Why Homeschool

11/29/2024

My wife and I are thinking seriously about homeschooling our kids. We have a 5-year old daughter and a 2-year old son, so we are still early. Even so, we decided to enroll our daughter into public kinder-garden. Why? Not really sure. Our reasoning was that it would help her start learning to be social, improve language skills, and it will take her off of our hands while we raise the toddler. Also in some ways we think that at this stage is when it’s most important to be with other kids her age, play and sing, do crafts and what not, all the things they do at kinder-garden that we would hardly have the time or energy to do at home. Once they’re older, it’s more about books and language and math and whatever and it’ll be easier to handle that ourselves, we think.

In may ways that has been true, but of course, there are still many many questions, we still have some doubts, the schooling itself has given us many things to think about. In some ways it’s made us more resolved to do it, but in some other ways it’s made us see that there are certainly some advantages to schooling.

… Actually, there is really ONE main advantage: it’s easy. But it’s kind of a big one. And it’s nuanced by the fact that it still requires a bunch of involvement from our part: going to school meetings, doing the lunch committee, getting material for work in school and also homework… why does kinder-garden involve so much homework?

The easy part really is the fact that it takes responsibility out of our hands. I can’t say that she isn’t learning anything useful, I do think it has been good for her social skills (kind of, more on this in a moment) and most of all for her language skills, she has friends (though not our favorite people in the world, we live in a rather sketchy neighborhood, that’s, of course, part of the nuances.)

With regard to her social skills, I’m actually not even sure I could say the overall change has been for the better. She’s meeting new people, different people, learning to collaborate, play in groups, wait in line, listen to instructions, things like that; that’s all good. Things I don’t like: she’s lying to us, cursing and calling us names, being a bit mean to her brother sometimes. I have no proof, but I believe she’s learning most of that in school, from her peers (again, not our favorite people.)

It takes responsibility out of our hands

But that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? To homeschool is to deliberately take that responsibility into your hands and own it.

It takes the responsibility out of our hands only in the sense that we don’t really have to think about what to teach her, programs, methods and so on. We just go along with their plan for her education. But we still have to think about what they are teaching her and maybe in this stage it’s not a big deal but for the later stages of schooled education we are certain it will be.

We live in Mexico City and here in Mexico public education is highly regulated, the State dictates everything from the method of education to the overall lesson plan, from Kinder-Garden to Middle School. Private schools have a little more freedom in things they can add to the curriculum and their methodology but they still have to comply with the State mandated plan. Education has always had quality issues, but lately we feel that there are now also political issues that we just can’t agree with.

A few weeks ago they did a festival for Dia de Muertos at school, they prepared a dance, they dressed as “aztecs”, the school made a whole stage like a big ofrenda with painted skulls vaguely resembling a tzompantli, which is already weird if you knoe what a tzompantli symbolizes, but it’s not even the worst part. In the dance number the children gathered in a circle around a small platform set in the middle of the court, then on a cue they stopped, kneeled and a teacher came inside the circle carying a small child in her arms, deposited her on the platform and the child layed there still while the children danced around her for a minute, then the teacher came back and carried her away. Of course there wasn’t anything explicit, or directly representing it, but that was without a doubt a reference to human sacrifices.

Mexico’s new regime is all about “the people”, and glorifying the poor and the indigenous heritage. Now, I have absolutely nothing against giving visibility to this part (notice that it is only one small part) of our cultural background. To prioritize it like it’s the only thing that matters is another question. But the worse part is that in doing it, I don’t know if deliberately or by ignorance, they are actually showing the absolute worst part of Mexico’s pre-colombian past. That is not ok. Besides that, I’ve also taken a look to some of the materials for higher grades and teacher training and some parts of the content promote a political and economic system plus a kind of nationalism and a cult of personality to this regime and it’s politicians that I can’t agree with; especially the latter part, even if it was a different party in government that I wasn’t particularly opposed to, I believe that has no place in my children’s education.

