Homeschool News & Views

From Homeschool Helpers

Issue 32, July 27, 2007

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool News & Views.

When parents first consider homeschooling, they then must consider a curriculum.

When we first started formally homeschooling back around 1981, there weren’t many curricula available. By formal homeschooling, I mean to actually buy and follow a set curriculum. We had in fact been homeschooling already since 1976, when we began to teach our first child to read. Then, since it was so easy to teach the kids to read, we added some numbers and music. And they had been sitting in our family Bible studies for as long as they could remember, and that is the most important homeschool course. So by the time we actually bought a course and began teaching out of that curriculum, or formally homeschooling, we had really been homeschooling for five years.

Even though we had been teaching our older two kids for years, we were still afraid that we couldn’t teach them. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the way we were. We had been teaching our oldest for five years, from age two to age seven. He was a good reader by that time, reading easily at a fifth grade level. His sister was two years younger and doing almost as well as he was. These were stupendous results by normal public school standards. They will have high school students who could read no better than our babies, and yet we were afraid we couldn’t teach.

When parents first consider homeschooling, they usually have this fear that they cannot do it. They think that teaching is some magic gift bestowed by the universities and state certification. It is not. In fact, by their boring and lifeless nature, institutions are the worst teachers. It’s a testament to the amazing human brain that big impersonal institutions are able to get their students to learn anything at all.

So if you are just first considering homeschooling and you feel a bit cautious, that’s not unusual. We’ve all been there.

Since we were afraid we couldn’t do it, we tried to pick a curriculum that was safe and proven. We went with the Calvert School, which had been used for decades by American diplomats around the world to teach their children when there were no English language schools in their locations. The format was for us to do the teaching, then we sent the materials to a Calvert teacher, who checked them and returned them to us with her comments.

We thought that course was a bit stiff and stuffy, and most of all it was not outright Christian. We had family Bible studies, where we directly taught the Bible to the kids, so it wasn’t like we were leaving the Bible out. And since we were teaching the Calvert courses, if we wanted to interject a point about God we could at any time. But the courses themselves were written without using the word of God as the foundation for all knowledge.

We believe that the word of God is the foundation for all knowledge. So the next year we looked for a Christian based curriculum. The problem we faced there is that we were afraid that we might disagree with some of the religious teachings in the Christian course.

We went with Alpha Omega and we were not displeased with that choice. We stayed with that curriculum through the rest of our homeschooling.

So perhaps you are a parent who is ready to Love Tutor, or homeschool. You are ready to pick a curriculum. You search on the internet for homeschool materials, and there are so many choices that Google nearly locks up.

And you, new homeschooling parent, may be discouraged by the sheer number of curricula available to you. How in the world can you even examine all those curricula and pick the single one that is perfect for your children?

When we first began homeschooling, we certainly didn’t have that problem. There were only a few choices available. One of the choices was getting old used textbooks for next to nothing, and not a fancy programmed curriculum.

Again – you are a new homeschooling parent. You are ready to pick a curriculum for your children, and you discover there are hundreds of choices available.

Isn’t that a marvelous, wonderful thing?

There are now so many homeschool curricula that a first time homeschooling parent is perplexed over the preponderance of pedagoguish publications. Not only are you able to homeschool, but there are so many fine choices in homeschool materials that it makes a new homeschool tutor trepidatious.

Wouldn’t it be awful if you wanted to homeschool and couldn’t find anything except used public school Godless anti-Christian textbooks? Well, it’s not that way at all, so it must be wonderful that a homeschool parent has so many choices that it is almost overwhelming.

Be thankful for your choices. It is truly wonderful that America has had the freedom to allow the homeschool movement to birth and grow and explode. Of all the countries in the world, the United States had the freedom to nourish homeschooling. The British Empire once had colonies all around the world, so that the sun was always shining on a British subject, but Great Britain did not develop the homeschooling movement. Only now is it creeping forward there. Homeschooling did not originate in Europe, the mother of western civilization. France only recently loosened its restrictions against homeschooling, and Germany still treats homeschool parents as criminals. Even down in Mexico, which is a backward, undeveloped country, they will take the children away if the parents try to formally homeschool.

The light of homeschooling is now faintly arising in many countries around the world, including Australia, in the socialist repression of Canada, and even Russia and some of the old Soviet Union countries. But it birthed and took root in none of those countries. Homeschooling is made in America! God bless America, the home of the free, as we have been in our past history. People had the freedom to bring the computer into the world and to bring homeschooling back into the home. Nowhere else did this happen.

