For the past three weeks, we have been examining the recent surge in homeschooling, identifying some characteristics common to successful homeschoolers, and looking in more detail at some of the many homeschooling options currently available. This week, I’m sharing a few of my own conclusions drawn from participating in this exercise.
Know How Education Affects the Vision for Your Family
If you want to be successful at anything, you need to know where you’re going. You need to begin with a certain end in mind. This is true for marriages, parenting, and family life in general. The way you educate your children touches all three of those and therefore must be a part of every family’s holistic vision. Sending your children to school for seven hours a day is vastly different from having them at home all day every day, and the mere logistics of either choice will have a substantial influence on what kind of family yours becomes.
Parents, you must know how your choice of education will affect your vision for your family before you embark on the path. You must do the work of trying to see around corners, trying to predict the consequences of your decisions as you plot a course for your family that ends with the fulfillment of your vision. You don’t need to acquire a crystal ball or consult a fortune-teller, however, you merely need to seek out people who seem to living out the vision they have for their family. Get to know them a little and find out about their successes and failures with education. Ask them where the pain points have been and whether the rewards are worth it. Ask them if they are content with the results or if they would educate differently given another chance. Humble yourself and learn from people who have already done it. When I say that the education of your children is one of the two or three biggest decisions you will ever make, I mean it. It profoundly affects your family and every individual in it for the rest of their lives. Avail yourself of some good, honest counsel.
Know Your Weaknesses
Part of deciding how you want to educate your children is knowing your and your children’s weaknesses. It’s not that people can’t change. It’s that they rarely do. You will need to examine yourself and be completely honest; better yet, invite someone you trust to give you an honest assessment of your weaknesses.
Here are some things homeschoolers routinely have to do in order to offer an honest education to their children:
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Require obedience
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Use the word “no”
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Say what they mean and mean what they say
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Be willing to say (lovingly and encouragingly) that the writing, coloring page, reading, math work, etc. is actually not quite right and will need to be repeated
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Be willing to watch their children struggle with difficult concepts without immediately rescuing them
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Mortify any desire to show their children how smart they are and, instead, let them figure it out
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Be willing to explain everything a hundred different ways
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Get super organized
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Make general plans a year in advance and detailed plans a week or more in advance while leaving space for spontaneity
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Complete today’s work today without putting it off until tomorrow because tomorrow will have its own work sufficient for the day
If you’re not already doing these things, chances are they aren’t your strengths. Don’t expect that to change just because you decide to homeschool. People have been known to change through hard work and determination, but it doesn’t happen on its own, which is to say, it often doesn’t happen. Be honest with yourself about any weaknesses you may have and how they may affect the education of your children.
Do It as unto the Lord
School choice programs have truly made this an age of nearly infinite education options. What a blessing it is for so many families to be able to make choices now that were once out of reach. An unintended consequence of having so many educational options is that we are tempted always to think we can just do something different if this doesn’t work out. And it’s true, we can. Let me remind you, however, that only a couple of decisions you will ever make are more important than how you choose to educate your children. Don’t be flippant. Your children are not Guinea pigs, so don’t use them for experiments.
If you choose a brick-and-mortar school, get in there and give it all you have, as unto the Lord. Become part of the school community and support it in every way you can. Get your children to school on time; make sure they have done their homework; pack them a nutritious lunch; help them when they need you to. You’ll be in community with lots of other individuals, and that is a messy business. Someone will offend you; likely as not, it will be your child’s teacher. That is when you’ll be tempted to think, “Well, we’ll transfer to the school down the road.” And you most certainly will be able to. You’ve got options. But at what cost? Continuity? Stability? And what are you teaching your children? To cut and run when things get messy? All of life is messy because other people are everywhere.
If you want to homeschool, sit at the feet of someone who has done it well, make sure you have got what it takes to do it well yourself, then homeschool as unto the Lord. It’s no good to get a few months in, decide it isn’t going to work, and then try to get into a school when your children are behind. Be sure about it, and then give it all you’ve got to the glory of God. Be the best homeschooler there ever was and see it through. If you go into it thinking that if it doesn’t work out, you can always do something different next year, the chances are really good that you will do something different next year. But at what cost?