I like to say that I was very homeschooled because we had goats. Milk goats to be exact. I drank goat’s milk daily, especially chocolate goat’s milk, which was very creamy. I needed it to fatten me up as a very scrawny and awkward homeschooled teenage boy. For a year or two, every night I would stay up late watching Murder She Wrote, eating a bowl of Top Ramen, and drinking a tall glass of chocolate goat’s milk. For whatever reason, this strikes me as a supremely homeschool kind of behavior.
I’m not going to deny that homeschoolers aren’t odd at times. Having less social pressure to conform to your peers frees you to enjoy things like Murder She Wrote as a 14 year-old male. My real point with all of this is that I turned out alright in the end, I think. Despite the accusations that homeschooling does not prepare you properly for the real world, or that parents aren’t properly prepared and certified to teach their children, I just wanted to put my own data point out there as an example of how it can work quite well. In fact, it can be a wonderful way to get an education, even in the 90s.
Let me begin by setting aside some qualifications. I admit that this is only my own experience and it could be the case that my mother was just particularly gifted (I think she is pretty great). And I know that there are plenty of horror stories about homeschooling gone wrong, just as there are horror stories of public schooling gone wrong. I should also clarify that my own children are not homeschooled; they attend a local classical school where my wife teaches. We found this a better fit for our family than homeschooling, even though I think homeschooling is a great option for other people. My goal here is not to convince you to homeschool. It’s only to tell the story of my own experience and to offer a positive data point in a society that seems to focus obsessively on negative stories of homeschooling.
I am what I like to call a 100%er, meaning I never attended public or private school from pre-k through high school. Being a very imaginative child and somewhat of an introvert, I loved the ability to get my school work done early in the day and then go off and get lost in a world of Legos for hours on end in my room, or dig in the dirt in my backyard. When the neighborhood kids got home from school, I would ride bikes with them and play G.I. Joes and Legos, but the thing I remember most about my early years of homeschooling in the 80s was the freedom to be a kid. I learned at my own pace, which was slower than it should have been according to the standards, but I did learn. But my imagination grew by leaps and bounds. And in my middle age, it’s that imagination that I cherish most of all.
I said I learned slowly; this was especially true in regard to reading. I was a late reader. Phonics never made sense to me. There were too many exceptions to the rules. My mind tends to be analytical, and I wanted phonics to be a highly ordered, rule-bound system, and phonics, at least to my five-year-old brain, didn’t seem to be that kind of system. I only began to start reading when my parents bought me a Garfield book as a present and I eagerly struggled over the words. In many ways I owe my love of reading to Garfield. I am ashamed to admit that. Why couldn’t it have been Calvin and Hobbes? What’s significant here is that homeschooling allowed me to patiently learn at my own pace. There was no shame, guilt, or pressure to learn to read. I eventually got it, and now I read for a living.
As I aged I spent more time with other homeschoolers in a homeschool co-op, which was very encouraging to me. I met lifelong friends there (who also turned out fine, I might add!). Were we nerdy and awkward and into uncool things? Yes, definitely. But we also had wonderful times together. There was relatively little drama. I grew quite close to a number of the guys and had crushes on a number of the girls. All very healthy normal early adolescent stuff. I even managed to get into pogs before they were completely out of fashion. I still have a set of In-N-Out pogs somewhere.
Around this time schooling was challenging for my mom. I think she was learning the mathematical concepts as she taught them to me, for example. She was not specially trained to teach us, but she loved us and was committed to sacrifice for our education. And the thing is, if you desire to learn, and you have access to good books, you can learn a great deal. This is one of the greatest lessons that homeschooling taught me. Much of my education was done with a textbook and myself. And I learned how to teach myself by working with texts, by finding resources, by digging for answers, by wrestling with problems. I learned how to learn. That skill has continued to be one of the most significant skills in my success, first in college and now in research, teaching, and writing. Many people struggle when learning is not delivered to them in a precise, simple, clear manner. They rely on a systematic way of learning, rather than being able to learn organically in any situation. But outside the bounds of academia (and sometimes even inside!), learning doesn’t happen systematically. It happens organically or not at all. Homeschooling prepared me for that.
