The 2020 coronavirus has introduced home education to many parents who would otherwise have never considered it. There are many benefits to home education. Many public schools, Catholic schools and Christian schools are not the healthiest environment for a young person to grow up in. The young absorb all the negative cultural practices from their friends, worry about being popular, get bullied, follow peer-pressure to participate in foolishness, and learn to focus on music videos and worship celebrities. They will absorb harmful short-term attitudes toward relationships and sexuality. Science is also taught as if life could have began without God and evolved on its own without any help from God. To counter all of this, the practice of homeschooling is growing rapidly. It is one of the only ways to prevent a child’s faith and moral values from being corrupted. We will examine some of the benefits of homeschooling.
Environment and righteous values
Part of a parent’s job is to be a propagandist to your child. They are going to have to rely on someone to learn how the world works and build a mental framework to understand their place in it. I cringe when hearing the words “I want my child to decide for himself what to believe.” What that really says is that you want your child’s friends to decide what he/she will believe. Children will absorb everything in their environment. Is the school environment an ideal system for them to accept as normal? They will be constantly shown trashy music videos by their friends on breaks. They will spend all their time talking about what happened at this or that party and being invited to drunken parties of debauchery. They will be pressured to have relationships with short-term boyfriends/girlfriends rather than preparing themselves for marriage and to start a family. They learn to associate in cliques of similar age and status and ignore others. They learn to see sports stars as heroes and debase themselves through useless activities such as cheerleading. They celebrate bullies and give them higher social status.
Normally in the home there is 1-2 parents at a time for 2-3 children. This around a 1:2 ratio of elder to youth. Compared this to 1:20-ish at school. So at home they are absorbing your positive mature values being modelled, while at school they are surrounded by the immature, bad example of their peers. Peer influence is also stronger than parental because most young wish to act like their friends and rebel against their parents. So your brief time spent with the child after school will not make up for all the peer pressure he/she receives there. Thus you have both of these disadvantages combining into a hopeless scenario where your child is at the mercy of their school environment and you have to really hope they end up with good classmates.
Mass conformity
Many schools only allow the same general path for all students regardless of ability. There are some exceptions, but the general focus is on getting grade 12, the same goal for everyone. This does not make sense at all. Some students will be hopeless at algebra II and would be better off spending this time learning a skilled trade instead. Germany has a great system where students are separated into three tracks in high school depending on their strengths and weaknesses. Homeschooling likewise allows efforts to be focused where they are needed most. Not pressuring everyone to simply hit the same target as each other.
Conformity is also a social trap. Students are put in a class with those of the same age group. They do everything together with this class. Within this class they form “cliques” with those of the same attitude and status. Peer pressure causes anyone who is too ‘different’ to be ostracized and mocked. Students are trained to passively accept what the teacher says as truth. This system is very much unlike the real world where you have to work with people of all ages who think differently than each other. In the workplace you have millennials and baby boomers who may each think the other is the most entitled generation to have lived but nonetheless have to make things work. You are forced to have your views and mindset challenged by interacting with older and younger persons who may think very differently. This is a healthy process which leads to holding respect for a diversity of viewpoints and not holding one’s own as the gospel truth. School is not the “real world,” not even close.
Teachers unions
Among the fiercest opponents of home education are Teachers Unions. These powerful groups work to erect as many barriers to home education as possible. Requiring the parent to be a certified teacher for example, locks out most parents from homeschooling. The unions know that the easier homeschooling becomes, the less power the union will have. The union leaders in particular have a lot to lose, given their six-figure salaries.
We also have the endless teacher’s strikes parents have to endure year after year from the highly militant teacher’s unions. Once a deal is struck with the government, these groups do not stay satisfied for long before coming back for more money and paid vacation days. Ontario is a clear case. This year they have been doing strike days constantly, skipping one day at a time from working. This strategy may provoke less public hostility but there is nonetheless an attrition of learning when all of those missing days are added up. With schools being made so unreliable from these strikes and being shut down so often it is yet another incentive to home-school.
Liberal indoctrination
Schools have been caught bringing in drag queens to desensitize children toward LGBT behavior. One school required the children to write a homosexual love letter in order to “teach them tolerance.” They teach gender confusion such that there are more than two genders and that you can be whatever gender you feel like at the moment. One film used in the British educational system teaches that there are over 100 genders. It is well known how ivory-tower academics lean to the left in their political views.
Climate change is another example. You have teachers bringing their class to climate rallies and similar events. One grade 3 Toronto class was required by their teacher to participate in a pipeline protest. This is not education but indoctrination. Climate change is a difficult issue. It is not a black and white, good vs evil story. Too many students are coming out being trained with the idea that businessmen and industry is evil and that radical activists are heroes. It’s more complicated than that. Students should be learning of the challenges and difficult economics of climate plans, not just the rose-colored glasses version of the story. Children are not being taught to form their own balanced views with critical thinking, they are being instead taught to accept radical leftist ideology as truth.
Academic benefits
According to a study from the Fraser Institute, homeschooled children achieve test scores at the 85th percentile, compared to the 50th for public-schooled children. There is more of an emphasis of learning itself, rather than on just passing multiple-choice tests. The mind is better able to learn when the child is not so stressed out due to social pressures and bullies. How can someone learn when they are constantly being judged by their peers? Being a “nerd” is considered a bad thing and stupidity is glorified by middle-schoolers. If you try to bring up anything meaningful or important that is not related to actors or music videos they will have look confused and have a shell-shocked stare (if you have ever sat on a bus with them you will understand). This is an environment which is hostile to study. It pressures the young to accept their place in the social pyramid and worship the buffoons/bullies at the top. Home is an environment of peace and calm where the child can really focus without fear.
