No parent that homeschool starts out with complete confidence that they are making the right choice for their family. In fact, second guessing oneself seems to be a parenting prerequisite. One decision you can always feel good about is taking control of your child’s education and choosing to homeschool them. Here are some of the biggest pros that homeschooling can offer.
The first pro of homeschooling is that you maintain control of your child’s influences. If your child begins attending public school in kindergarten, age 5-6 years old, they will be away from you for nearly eight hours a day. During those eight hours you have little control over their experiences and influences. Public school can be a fun, welcoming place, but it can also be a place where bullying and negative influences are part of daily life, in spite of the best efforts on the part of schools to temper such things.
A second reason to homeschool is that you control not only the influences on your child, but their education. Curriculum changes in public education come about every few years, sending things in to chaos. It is stressful for teachers and students alike, who must learn to prepare for new tests and assessments. Students become guinea pigs in the search for the best way to teach new curriculum. The end goal of education should be to produce knowledgable, responsible citizens, not to pass a test. Homeschooling guarantees you are educating, not teaching to a test.
Countless parents decide to homeschool after either personally experiencing or through observing other parents struggle to maintain a jam packed schedule. After a seven hour school day, they often feel like nothing more than a taxi driver, transporting kids to the many activities that must take place after the school day. With homeschooling, not only is your learning time used more efficiently, leading to a much shorter “school day,” but you can work your schooling around the kids’ activities. You have an entire day to work in things like music lessons or doctor appointments, rather than a narrow 2-3 hour window in the evening.
Public schools are now investing more money than ever in “experiential” learning, giving kids hands on experiences that teach them concepts and integrate multiple subjects. There is nothing cutting edge about this, and in fact when our society was primarily an agricultural one this was the normal way to learn and grow. Homeschooling can make this happen every day, not just on special field days or in programs that only have room for a small population within a school. Better learning opportunities are a major reason to homeschool.
Perhaps the greatest pro of homeschooling or at least the one that results in producing good citizens with faith and strong character, is that beyond filtering out negative influences, homeschooling allows you to teach values as an integral part of your child’s education. Your faith and core values are increasingly being left out of public education, and the results are devastating.
Entire books could be written on the advantages of homeschooling, but the five reasons listed here are likely all you need to feel confident in your decision to educate and raise your child to be the kind of adult that we need leading the next generation.
For 15 years Mimi Rothschild has been privileged to help hundreds of thousands of homeschoolers educate their children at home. The MorningStar Academy is a private online Christian school offering diplomas and teachers. The Jubilee Academy is an online Christian curriculum provider offering over 150 full year online Christian courses for PreK-12.
