Homeschool News & Views

Issue 25

June 8, 2007

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool News & Views, issue 25, for June 8, 2007.

A homeschool student won the National Spelling Bee. Again! Evan O’Dorney learned to spell the monstrous spelling bee words by juggling while his mother gave him out the words.

About 90% of the students in this country are public schooled. It’s estimated that about 3% are homeschooled. That means that a homeschooler should win one of these national contests only once every thirty years. But they win the National Spelling Bee and the National Geography Bee frequently.

Furthermore, this year five of the fifteen finalists were homeschooled. That’s the rule, not the exception. Homeschoolers, although outnumbered about 30 to 1, dominate these competitions.

A person has to be a total bigot not to realize that something incredible is going on here.

Homeschooling, or love tutoring, works like nothing else. This has been proven over and over again.

Why is homeschooling the most effective teaching method?

Personal tutoring is much more efficient than factory schooling. The big factory and the faceless assembly line process works with making cars. It does not work with people. The factory approach is efficient for the teacher and inefficient for the student. The teacher maximizes his time by handling 25 students. The student minimizes his time by getting only 1/25 of a teacher.

It’s the same principle as with polygamy. In the Old Testament, many of the men had more than one wife. One example was Jacob, who had two wives and two of his wives’ maidservants. So Jacob had four women, but each woman only had one-fourth of a husband. When Jacob’s sons were grown, they were anything but one big happy family, and the other sons sold Joseph into slavery.

After I graduated from high school, I commuted to a college near my home. One of the assignments of my first year psychology class was to go back to my high school and observe the students in class. It had been a full year since I had graduated from this high school. While I was going to that school, I just took the way it was for granted, without thinking about it. However, visiting the school again after a year’s absence stunned me.

I remember going quietly into Mr. Kraft’s math class, taking a seat in the very back, and sitting down to observe. After the usual time consuming tasks of everyone getting in their seats, taking role, and getting out the books, the teacher began to lecture. He turned his back to the students and worked math problems on the blackboard, explaining the problems as he calculated. The only problem was – nobody was watching him. Maybe two students were paying attention, and twenty were talking and giggling, passing notes, or just idly watching the other students do the above.

I could hardly believe my eyes. I looked at the teacher, and I looked at the students. The teacher went over his notes, while the students passed their notes. The teacher droned while some students dozed. This was all just everyday school life.

I was stunned at the incredible waste of time. But when I had gone to that school, that had been normal for me, too. I remember sitting in history class, getting a seat in front of this one girl that I wanted to sit close to, and constantly turning around during class to talk to her. Now I am not saying that she wanted to talk to me, but I nearly cricked my neck trying to flirt with her in history class. Finally, realizing the obviousness of what I was doing, and trying to put a facetious twist on it, I turned around once more and said to her in my most playful tone, “Don’t bother me. I’m trying to concentrate.” She, fully realizing what I was doing, immediately shot back, “Do you mean you’re trying to concentrate on matrimony?”

For some reason I was mortified. I was quiet for the rest of that class, at least.

So I had often wasted class time in school, but when I returned to the school and saw most of the students doing that, I could hardly believe it.

Homeschooling makes the most of the time spent because the student’s attention is kept on the lessons. There is no big crowd to distract and diffuse. Just the teacher and the student, the parent and the child. Normally there are several children in a home school family, but not enough to disrupt the process, and each child receives individual attention.

Even in a Christian school, this lack of individual attention is a problem. Often small Christian schools will have a setup where each child has a desk cubicle, and he individually works on his workbooks at his own pace. A teacher can supervise thirty students in all different grades in this manner. However, the fact is that some of the time those students are just sitting at their desks, hiding in their cubicles, pretending to study. They may be doodling, they may be writing notes, they may just be dawdling – but they are wasting their school time. With eyeball to eyeball homeschooling, much of that waste and inefficiency is eliminated.

Evan O’Dorney juggled while he learned spelling. That is not your typical schoolroom scene. Few doctors of education would say that students should juggle while studying spelling. But Evan was not bored. His mind was too active to focus only on spelling words. He had to have something else to do at the same time. It worked. And if there’s a national juggling bee, he’ll probably do well in that, too.

Another advantage of homeschooling is the ability to specialize, individualize, and excel. That’s what happens with the spelling bee students. When it becomes obvious that a student is outstanding in that subject, the parent can work with him or her in that specialty. I have seen this specialization repeatedly in music, where a student shows an aptitude for an instrument and is very interested in pursuing that. Homeschooling allows the student to focus on that area of strength and interest. I remember being shuttled through high school on a track planned by the institution, and the things I was most interested in were not included in my education at all. A local homeschool group here has produced two state fiddle champions because the students had the flexibility to focus on their area of interest and talent. They plan to make that field – fiddling -- their adult careers. You see, that kind of fiddling around is all right.

John Holt, who was instrumental in getting the homeschool movement started in America, said that students learned because they wanted to learn. He cited himself as an example. He took up the cello when he was in mid-life only because he wanted to learn to play it. Some may think that fifty is late to learn an instrument, with little life left, but there’s always room for cello.

Students learn because they want to learn. The fact is that no teacher can force any student to learn anything if he really doesn’t want to. A teacher may be able to force a student to sit still and be quiet, although in today’s public schools that’s pretty rare. But if that student is not motivated to learn, even if the student is quiet, little learning will take place.

This is the big factor in education – having a student who wants to learn.

Public school teachers are primarily motivated by money. Not wholly motivated by money, because most will want to help their students as much as they can. But they are primarily motivated by money because it’s the way they earn their living. If they don’t get paid they won’t be there. Public school teachers do not love their students individually.

Christian school teachers are motivated by love for Christ, but they do not strongly love each student. They do care for their students, but they do not love each student as they would love their own children.

Homeschool teachers love their students as their own children, because they are their own children.

There is no overstating how important this parent love factor is in learning.

America today is full of busted families, and many children who are the victims of these busted families. The government has set up an enormous foster care system to care for the semi-orphaned children which the Godless government policies have helped create. Over and over they will take children from the biological parents because of danger to the children from conditions caused by those parents. The government will then place those children in foster homes. Sometimes the foster parents just take the children in for the money. Sometimes the foster parents provide caring homes, with kindness and true love. However, people who work with the foster system say that blood is thicker than water. Most of the time, the foster children want to go back to their own parents. Even though they may actually be treated much better in the foster home, the children usually want to go back to their blood kin, their own mommy and daddy.

I think the thick blood factor is the biggest reason that homeschooling works so well. When parents who love their children teach their children, that is the greatest possible motivation for a child to learn. Everybody wants to please Mom and Dad. All moms and dads want their children to do well. Homeschooling puts these together.

Homeschooling is more efficient, allows students to specialize, and the students are motivated to learn. No matter how much equipment a school has, no matter how much money is spent on each student, no matter what new teaching methodology is tried, the most important factor in teaching is the desire of the student to learn. So next year, look for the homeschool students to again dominate the National Spelling Bee.

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. God bless the Christian homeschoolers.