Another thing which helps is that homeschooling allows the child to learn at their own unique pace. Some may be slower learners at certain subjects and require more time. Some will blow past the normal timeframe and may graduate early from other subjects. Mass-schooling is to pretend that everyone learns at the same pace as each other. It is ridiculous to think that the gifted and slow child should be forced to go at the same speed as each other. Home-schooling removes this anchor from holding back your child’s strengths.
Special creative projects
When I was younger myself and my brothers worked together on writing a fictional book of the fantasy genre. This was accepted for a portion of our English studies. This gave us critical writing skills which we would all grow up to use later in life. Rather than only read and critique someone else’s work, we learned to create something of value. Learning is far too passive in our age. Learning by doing is the best way.
Coding is quite accessible with the internet being so widespread. Rather than learn a foreign language which may never be of use, why not allow the student to learn a programming language and do things with code? Of course this only applies if they are interested in it, but there are many online resources designed to help young people learn to create things with code. There is HTML and CSS for websites. There are languages for game design. What young person would not find designing a game to be fun? They will carry those skills of creativity and software knowledge for life.
For parents who are small-business owners, you could teach your child the management/supervisory side of things. How to balance a check book and order inventory and such things. This will set them miles ahead of their publicly-schooled counterparts in the world of business and finance. Some of them may grow up to be entrepreneurs themselves. None of this is possible in the rigid classroom setting. All of these opportunities are lost for good when the child is in school most of the day and does not get to learn anything of their parents trade.
Edison’s home education
The world’s most successful inventor Thomas Edison was considered an idiot by the public school system. Rather than give up, Edison’s mother pulled her son out of the system and educated him at home instead:
One day Thomas Edison came home and gave a paper to his mother. He told her, “My teacher gave this paper to me and told me to only give it to my mother.”
His mother’s eyes were tearful as she read the letter out loud to her child: “Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training him. Please teach him yourself.”
After many, many years, after Edison’s mother died and he was now one of the greatest inventors of the century, one day he was looking through old family things. Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: “Your son is addled [mentally ill]. We won’t let him come to school anymore.”
Edison cried for hours and then he wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the century.”
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Imagine how much different our world would be if he had been forced to stay in the system. This is the person who invented the light bulb, sound recorders, the stock ticker, and created the world’s first laboratory among thousands of other inventions. We today all benefit from his good fortune to have been home-schooled.
The homeschool day should be structured
Be careful to manage times carefully for the last few years at least. This is crucial for when the student later enters the job market or university. If they are used to waking up whenever they please and working at whatever schedule fits them, they will not be prepared for the structured environment in the workplace. Homeschooling should not be a setup where the child can sleep in as much as they want and wake up at noon everyday. How will they survive when their workplace requires them to be there at 8:00am sharp and they have to wake up at least an hour before that? The child should be required to be working on a subject by 9:00am on weekdays unless there is a good reason not to.
Socializing
There are plenty of other outlets for socializing in besides school. Connect with other groups of homeschoolers in your area. The kids can take turns visiting at each others house and yours. Scouts is another good activity. Local sports is another. Army/air/navy cadets as well. Then of course there is church and hopefully your children will have made friends with some of the kids there.
There is a fear that homeschooled kids will have no social skills. Many of the ones who appear unsocialized are simply natural introverts and would have also been that way if they were at school. My brothers are extremely sociable and were homeschooled up until high-school. The home education did not hamper their sociability whatsoever. As for myself I am a natural introvert, but most people cannot tell that easily anymore. I would have been just as much an introvert if I had gone through public school versus having gone through home education.
How many grades to homeschool for?
I do not recommend homeschooling for all 12 grades. Grade 12 at least should be done through the public-school system, possibly the other high-school grades (if your local school is a good quality one). Many parents have been out of school for so long they will have forgotten some of the high-school subjects and they may only be skilled enough to teach their child through the end of middle school. It will be hard to teach your child algebra if you have forgotten how it works.
As the parent you are the one who knows your child’s maturity level and their resistance to peer-pressure. By doing grade 12 through public school this makes it easier to prove to an employer that you have a real high-school diploma, as opposed to just a GED. Many times a homeschooler can still get a diploma even if you did all 12 grades at home however. Certain scholarships are based on your academic performance during grades 10, 11, 12 and by enrolling in an actual school your child can qualify for one of these if he/she performs well enough. 1-3 years in high school also prepares your kid for the structured environment they will be in if they go to university or work for certain companies. This also allows them to know what the social environment of school is like so they can better understand others.
Conclusion
There are many benefits of home education. It is becoming more widespread with every passing year. There is a multitude of online resources and associations to help you out in making the journey. The world is turning away from God and it will only get worse with every passing year. Peer-pressure, drunken parties, bullying, bad friends, school-shootings, liberal teachers, and mass-conformity are a few of the issues with public education. Given that so much of a young person’s life is spent in this institution, is this really the best environment to allow them to be raised in? In contrast, home schooled children perform better academically and turn out as excellent adults. It provides a peaceful and caring environment to study in. The parent can devote more time to the child (compared to a normal teacher-student ratio of around 1:20). Most importantly of all, you can raise your child with good values and give them a fighting chance against the darkness and conformity of the world system. Good luck.