I have been interested in education, especially in alternative methods, since I was a teenager when I read about A.S. Neills school, Summerhill. Later I followed with interest the free school movement in America. I was really filled with conflicts at the timeemotional and spiritualas was much of my generation, and the conflict manifested itself in my views about having children. My interest in the education of children was baffling to me because at the same time I was declaring that I would never be a party to bringing children into a world full of war and poverty and suffering and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. These were my post-childhood-Christian and pre-adult-Christian days of professed agnosticism: if God existed, he surely had abandoned us.
I married someone who finally made the risk of having children worthwhile. He also was full of conflicts and desperately searching for something to make the crazy world make sense. We had children. Then together we found the Church and the beginnings of resolutions to some of our conflicts with the world. So, married and with a growing family, my husband and I were received into the Catholic church.
Once there, we were hopeful that we had found a community where we could be at home. I had not given up my earlier ideas about education, but we wanted to immerse ourselves and the children in the Church. The fact that both of us were converts meant that we had no family support of our life in the Church, no extended family celebrations of Church holidays, etc. To help to counteract this we thought parochial school would be a good ideadaily contact with priests and men and women religious as a way of personalizing a vocation for them (and for us, for that matter). We decided to move from the middle of a cotton field into the middle of a small city so we could send our children to a Catholic school. We wanted badly to be a part of a living community of Christians, and our parish seemed the obvious place to look for that kind of community. Sending our children to the parish school helped: we were very involved in the daily workings of the school. We learned a lot about the modern Church (and about school boards and parish councils in the process).
With regard to education, we learned that the Catholic school is not staffed by very many religious anymore, and that many of the lay teachers were not even Catholic. And, worst of all, the schools seem to have sold their uniqueness and most of their Catholicity to the government in return for accreditation. Perhaps its just a result of the spirit of the times, but the end result is that there is not much difference between parochial and public schools anymore. My purpose is not to malign Catholic schools, as there are plenty of people who do that with a vengeance. If I had to choose between public and Catholic schools for my kids, I would still choose Catholic schools.
But the education establishment in general has become so bureaucratic that educating each child is no longer the most important thing. The school as a wholehow many awards it wins, how its test scores compare to those across the country, whether its athletic teams win or losetakes precedence over the individual student.
My older son went for three years to our parish school, my second son for one-half year, before I mustered the courage to take them out and teach them at home. This was something I had considered since before my oldest went to kindergarten but which I hadn't the self-confidence to attempt. The catalyst that made me realize that I could do it was the lack of individualized response to some problems my second son was having adapting to school. He was in a kindergarten class which had extremely varied abilities, from good readers to those still learning the alphabet. My son was very bored and the only thing they had to offer him was the task of helping the teacher with some of the kids who shouldn't have been in school in the first place. I certainly don't object to my children helping other children, but this only frustrated him since it didn't also include more challenging academic work for him. My son's only available method of self-defense was to try to avoid school each day; thus began the month or so of stomach aches, headaches, etc.anything to get out of going to school. Of course I talked to the teacher and to the principal and found them unwilling to accept the fact that he was bored. There was no ability on the part of the school to change itself to meet his needsthe entire burden was on him to change himself, and to take some of the burden off of the teacher. And, worst of all, I was told that because I wasnt a professional I didn't know what was best for my child, never mind the fact that I know him better than anyone now on this earth. The professionals knew how children behaved and they could certainly handle this onethat generalization that always misses the individual, some more than others.
And so my children and I made the leap of faith and embarked on the journey of learning together. I dont regret having jumped in spite of the sometimes rocky road weve traveled since we landed.
All of us had to get used to this idea. We began by what I now call having school at home. I purchased a curriculum and gave them assignments each day and tests and sent their tests and samples of their work in to be graded. We had moved the classroom home but had not changed it much at all. We were not really taking advantage of the fact that we were homeschooling other than changing the teacher and the location of the classroom.
The next year I purchased a different curriculum but declined to have them grade my kids work. This was a little better: now I was free to use or not to use a textbook, lesson from a text, approach, etc. All of us felt a great burden lifted. There was no professional even looking over my shoulder.
Until this point I had been using Catholic home school curricula which exist as an option to public school for those unable to attend a parish school and also as a reaction to the lack of orthodoxy in parish schools today. These curricula basically re-create the parish school of the fifties in a home environment (one even insists that the children wear uniforms and salute the flag every day). All the limitations of that approach became very clear to me and I realized that I would homeschool even if I had a great school nearby to send them to. The only opportunity for individualization in the traditional school environment is the technique used to present the subject and the rate of speed of study. But all of my children are so different, have such completely different minds and likes and abilities that I needed even more flexibility to give each one what he or she needed.
In our third year I finally took one more leap and began to design my own curriculum for each child. This meant more work for me and some trial and error for us all, but I was finally able to homeschool in the fullest sense because I knew the loves, strengths, weaknesses, interests of each child and I could approach each subject in a way designed to benefit each child as well as choose subjects that would interest each one.
For example, I briefly tried the approach called the Unit Method, where the whole family studies one subject at any given time, each at his or her own level. In theory this still sounds great but in practice it hasnt worked very well for me, possibly because Im not creative enough. My children have vastly different interests and attention spans and one would have considered the subject exhausted while another was still studying away. So I abandoned the unit method.
I also learned to abandon levelized reading programs from a reading curriculum after each child achieved a level of reading comprehension at which he could read a book that was not written with a controlled vocabulary. In other words, he could read most of the books in the childrens section of the library. For this the kids were very gratefulno more boring stories in the reader with questions to answer, etc. They then discovered, to their surprise, that some of the stories werent so boring after all, and began to enjoy just reading their readers, either for entertainment or information. We still have a reading curriculum, but it is based on novels, biographies, historiesreal books.
We have settled many things, such as which math text to use and how much writing is required of the one who hates to write, but I expect that every year things will change with each childthings that work this year wont work next. One of the beauties of homeschooling is that I can respond to the changes that occur in my children by changing my approach and what I require of them to fit their individual needs. Not many schools can do that even if the teacher wants to. Im not sure that many of them have thought about it.
Educating children is like caring for a garden in which grow different plants: flowers, vegetables and weeds. All need soil, water, sunlight and nutrients; the combination which causes one to thrive may damage or even kill another. But schools, like many of our institutions, seem to function more like factories. It seems now that my early intuitions about alternative schooling were on the right track, and I am relieved that my family is no longer a cog in the factory works.
Karen Horton homeschools her four children on the Gulf Coast.
