Homeschool Experience

My wife and I home-schooled our three children (all now grown). Some of the observations we made were:

New homeschoolers often cling to a curriculum attempting to "get it right". We did not use any curriculum. We did foster a desire to learn and discovered that the State standards were so low that out children passed the tests with no preparation. This might not be so with children who have learning difficulties.

We found that math was easiest to learn when applied to practical problems like geometry for garden calculations and some algebra for livestock feed calculations.

One common objection we heard regarding homeschool was that it would deprive our children of "socialization". We had observed youth in many churches that cling together almost alienated from the other members. To me this represented not socialization, but social dependence.

Considering the influence of the world into the minds of children and through children to other children, our primary purpose in homeschool was to reduce this pipeline of evil into the developing minds of our children.

Some parents do not have a TV in their home. I can understand this. We have used TV (non-cable or broadcast) but DVDs (which I have edited) so that they could see some of the world, but from a critical perspective that they might be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

I have come to view the industrial educational complex as somewhat fraudulent. The idea that only specially trained educators can teach, I think is false. Bright children learn more than dim ones. A teacher can influence motivation but in the final analysis, it is the child that learns. We did not feel that God gave us our children so that we would turn them over to the world to raise.

We could have had more material prosperity had we two incomes. However, we feel that when we stand before Christ, having children raised to serve the Lord would be our reward.