Photo by Marta Wave

Our family just finished up our 18th year of home schooling. We still have 10 more years left on our journey. Throughout the years, I have had the opportunity to meet many wonderful families and consult with countless others.

For many parents who are contemplating home schooling, some of the most frequent questions I hear include, “What does your home-school schedule look like, and how many hours a day do you do school?” The reason for these questions is that the majority of people have been conditioned to believe that learning only takes place via the public-school model. They are conditioned to believe that “school” is a set number of days and hours, typically being spent laboring over curriculum, textbooks, workbooks and testing. That is a narrow interpretation of what education should be.

Every waking moment of every day is a learning opportunity. For many, one of the most important aspects of home schooling is to completely unlearn everything you were taught about education via institutionalized learning. That is one reason I strongly recommend de-schooling, not only for the child but for the parent as well. Due to the conditioning of government schools, most believe that learning only occurs within the walls of a classroom. Authentic home schooling is a completely different culture where learning has no boundaries or time limits. Home schooling is an extension of parenting, which doesn’t put a time limit or parameters on the acquisition of knowledge.

From Webster’s Dictionary 1928: “Educate, verb transitive [Latin educo, educare; e and duco, to lead.] To bring up, as a child; to instruct; to inform and enlighten the understanding; to instill into the mind principles of arts, science, morals, religion and behavior. To educate children well is one of the most important duties of parents and guardians.”

This definition is an excellent example of the ideology of home schooling. Authentic home schooling accomplishes all the aforementioned with the parents serving as the primary educators of their children.

Unfortunately for many, that responsibility is abdicated to strangers in a setting where parents truly have no way of knowing, directing or monitoring what their children are being taught. Do parents really want strangers teaching their children morals, beliefs, habits and personal development? The public outcry against critical race theory and social and emotional learning says no; however, a large number of parents still send their children to government institutions for the majority of their formative years. They are trusting a system whose track record is less than stellar to “educate” their children.

Only 24% of 12th graders in public schools scored at or above proficiency in math, only 12% in U.S. history and only 22% in science, according to Our Nation’s Report Card. Compare that to home-schooled children. “Home-school student achievement test scores are exceptionally high. The mean scores for every student (which are at least in the 80th percentile) are well above those of public 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 public-school 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 home-school research found that 78% of peer-reviewed 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. Home-educated 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 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 can be found at: nationsreportcard.gov.

I encourage parents to stop giving credence to a system that produces less-than-stellar results. Embrace learning as an atmosphere and a lifelong goal. I encourage parents to give authentic home schooling a consideration.

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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.
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Tiffany Boyd is a home-school consultant, speaker, advocate and founder and administrator of Free Your Children and Middle Tennessee Christian Homeschool Connection. She is a monthly contributor to he Murfreesboro Pulse, and has appeared as a guest of 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 homes schooling or for new homeschool parents. To learn more about this event or to host one in your area, email Tiffany at freeyourchildren@gmail.com.
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