This post will attempt to collect arguments for home schooling. It will also include objections to home schooling and then homeschool responses. This will hopefully be an ever-growing post, so it is linked to on the “The Homeschool Debate” page, along with the rival posts for collecting arguments for public schooling, along with objections/responses, and the same for christian schooling.
#1 Home schooling reinforces the wholeness and unity of life by not dividing young children’s daily life between two radically different and independent enviroments. People have enough trouble not being “sunday christians” or living different lives at home, at work, and at church.
Objection: The parent’s influence will be able to overcome this by teaching their child to live one life…
Response: As with a lot of issues in this debate, it is difficult to lay down some definitive argument the proves the negative influence of this division of life or quanitifies this negative influence’s strength relative to the opposing strength of positive parental influence. It is both a philosophical and empirical claim. Philosophical because man is an embodied being and, especially when young, it is difficult and somewhat unnatural to bridge in one’s intellectual and emotional (wholeness and unity of life) life a huge chasm in one physical life (school vs home). This philosophical point can be supported by empirical evidence. The most obvious one is I think a very common experience of young students seeing their teachers or someone from their school life outside of school. Seeing a teacher at a grocery store is a weird, sometimes almost disturbing experience. One can also remember the gradual realization that teachers are humans too! And have lives of their own, just like us. These experiences indicate a deep spiritual divide in young children that would likely have negative consequences. For example, undermining the process of identity formation that occurs most strongly in one’s early years. Or, removing strong temptations to form false selves that will only have to be resisted and eliminated in later life. I heard of a girl who had several myspace pages, each with a different personality that she wanted to try out as if it were an outfit. There is more to be said about this, but it seems obviously unhealthy. As people get older and their identity is formed and their convictions solidify, and they have matured, they are able to handle different and independent environments (like home and work) while maintaining a unified life.
Further Objection number one: Everyone has to go through this sort of thing, it is part of growing up and cannot be avoided.
Response: I am not sure that is so. I wonder how much cultural crappiness we simply accept lying down because we think it is “just the way things are” when it is actually just the way contemporary American culture is. Some international perspective would be sweet here to show if it is unique or universal. Plus even if it cannot be avoided, it should be resisted, and things strongly encouraging it should be avoided at young ages. As children grow older they will start to lust and will have to grow to resist this moral/spiritual problem, but this is no argument for putting them in a porno shop at an early age and saying “resist!”
Further objection number two: This identity stuff is all kind of moot, because realistically, it is only very committed parents that would homeschool, and they are the very ones who would be able to help a child deal with all this division and fragmentation from institutional schooling.
Response: Good parents would also want to help their child if they could, and more gradually and controlledly introduce their child to this kind of challenge of life and the spiritual strength required to overcome it.
#2 Home schooling resists the onslaught of the culture of specialists and specialization. By identifying “teacher” with someone who works for a big institution, paid by the government, and recognized as a teacher by a community. As we find our identity in our occupation, we forget we are humans first (which includes both teaching and learning) and then have an occupation…
#3 Adapting the education to the unique person can only take place (realistically) with a more individual attention and assessment, not possible with the classroom sizes and limited time of public schooling (and maybe Christian schooling depending). The more people one has to oversee, the more they must become like numbers, and treated identically.
#4 What is more important in younger ages is not facts, but moral/intellectual formation. Teaching to love learning, setting the stage for a life of growth to be more and more of what one is supposed to be. Yes at some point the child will need to make a living, but this is of relatively minimal importance compared to their spiritual growth. What is more important than facts and technical skills is the lifelong growth of his soul to be a light reflecting the beauty of God for its own sake, and perhaps, hopefully, that a sinful world will be drawn heavenward through it. The goal of a mechanistic culture is to pump in the right information/skills so a child/cog can take his place in the national scheme. This is called training. The difference between education (to become a human) and training (to be a cog/functionary) is explained by Josef Pieper
A functionary is trained. Training is defined as being concerned with some one side of aspect of man, with regard to some special subject. Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things.
Given contemporary culture (and at some point hopefully there will be a post about evidence of this) and its view of man, it is highly likely that Christian parents and public school have radically different goals for children. Given this fact, it is more important for children at younger ages (say up to around 12, just throwing out a number) to be formed according to these deeper spiritual goals, and the secondary though necessary and good goals of reading and math and so forth will take place given this spiritual environment. In other words, very general spiritual/intellectual/moral habits are the emphasis in the beginning years and the secondary skills are taught in the midst of these habits, or with these as the educational “air.” Once these habits are somewhat solidified, focus shifts more fully to various particular “subjects” of education.
Objection: Of course parents and school may have different goals. But those goals are not necessarily opposed. Schools simply provide useful information and refrain from all the larger “education” type stuff and leave that to the parents.
Response: This objection fails to understand the radical integration that is possible with homeschool. This approach would reinforce the dichotomy between secular and sacred. And it leaves less occasion for learning the overall habits. For example, if a child is supposed to be learning the abc’s but is refusing to stay on task or is be undiscipling in some other way that the child is capable of, then a discussion about focusing or being disciplined would have a natural place. Yes there are probably other occasions for this like during homewrok from public school, but there wont be as many.
#5 Homeschooling can foster an intentional, as opposed to a ”default”, lifestyle.
#6 Parents won’t miss a third of the life of their children from age five on, and about half of their waking life. LEven more, these are especially exciting hours, where the parent(s) can accompany their child while learning about God’s world. The parent can model right response to new things, to evil things (like wars, etc), to beatiful things etc. The child will watch their parent interact with truth.