But the decision to homeschool can’t just be defensive or reactionary, there must be something positive about our decision. And there is, there’s a thousand positive reasons to do it.

First and foremost: I believe in freedom and choice, the freedom to do something different from the one-size-fits-all education prescribed by the State. To live and raise my children slightly outside of the mainstream system; not so much outside that they are disconnected from society, but enough that they are able to take a step back, look at it from without and see it as a whole and choose where and to what degree they want to participate in it.

As for which methodology of education we are going to use, we haven’t really settled on one and we think that it’s not that important to be orthodox on that regard as long as you do the things that work for you and your family; but I will say that one we like for its general philosophy is classical education, even if we are not religious. I like it for three main reasons:

1: by focusing on the classical works and ideas –and “classical” doesn’t have to mean just Greek and Latin, it can be anything that, as they say, “has stood the test of time”– you are doing precisely what I said before, you are able to see mankind as a whole with it’s History and different ways of thinking, you are not just immersed in the present system, how things are right now, but you can look at the ideas and narratives that stand behind and have shaped all of the particular aspects of the present.

2: the world is always changing, but something tells me that the rate of change that our generation has experienced throughout our lifetime, which is already quite high, is nothing compared to what the next generation will experience. In this scenario I’ve realized that I care very little for all the private schools and different courses that offer to teach the children the latest and greatest tech, social, or political fad. All of that matters very little when we have no idea whether or not those things that appear to be important now will continue to be so in 10 years. A classical education gives you the ability to hold on to the things that don’t change, it gives you something to stand on. I guess what I’m trying to say is: when the storm comes, would you rather be a leaf in the wind or a rock?

3: Of course a classical education is only the base, I’m not saying you cannot add modern tools on top of it, only that those tools will be much more useful if they are standing on top of a solid platform. Classical education’s whole philosophy basically revolves around ethics, language and reasoning skills and that is the solid platform, the foundation on which everything else stands.

Another positive reason to homeschool is I do believe that in the end they can be better prepared than the average schooled kid. And it’s not about teaching them the latest and most current and most specialized subjects, or overworking them and making our whole lives about their education, checking all the boxes, like some do; it is much more about teaching them a solid base on which to construct all the knowledge they need and giving them the tools to choose whatever they want to learn, and giving them the freedom to dive in whatever topic they want to… with maybe just a little nudge here and there to make sure they stay on track.

There are many statistics and peer reviewed studies that prove this, hundreds of books written on the matter. Honestly, academic performance isn’t my top priority, but of course it is good to know that at least it is not a reason not to do it. Here is a very good compilation of facts and statistics with links to many peer reviewed articles that prove that there is no reason to fear that homeschooled children will be left behind, in many topics, from academics to socialization and mental health. In many instances they even appear to perform better, although the article does clarify that more data is needed to confidently assert that, but at least there is no reason to assert that they perform worse.

Finally, the world is a little bit crazy right now (maybe it always has been), and yes, in some ways it is about protecting my children form the craziness, but not through isolation, in fact it’s quite the opposite, by helping them widen their horizon, to see the larger picture. I grew up in a somewhat privileged environment, but within this system of “private” but heavily regulated education, hearing the mainstream news, I went to a big public university where pretty much everyone is “left”-wing and I even fancied myself an activist for a brief period but at some point I just got fed up with this narrative, it felt meaningless, it felt like being in the so-called "opposition" was just as "mainstream" as the alternative. I knew that there must be more to it, and I realized that all the left-wing/right-wing narrative is just two sides of the same coin and most people, whether they are on one side or the other, live their whole lives just looking from within a tiny bubble, never looking outside, never realizing that the reality of human experience and life is so vastly more complex and nuanced.

This was, for me, a long process that took a good part of my mid-late twenties/early thirties, but I want to try and give my kids the possibility to have that point of view from the start. Because being perfectly adapted to a deeply sick system is not the mark of mental health that many people seem to think it is. No one ever created something new or beautiful or meaningful by living and thinking just like everybody else.