The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [13]
For many parents, this is the most difficult aspect of home-schooling. Myriad resources are available for homeschooling families to learn with: commercially prepared curricula, text-books, community institutions such as libraries and muse-ums, homeschooling organizations, magazines, and lots of self-proclaimed homeschooling authorities who will feel free to tell you their version of the best, most effective way to homeschool. And there will be the traditional educators who try to persuade you that the only effective homeschooling program will be one that duplicates the school experience as closely as possible. Despite all that advice and opinion, though, the burden ultimately falls on you to decide how homeschooling can work for you.
You are the person who knows your children best, who is best equipped to recognize their interests and abilities, who cares most about their well-being, their happiness, and their ultimate success in finding a place for themselves in our society. Your main concern is not maintaining high average test scores or covering a certain number of chapters in a certain number of textbooks within a certain period of time. Your concern is that your children end up as the kind of people you’d like to see them become, with the kind of education you’d like them to have.
To decide whether homeschooling works for you, you’ll have to figure out what that means. Do you have specific academic goals for your children? Should they learn specific mathematical concepts, read certain books, and develop particular skills to be educated? Are your goals focused more on skills—that your children should be able to devise a household budget or a market plan, write coherently and persuasively, and analyze facts and ideas at a certain level of complexity? Or perhaps your goals are less concrete, and you want your children to be able to set their own goals and be able to work toward them effectively.
Whether your goals are some combination of these or something else entirely, you’ll need a fairly clearly defined idea of what they are to decide whether homeschooling works for you. Without any idea of where you are going, or trying to go, you will be vulnerable to each and every expert and authority who comes along to tell you what you and your family ought to be doing, or to any story homeschoolers tell you of what worked or didn’t work for their families.
One thing that surprised me when I started speaking at homeschooling conferences and workshops, usually to new and prospective homeschoolers, was the hunger for specific advice on what to do. How much television should I let my children watch? Which books should I allow (or require, or forbid) them to read? How many arithmetic problems should my six-year-old daughter do each day? What science experiments should my children be doing? It was strange and sad and a bit unnerving to be asked those questions, as though my answers, because my name was printed in a conference program, would naturally be better than their own.
It’s scary, though, learning to trust your own judgment and instincts. If you rely on experts—listen carefully to every detail of their instructions and follow them to the letter—and don’t like the results, you can always blame them for the problems. It’s not your fault that their advice was so terrible. And after all, they were experts. How could you have been expected to know it wouldn’t work?
Homeschooling requires you to take on the responsibility yourself. You become your own expert, your own authority. You