Home-Schooling: Point vs. Counter-point

Note: I have written two previous pieces on home schooling, one quite some time ago and one recently. They have both evoked thoughtful, passionate posts from parents on both sides of the issue. In order to further that discussion, I am posting two of those responses: one, from a mother of five children, who sent her kids through our Catholic school, and the second from a home schooling parent named "Ginnie", whom I don't know, but who posted a particularly poignant response to my last article.

I appreciate the responses so far, and hope the "point-counterpoint" format of this post continues to engender lively debate!

Why I Didn't Home-School:

I have tried many times to identify why I feel "in my gut" that homeschooling is not the best thing for a child, unless, as you say, one lives in such a remote or dangerous place that there are few good options.

Part of my reasoning is that schooling leads children from within a strong, supportive family OUT of that family in incremental steps to a bigger community to belong to, as public citizen and member of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Keeping the child within the confines of the family seems to negate the child's innate need to grow up and out of the family, learning to leave as well as learning different subject matters. Parents are always primary educators, but it would be proud and wrong to think that they can or should be the ONLY educators. We as parents teach our children to trust by modeling for them that we trust other people to love and care for them. We teach them that it is all right to trust others outside the family, to grow close to adults other than one's parents. We teach them that we do not have all the answers, that others have expertise to share with them. These are faith values.

One of the important functions of schooling outside the family is that the educational experience is not tailored to one student's needs. It may be educationally enriching for a home-schooler to pursue in depth his/her own interests without being "held back" or "forced ahead" by the needs of other students. But unless we are hermits, we are made to learn to live in community, to acknowledge that others besides ourselves have needs that we need to acknowledge, anticipate and empathize with. We need to learn that others have diffent actions and reactions than us and that we have to learn how to respond usefully and gracefully. Even a school without a specifically religious agenda teaches these natural law values.

Students also need to see that faith values are shared by others besides their parents, that this is not something only their parents do.

While I do not believe that home-schooling is the best choice for a child, I also have seen how poised, calm and confident home-schooled children I have met seem to be.

In Defense of Home-Schooling:

I really posted here to address the assumption that home-schooled children are social misfits. *Maybe*, just maybe, its not that they are misfits, though I'm sure some are (although I must confess I've met many adults who went through the public school system who are socially inept). Anyway, my point is, is that its possible that maybe they are more mature, that they in fact do not find humor in what some teenagers nowadays (and kids in general) engage in. Sponge Bob? Drivel.

I have an advanced 7 yr old, just turned 7 a few weeks ago. She is reading years past her grade level, well, she's reading at the 6th grade level to be precise. I never taught her to read, she did it all on her own. Now, having been exposed to the written word in higher level books like she has, its quite possible that she won't find the same things interesting or entertaining as other newly turned 7 yr olds would.

I don't know, I think part of the reason you feel home-schoolers don't fit in is because they haven't succumbed to the group mentality. I just don't picture teenagers of 100 yrs ago engaging in the same kind of silliness that is so prevalent now. I went through the public school system and I found most of the kids in my classes immature back then, and it just seems to have gotten worse..

I truly don't understand the problem of sophisticated language, I thought we were EDUCATING our children. I thought I was raising adults, not children, and as an adult, where my children will eventually spend the bulk of their time on earth God willing, I want them to be all that God has called them to be, based on their talents and His will for their lives. And its not about standardized tests, I personally don't care about standardized tests, they are just hoops I have to jump through. I don't teach my children to the test, they have knowledge that they wouldn't be tested on, so the test really is mute.

And about a former homeschooled child not being able to get voted in a leadership position in a Catholic private school, maybe its not all the homeschooled child's fault. That's why I asked if these kids in the private school attended this school for the bulk of their education, its probably kind of hard for a new kid to fit in, and if you had been homeschooled, well that just makes it harder once the other kids find out. There is quite a bit of misinformation out there perpetuated by others not in the know, and the other kids hear that and pass judgments.

I'm raising my children to be leaders, but not to seek approval from other children. I don't want them to be social misfits, but they need to learn early on what really counts. Men? God? ;o) They need to seek HIS approval first, and their Dad's and Mom's.

Effects of Home Schooling

I have written elsewhere about the Catholic Church's support for parents as primary educators to home school their children, provided they seriously investigate the Catholic school option. In this article, I intend to present my own views on the effects of home schooling on students based on my experience of 22 years, observing these students as they integrate into Catholic school environments in high school.

Since what I will say is likely to be controversial, not just to the anonymous reader but also within my own family, I would like to make a few preliminary comments. First, I do not mean to suggest my comments are universally valid for every student and every circumstance. Each kid is different and responds differently to different conditions. Second, it is not my intent to judge people's motivations or intentions; parents I know who home school are some of the very best parents I've met--serious in their commitments to their children, active in their parish and typically well educated themselves. Finally, I am not a psychologist, nor do I presume to speak with the authority of one with advanced degrees in adolescent psychology.

