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E very morning we wake up to the tasks and joys of home
education. Sometimes all goes well—children coop-
erate, the phone doesn’t ring, no one is sick, the milk
doesn’t spill, and everyone is laughing, smiling, and learning.
However, on other days a confusion of conflicting schedules,
curricular checklists, family needs, challenging attitudes, and
random events threatens to derail our productivity and pos-
sibly even our belief that we are doing the right thing. With a
few “disaster days” in a row, we may even begin to think evil
thoughts such as, “Maybe I am failing them. Maybe I should put
them in school …” Creeping in through the chaos, such feelings
of frustration may become seeds of doubt that can take root
in the mind of any parent, no matter how dedicated or deter-
mined. So at times like these, a bit of contemplation becomes
critical; we must step back and ask the very important question:
Most of us chose to homeschool for one or more fairly com-
mon reasons: We had a bad experience in a school, we were con-
cerned about the secular or even anti-Christian curriculumor so-
cial environment at a school, we couldn’t afford private school,
we loved our kids toomuch to send them away to school, we be-
lieved we could teach themmore effectively at home, or we just
had friends who convinced us to try. However, after a fewmonths
or years, our reason for continuing to homeschool becamemuch
more personal, intuitive, passionate—and sometimes hard to
articulate. We came to realize that we wanted to “do school”
differently for a grander reason, and the desire to home edu-
cate our children became a calling, a vocation, even a mission.
As John Taylor Gatto so eloquently explains in Dumbing Us
Down and The Underground History of American Education, most
public schools in this country (and private schools which imitate
them) were designed to teach—and have become, for the most
part, successful at teaching—lessons of conformity, mediocrity,
anxiety, and apathy. Reading Gatto, we begin to sense that we
ourselves were robbed; our absorbent minds and youthful pas-
sions were either starved or misdirected, fighting the twin de-
mons of boredom in the classroom and the compulsion to fit
in. Self-directed study was unheard of. If we learned to give all
the right answers, we could win the game; however, meaningful
learning—if it happened at all—was nebulous
and temporary. At worst we failed to take away
much at all, and at best it was a poor use of our
time and potential. Realizing this, we immediate-
ly wanted something different for our children.
Therefore we seek alternatives, readily avail-
able in the world of home education, where in-
dividualized, appropriately challenging, truly
engaging opportunities exist. Perhaps we find
a unit-study approach; perhaps we discover the
value of learning Latin and reading classics with
the whole family. Or maybe our high school age
children take college classes or pursue internship
opportunities. It all seems so good and so right.
But then the specter of concern about college
may darken our door, and the temptation to do
“school-at-home” returns, lest our students have
a different curriculum than the students in the
institutions down the street and, therefore, pos-
sibly be unprepared for college entrance. Again,
we might think that school is a safer option. But
do we truly want to go back to the homogenized
conveyor-belt systemof education that we deter-
mined to escape in the beginning? It’s doubtful.
Fortunately, we can hear and readmany home-
school success stories. Headlines like “Home-
school Teens Ripe for College,”1 as well as stories
from other families a few years ahead of us help
us realize that no, we do not have to bow down
to the great gods of the SAT and their lesser min-
ions, the Iowa Basics. Nor do we have to bring
our transcripts to the altar, having sacrificed our
children’s talents and passions for the mechani-
cal world of test scores and grade point averages.
Colleges today love homeschooled students be-
cause, of all the students that matriculate, ours
show, on average, higher levels of academic apti-
1
schooled-teens-ripe-for-college
FINISHING
THE RACEBy Andrew Pudewa
WHAT ARE WE REALLY DOING HERE?