Opinion Home Schooling: Where Every Waking Moment is a Learning Opportunity OUR FAMILY JUST FINISHED UP OUR cate, verb transitive [Latin educo, educare; e 18th year of home schooling. We still have 10 and duco, to lead.] To bring up, as a child; to more years left on our journey. Throughout instruct; to inform and enlighten the underthe years, I have had the opportunity to meet standing; to instill into the mind principles of many wonderful families and consult with arts, science, morals, religion and behavior. To countless others. educate children well is one of the most imporFor many parents who are contemplating tant duties of parents and guardians.” home schooling, some of the most frequent This definition is an excellent example questions I hear include, of the ideology of home “What does your homeschooling. Authentic home school schedule look like, schooling accomplishes all and how many hours a day the aforementioned with do you do school?” The the parents serving as the BY TIFFANY BOYD reason for these quesprimary educators of their tions is that the majority children. of people have been conditioned to believe that Unfortunately for many, that responsibility learning only takes place via the public-school is abdicated to strangers in a setting where model. They are conditioned to believe that parents truly have no way of knowing, direct“school” is a set number of days and hours, ing or monitoring what their children are betypically being spent laboring over curriculum, ing taught. Do parents really want strangers textbooks, workbooks and testing. That is a nar- teaching their children morals, beliefs, habits row interpretation of what education should be. and personal development? The public outcry Every waking moment of every day is a against critical race theory and social and learning opportunity. For many, one of the emotional learning says no; however, a large most important aspects of home schooling is to number of parents still send their children completely unlearn everything you were taught to government institutions for the majority about education via institutionalized learnof their formative years. They are trusting a ing. That is one reason I strongly recommend system whose track record is less than stellar de-schooling, not only for the child but for to “educate” their children. the parent as well. Due to the conditioning of Only 24% of 12th graders in public schools government schools, most believe that learning scored at or above proficiency in math, only only occurs within the walls of a classroom. 12% in U.S. history and only 22% in science, Authentic home schooling is a completely difaccording to Our Nation’s Report Card. Comferent culture where learning has no boundaries pare that to home-schooled children. “Homeor time limits. Home schooling is an extension school student achievement test scores are of parenting, which doesn’t put a time limit or exceptionally high. The mean scores for parameters on the acquisition of knowledge. every student (which are at least in the 80th From Webster’s Dictionary 1928: “Edupercentile) are well above those of public
#FREE YOUR
CHILDREN
school students,” a study titled Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students said. The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above publicschool students on standardized academic achievement tests. A 2015 study found black home-school students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above black public-school students. A review of homeschool research found that 78% of peerreviewed studies on academic achievement show home-schooled students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools. Home-schooled students score above average on achievement tests regardless of their parents’ level of formal education or their family’s household income, the National Home Education Research Institute presents in its Research Facts on Homeschooling. Whether home-school parents were ever certified teachers is not related to their children’s academic achievement. Degree of state control and regulation of home schooling is not related to academic achievement. Homeeducated students typically score above average on the SAT and ACT tests that colleges consider for admissions. It is time we stopped defining education by looking to a system that is churning out barely literate young adults. “The child at school . . . has his initiative subordinated to a schedule which has been worked out according to pragmatic factors other than his creativity and needs. He has to try to become interested in hours of listening to talking. There may be no time for him to talk or to express himself. Worse, the books provided are often weak, watery and insipid,” Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote in For the Children’s Sake. During my years as a public-school kindergarten teacher I tried to prevent the 34 * MAY 2022 * BOROPULSE.COM
removal of Saxon Phonics from our county classrooms. We lost the battle and phonics was stripped from the curriculum. That decision was an epic failure, along with the Reading Recovery program that was instituted. “At one point, Reading Recovery was in every state. But school districts have been dropping the program,” NPR reported. “Critics of Reading Recovery have long contended that children in the program do not receive enough explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words.” This leads us to the scenario we have today. According to a study conducted in April 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy (literacyinc.com), 32 million adults in the United States can’t read above a fifth-grade level, and 19% of high school graduates can’t read. Our Nation’s Report Card proves that our current method of educating our children is failing; a more in-depth look at national scores in various categories can be found at: nationsreportcard.gov. I encourage parents to stop giving credence to a system that produces lessthan-stellar results. Embrace learning as an atmosphere and a lifelong goal. I encourage parents to give authentic home schooling a consideration. In the words of Christopher Milne, “Young children are eager to learn, and when we send them to your schools, in two years, three years, four years, you have killed their enthusiasm. At 15 their only eagerness is to escape learning anything.” Parents can foster a love of learning in their own homes with much better results than the government model of education. You are equipped. Tiffany Boyd is the founder of Free YOUR Children, a home school advocate, consultant, speaker and the founder of Middle Tennessee Christian Homeschool Connection. She and her husband have home educated for 18 years. She has appeared as a guest on Homeschool Loft podcast, on the Schoolhouse Rocked podcast and on The Sentinel Report with Alex Newman. Tiffany will be hosting an upcoming seminar, “Creating an Authentic Homeschool Culture,” for parents that are considering home schooling or for new homeschool parents. To learn more about this event or to host one in your area, contact her at freeyourchildren@gmail.com.
