Don’t lose the “HOME” in Homeschooling

By lmj

The story below is an allegory of a homeschool journey. The names and personalities of the people I knew have been altered to protect privacy. No one person described below is real, though the stereotypes are common enough. If you think you see yourself here, it is merely an accident.

The Setting

Sometime in 1996 I got “wired”, on-line, with my homeschool. My oldest was in first grade and my other three were a newborn, a toddler, and a preschooler. These were the days before the Well-Trained Mind, when we were relying on Dorothy Sayers’ on-line article, The Lost Tools of Learning and Doug Wilson’s book, Recovering the Lost Tools for most of our classical information. We were lost, like the tools, but happily plugging along by trial and error, as indeed, we still are.

Through a couple of novice classical email loops I met various ladies and forged friendships which have lasted to this day. We all came from different states, different church backgrounds, and had different levels of education. What we shared in common was a love for classical education, which later blossomed into many different endeavors and interpretations of how that classical education was to be realized.

The Group

This was back in the days when you were fortunate to find ONE Yahoo group (though back then it was not Yahoo) dedicated to homeschoolers pursuing a classical education. My imaginary group here for the sake of this story was composed, among others, of Rhonda Rigorous, Joanie Joy, Flora Flow, Essie Expert, and myself.

We excitedly discovered that some of us were within driving distance of each other and we eagerly purposed to meet.

Our gatherings in the beginning were long weekends at the home of a loop member in a larger city somewhere in the Midwest. We sipped long cups of tea, chatted, looked at each other’s curriculum, and giggled till late into the night. We even had an all day family gathering of hubbies, kids, and ourselves to play ping pong, frisbee, soccer, chat, and eat an all day lunch. It was homeschool heaven.

The People

Flora Flow was an elegant brunette, sweet, feminine, and modest in appearance. She never raised her voice. She had obedient and quiet and helpful kids and a managerial type husband, sweet and fun, but definitely not to be trifled with disobedience. Her homeschooling featured a relaxed, slightly messy (but easy to pick up...) home with Charlotte Mason style nature walks, crafts, stories galore, hot tea, and snuggles, some structure, but tremendously loving and go-with-the-flow type of planning.

Joanie Joy was a quiet modest person. Her home was perfectly organized but it was warm and welcoming. Her school room had color coordinated notebook binders organized by subject, on her shelves nary a book was misaligned, her lessons plans were detailed and impeccable. Her school was a classical version of Konos, academically rigorous and planned to the T, but fun and hands on.

Essie Expert was welcoming and relaxed, but very strict with her kids. She was the type of person who goes through life with long lists of things to check off and get done, firm and loving, but not particularly snuggly. She purchased every classical book might possibly need and plugged away one piece at a time to do right by God and by their kids. She vowed that as soon as there was a classical school near by her kids would be in it.

Rhonda Rigorous was new to homeschooling. She had pulled her oldest out of second grade and the next one out of kindergarten. She was not sure which way to go, other than her children needed a strong classical education with academic rigor and attention to detail.

The Gatherings

The fist year all of us had a great time of fellowship and learned a lot from each other.

The second year, Essie Expert and Rhonda Rigorous wanted to plan a BIG homeschool conference with famous speakers, experts on every imaginable topic so that our get-together would be **productive** with lots of learning and information. The goal was for classical education to grow and expand and become well-known in the area.

Flora Flow and Joanie Joy wanted something small and cozy like the year before... **relationships**.... We did a compromise and from there we went ahead with a small class room sized homeschool conference. We did some of the speaking ourselves and we invited a few local educators to speak on advanced classical topics. One of the speakers later went on to went on to form a Classical Christian School. Some of the children from our group, transitioned from homeschooling into that kind of school as they began cropping up around the country.

The following year, the gap between the “expert conference” and the "homey relationship gathering" got too big. I did not go, neither did Flora Flow or Joanie Joy, but the other ladies pursued the conference with excellence. In fact, they did so well that the conference has since grown into a large state event with famous classical homeschooling gurus from all over the nation featured as the lead speakers.

My Conclusion

What I learned from this little anecdote is that homeschooling is diverse and that we have very different goals. Some of us homeschool because the schools in our area, both public and private, are either poor academically or because the schools do not provide the Christian content, which we want for our children.

Others of us homeschool, not just for academic and religious reasons, but also because we believe it is a means of mentoring, of fostering close relationships with our kids. Our aim with homeschooling is to re-generate a sense of the small communities which our countries used to have; first in the family and secondly in our extended communities.

To us those of us who are primarily relationship oriented in our homeschooling, we believe that homeschooling is supposed to generate strong LOCAL communities with depth of relationships. ... The concept of "community” is largely lost in the modern world.

We felt that institutionalizing homeschooling support groups into these huge academic organizations, where we just go sign our kids up here and there, sit and wait and otherwise run around in the car all day is missing the HOME in homeschooling. We as moms are no longer the teachers, we are no longer HOME, we are no longer with our kids, and we never have time to sit down, be cozy, sip tea, and contemplate the meaning of life with kids and with their friends.

The homeschool support group in what I consider my home town now has a large ***homeschool house with class rooms***, where many moms send their kids for almost most of their instruction time. Can we still call that HOMEschooling?

A Parallel

Even our churches rarely meet in homes any more, but have their ladies’ meetings at out-let malls with lunch at a restaurant, their youth events in the church gymnasium, and their men's golf and steak scramble at on church grounds. Everything is large, practical and nobody needs to be inconvenienced by hosting it in their homes.

Homeschooling, like everything else, is beginning to be dominated by concerns of efficiency, expediency, and convenience. We struggle to take time for relationships, we don’t take time to breathe, to be, and to contemplate.

As homeschoolers, even rigorous classical ones, we need to slow down, come home, and return to that old-fashioned Abraham and Sarah hospitality. What I learned from Joanie Joy and Flora Flow is that unless we slow down to take time to create relationships, we lose much of the truth, beauty, and goodness we want to imprint in the lives of our kids.

-lmj 2004, April