Homeschooling 101

by Isabel Lyman

It is a wintry morning in New England. Anne Maxson, 48, sits at a long table in her federal-style home situated on two acres in Amherst, Massachusetts. Anne, a small business owner and single parent, is savoring a mug of coffee. Her face becomes animated as she rattles off a laundry list of reasons why she has chosen to remove Richard, her youngest child, from the Fort River Elementary School in order to homeschool him.

"I didn’t like the whole language approach to teaching reading and the awkward way they teach printing. The books they assigned the children were boring, and Richard found himself correcting the third grade teacher’s math errors," she shares with frustration.

Anne adds a complaint that would be amusing if it weren’t true. "The kids in my son’s class knew more about bead work than spelling."

The singular event that pushed Anne and Richard into homeschooling was even more absurd. It was the controversial incident that brought Richard’s school a great deal of negative publicity.

The principal of Fort River Elementary, Russ Vernon-Jones, decided to host a "blacks only" breakfast on school grounds for African-American staff and parents. Outraged by what she saw as illegal discrimination, Anne alerted the Boston Globe to the event; she was severely criticized by teachers for speaking to the press. Although the breakfast was eventually deemed illegal by Amherst’s town counsel, the principal, to Anne’s chagrin and that of other local taxpayers, did not even receive a reprimand for his role in orchestrating the "no whites welcome" breakfast. At that juncture, Anne decided to pull Richard out of public school and teach him herself, an idea she once deemed radical.

"I couldn’t see my son going to a school where the principal had broken a federal law, and there were no repercussions," notes Anne.

Richard is enrolled in the sixth grade of the Calvert School, a popular correspondence program. In addition to spending an average of three hours a day with his mother as his main teacher, he shares a U.S. postage stamp collection hobby with his grandmother. He also earns a substantial amount of pocket money doing yardwork and plays on an ice hockey team. Richard enjoys the tranquility of the home classroom where he says he is "not distracted" by the antics of other students and where his lively mother "is more fun" than previous schoolteachers.

"Being a widow, I feel a great responsibility to my late husband to do the right thing and give my son an education that emphasizes straightforward academics, not social engineering," explains Anne.

I, too, am a traveler on the educational road less taken.

My encounter with homeschoolers began in the Pacific Northwest, during my first year of married life. My husband and I were living in Bellingham, Washington.

Our apartment managers, a sweet couple named Tim and Jan, were better at dispensing hospitality than fixing leaky faucets. Over dinner and Uno games, we discovered that underneath their laid-back veneers they harbored ambitious plans. One drizzly night they told us that Matthew, their three-year-old son, would not be attending kindergarten, first grade, or any other grade for that matter. They planned to educate him at home, and Jan was not even a college graduate.

Since we were budding individualists and were expecting a baby, our curiosity was piqued.

Once I had been introduced to the "teach-thine-own" concept, my investigative juices began flowing. I read all the homeschooling literature I could find (which wasn’t much 18 years ago), starting with Home-spun Schools by Raymond and Dorothy Moore.

I discovered that homeschooling was not really that new, but rather it was a return to the way education was before the days of common schools and compulsory attendance laws.

I also discovered that the reasons to homeschool were as diverse as the methods employed. Some parents choose to homeschool because they desire a tailor-made, not a factory-made, approach to learning. Others prefer to include religious instruction – be it the Bible, Torah, or Koran – with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Some utilize a back-to-nature approach which allows children to understand their world through experience and apprenticeship. Resourceful parents are finding the will and the way to make homeschooling work for their families.

We made our decision to homeschool for these reasons and more. Not long after we began asking ourselves "Why homeschool?" we began wondering "Why not homeschool?"

As I prepared for the time that "school" would begin, I realized that there is more to homeschooling than teaching a child how to write cursive, find square roots, and recite the capitals of the fifty states. I needed to be able to answer the following questions with a "yes": Was I willing to bypass a lucrative career to stay at home? Was I willing to be the art teacher, physical education instructor, dean of students, cafeteria worker, and custodian?

Was I willing to seek out friends for my child? For some parents, especially those with a large brood, the homeschooling lifestyle would challenge the organizational and homemaking skills of even a Martha Stewart.

Still, my desire to play a daily role in training my child’s mind and shaping his character was overwhelming. It seemed like there was no better use of my or my husband’s time and energies . We began to informally teach our first-born phonics by using Scrabble blocks, and were ecstatic when Dan read simple stories at age five. My husband, the math man, had similar results with numbers. We had taken the initial step and tasted success. The homeschooling marathon had officially begun, and we would enroll Wid III, Dan’s little brother, in our homeschool. In his case, we were ecstatic when he read simple stories at age eight.

As the years have passed, and our curriculum has advanced from colorful math flash cards to complex physics problems, we have faced the typical struggles many homeschooling families confront. Grandparents question the wisdom of making ends meet on one, sometimes modest, salary. Store clerks wonder aloud why our child isn’t in school this morning. Friends muse that we are a tad overprotective of our offspring. Sometimes our own children tire of Mom and Dad as their teachers. Sometimes we tire of teaching. I found myself confessing as much in an article I wrote for National Review in 1996. I stated, "There are days when I wish I could march out of my home in an Armani suit to make piles of money on Wall Street; days when I wish I could hand my children over to the ‘professionals.’ "Nevertheless, we have had much joy homeschooling our boys.

November 4, 2000

Isabel Lyman is a longtime homeschooling advocate. Her columns about home education have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, National Review, the Boston Herald, the Dallas Morning News, and the Daily Oklahoman. She has also been published in the refereed research journal, Home School Researcher, and by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. She holds a master’s degree in social science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a doctoral degree in social science from the Universidad de San Jose, Costa Rica. She taught high school for over a decade at a small private school founded by her husband, and she is the mother of two teenage sons. Izzy can be reached at ilyman7449@aol.com. She welcome constructive criticism, questions about home education, and invitations to drink iced cappuccino.

This is chapter one of Izzy Lyman’s highly recommended new book, The Home Schooling Revolution. For more information, see www.homeschoolingrevolution.com