In all these other countries, homeschoolers must be hush hush, their choices are limited, their freedoms are frail. And in America, if you want to homeschool, it’s discouraging because you have so much stuff to pick from you can’t possibly evaluate them all!

If you are a new homeschool parent, relish the opportunity and freedom you have to go over all these curriculum choices. Homeschooling, made in America, the land of the free!

Now, then – when you go to pick your curriculum – relax a little.

There is no perfect curriculum for your child. Really, you, parent, are the critically important factor in your child’s education. You may not find the perfect curriculum, but you are the most perfect teacher for your child. Don’t forget that. School books say this and say that, and mostly they’re all saying the same thing, anyway. But they don’t love your child. You do. Your child loves you. You’re not perfect, and your child is not perfect, but you absolutely are the most perfect teacher for your child, whatever books you use.

Furthermore, the best and most permanent learning is that which is done by doing, not just by studying out of a book. Most of the things a student memorizes he soon forgets. The key to remembering something is to use it. If you don’t believe that then pick up some science test out of a science course and see how many of those little facts that you once learned you can still recall.

Today’s educational approach is pretty much based on the system of memorize and forget, memorize and forget. Students cram for a test, then that information gets pushed to the back of the brain as they cram for another test. Christ did not teach His disciples that way. He lived with them, taught them by doing and explaining what He was doing. He was a good teacher. In fact, that was one of His titles, rabbi or teacher. He also said not to call anyone else that.

In former times, apprenticeship was a common method of transferring knowledge. That was a terrific way of learning that is seldom used today.

Remember when you are picking your curriculum, much of your child’s learning will not be out of those books, anyway.

Our four daughters learned home economics very well from their mother. Home economics is very important to them. Most of them want to be Godly wives and mothers, and these homemaking skills are critical for them doing that. However, very little of their home economics was learned out of a textbook or a course. It was learned doing things with their mother. By the time they had learned to read well, they had learned to bake good biscuits. Now which is more important, good reading or good biscuits? I’d say that’s a tie.

The most important course you will be teaching is the Bible. You already have the textbook for that.

Remember, parent, you are not teaching college. You are teaching secondary school. In the old days this was to teach people to function in society by teaching them to read, write and cipher, or arithmetic. Those are the basics. The public schools have gotten so fragmented and diffused that they no longer teach the basics well. Numerous corporations have set up remedial training courses for their new employees to teach them basic education which they did not learn in the public schools. Don’t get so high falutin in your teaching that you don’t teach your children to read very well, to write clearly, and to do accurately the math they will need in life.

In picking a specific curriculum, there probably is no one right one or no one wrong one. Surely most of them will do fine, as you teach the lessons. Also, you may do as we did and switch courses. So picking a specific program is not a life or death matter. Homeschoolers use everything from Calvert School for diplomats to university homeschool programs to Christian workbook courses such as Alpha Omega or ACE.

Free choice is one of the great strengths of homeschooling. In a public school, everybody uses the same textbooks. Those books are not picked out by the students or their families, but by the educational powers that be.

In choosing a curriculum, you need to make certain basic choices.

First, do you want the confidence of having a teacher reinforce your efforts? That means being enrolled in a correspondence school, and sending the schoolwork in to them. We did that with Calvert School, but quickly decided we didn’t need that at all. Many parents still choose that option, however, in a number of different schools.

Beyond that choice, do you want a textbook approach or a workbook approach? Basically the same material is going to be covered. The workbook method makes for easy teaching by presenting the lessons in bite size amounts.

Do you want a classical curriculum, emphasizing Latin and logic, as might have been taught in centuries past? Or do you want a more modern curriculum, perhaps emphasizing technology? Many curricula will use the computer, the tool of today, in their teaching.

In your material choices, remember that every student is unique. That is one of the enormous advantages of homeschooling. Our kids wound up with interests in videograpy, computers, music and animals. They looked a lot alike, but they were all individuals with personal interests. Make sure you work those personal interests into your lessons for your children. You may have one kid who is a mechanic and his look alike sibling is a musician.

Being able to choose a curriculum for your child from such a wide choice is a wonderful blessing. What is your family like? What is your child like? What are you like, as a teacher?

The most important learning you can give your child is about life, not literature or Latin or logic. Daily discipling – Love Tutoring -- is what will make the biggest difference in your child’s life.