I won’t deny that there weren’t some awkward years for me as a teenager. I got involved in the local church’s youth group, started listening to modern, secular music, dyed my hair black (I had long hair at the time—it’s true), had a wallet chain, was depressed and moody and tried to fit in with the kids going to public school. Angst occured. I always felt like an outsider and a poser, which in fact I was. But who doesn’t feel like an outsider and a poser as a teenager? I survived with relatively few scars and only a heartbreak or two. And when I was 15 and a half, my mother and I decided that it would be best if I took that California High School Proficiency Exam instead of formally finishing high school. Technically, I never graduated high school.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry to finish early. I didn’t have a good plan for college. No one in my immediate family had gone to college, so there was no one to tell me how to pursue college degrees or what to look for in a college. I just stumbled into the local community college and started taking classes, beginning with a theatre class on acting.
Let that sink in. A homeschooled boy of 15 who has never set foot in a public school takes a community college class in the theatre department. It’s like an episode of Community. I wouldn’t have considered myself sheltered, but community college, and community college theatre is a whole different world. I was assigned a monologue where I had to use curse words and had a minor spiritual crisis.
But here’s the thing. I passed that class. And my other classes, and while I may have spent four years at the community college instead of the standard two, I did meet my wife there so it was alright. Was I anxious being around people with diverse beliefs and lifestyles? At first, yes. But I got over it. I made friends with people well outside of my comfort zone. We had shared interests in indie music and film and art, and that was enough. We played music together. I was probably a bit weird to them, but frankly, they were a weird group too. Community college kids are all a bit weird, especially the ones who stick around for extra years. So being homeschooled didn’t hold me back from making friends, finding a wife, or socializing in general.
One thing I should note, when entering this community college, I had to take an exam that landed me in a remedial writing class. I was disappointed, but I really shouldn’t have been. I was 15. I wrote like a 15 year old. I later went on to teach that very course at that community college when I was working on my Master’s degree in English. Maybe if I had been a better student or my mom had been more rigorous in teaching writing, I would have scored into an advanced writing class. Lots of other homeschoolers do. But here’s the thing. I teach writing for a living now. I turned out fine. It didn’t really matter in the end. Homeschooling gave me the tools to learn and the skills of perseverance to overcome challenges so that I could walk onto a community college campus at 15 into a remedial composition class and return to that class as a teacher. I’d say that’s good.
While I had a great experience with homeschooling, and I believe it’s an excellent option for many people, it isn’t for everyone. I know people have strong feelings about education, but having been homeschooled and known many friends who were, I strongly believe that it’s not a good fit for everyone. Some parents aren’t built for it. Some kids aren’t built for it. And that is okay. If you’ve tried homeschooling and found that it just leaves you utterly stressed out and exhausted and your kids aren’t learning anything and there’s a perfectly good outside option available, don’t feel like a failure for choosing that outside option. We tried it, and it wasn’t the right fit for our family. That’s okay. We also tried public school, which I think can also be a great option, but that wasn’t a good fit for our family either.
There’s so much guilt, shame, and pressure parents experience trying to find the right educational option, and it’s all so expensive in time and energy and money. I think we all have to remember that God is sovereign and use prudence to make a wise decision to care for the education and wellbeing of our children and then rest in His provision. I believe there’s freedom for parents to make the prudent decision about education for their children in their specific context. For my parents, homeschooling worked well. The space it gave me as a child to be imaginative was precious and invaluable. As I grew older I used that time to read widely (once I learned how, thanks to Garfield), laying the foundation for my future career. It trained me to pursue wisdom and knowledge. And even though I went through some awkward years of adjustment, I’m fine.
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