These, then, are my observations:

1) First, as to professional educator's concern that these kids may be academically unprepared, my experience is exactly the opposite! In general, home schooled kids receive an excellent education from their parents, who are usually well educated themselves and serious about passing on their knowledge to their kids. In addition to having a solid core foundation, they are more likely to have toured local museums, attended literary and fine arts offerings in the city, and to have traveled broadly. The flexibility that home schooling affords families allows families to do these things, and most of the home schooling families I know have used these opportunities effectively. At Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, though we review the academic credentials of incoming home-schooled students, we generally don't have concerns about their academic preparation.

2) On the other hand, in-coming home school kids tend to be socially awkward. This is not a failing on their part or their parents, but the natural result of being separated from their peer group during their formative years. I think that every parent of a home-schooler knows this intuitively; in fact, many parents embrace it as a good thing, not wanting their children to be part of the stereo-typical "in" crowd, with the attendant vices associated with socially skilled teenagers.

Sensitive to this concern, most home-schooling families I know make real efforts to schedule joint programs with other families, giving their children the chance to inter-act as they go to museums together, join parish athletic teams or take part in common community activities. But as helpful as these things are, they are programs which are typically highly structured and dominated by adults, not typical of the unstructured, free-lance interaction of peers on the "play-ground" (used heretofore as a metaphor for unstructured time with peers). There is a lot learned on the play-ground, and not all of it is bad! How to brush off an unkind comment, how to go outside of oneself and start up a conversation with a stranger, stumbling through embarrassed conversations with the opposite sex, and yes, even how to "defend oneself" in verbal banter, are all things that kids learn over many years afforded them by "traditional" schooling.

Some of the things experienced on the play-ground may not be desirable, such as cursing or bullying. I contend, however, that learning how to deal with the bully, however painful, is very much a part of growing up, as is the learned ability to bracket off other behaviors which are inconsistent with our faith. We cannot ultimately shield our kids from being hurt by others, but we do want them to learn to handle hurt and persevere through it.

Often, too, the social awkwardness is exacerbated by the child's language and diction, which is typically more sophisticated than their peer group. Astute educators can pick out a kid who has been home-schooled almost immediately: they use phrases and make comments that reflect the fact their dominant social interactions have been adult-adult, rather than peer-peer. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, as it will certainly help the child on future standardized tests! But it does make his separateness more apparent to his peers and his integration that much more difficult.

3) As a result of the social awkwardness, very few home-school children become leaders in their peer group. They don't have the social skills within their age group to be so. Further, even if the child desires to be so and runs for a class office, for example, his peer group will generally not allow it as a result of the awkwardness they feel.

This, in a nutshell, is my greatest concern about home-schooling as an educator and as a parent. Because these kids come from such good families and because they have unusual attention and care from their parents, if one were projecting their future while they were younger, one would expect them to become real leaders of their peers by high school. It simply doesn't happen (very often). My greatest desire for my children, second only to having them become people of faith, virtue and wisdom, is that they become leaders to help others live with faith, virtue and wisdom. By taking them out of their peer group at such a formative time, I believe home-school children are stripped of this opportunity--and the whole suffers from it.

Controversial? I suppose so, among home-schooling families, but not among educators who have the ability to compare kids from different backgrounds and training. In general, the effects on home-schooling I note are less pronounced the earlier home-schooling parents place their kids back into traditional schools. Arguably, the social effects of home-schooling on a first or second grader is minimal, since if one watches the typical child that age, one notices the child isn't socializing much whether he's around peers or not! As the child moves on to 4th, 5th and 6th grade, however, the desire to interact with peers becomes more innate and thus more important. With-holding kids from traditional middle school has a pronounced effect, making the high school years very difficult.

So if you're a home-schooling parent and you're still reading this article without having written me off completely(!), I recommend considering traditional schooling by 3rd or 4th grade, and definitely by middle school. If you do so, I believe your child can have the best of both worlds: your undivided attention, with all the love, security and flexibility that home-schooling affords, with the opportunity to grow socially and become a leader later on.

What is Distinctive About Catholic Schools?

Note: This talk was given to the high school's new families on July 30 as part of new family orientation.

Welcome new families! Welcome back to those families who are making a second loop through the high school with a different child.

As I begin my 22nd year here, I’d like to reflect on what I think is unique about Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School. There are some very good college preparatory schools in Montgomery. MA and St. James are excellent private schools, whereas LAMP is an excellent public school. But as good as we believe these schools are, we do not aspire to be like them. We are, rather, a Catholic high school, and because of that, we are distinct from every other high school in East Montgomery. It’s a distinctiveness we embrace.

The heart of that distinction is contained in our mission statement, which says as adults, we share in the responsibility to help children grow into persons of faith, virtue and wisdom.

Faith, virtue and wisdom: if you’ve been paying attention to our brochures, our video, or our web page, we’ve been using these words a great deal.

By faith, we mean faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. The acid test of any Christian school, any Catholic school, is this: does it help kids become holy? We believe that each child is a unique creation from God, and that God has a unique destiny for each student. Our job as adults—yours as parents, ours as teachers-- is to cooperate with God’s grace in the lives our teenagers to help them realize God’s will for them. We know that if they do that, they will become the "best version of themselves" and be truly happy. St. Iraneaus had this in mind, I believe, when he said “The glory of the Lord is the human person fully alive”.

Catholic schools provide an optimum setting for becoming "fully alive" not by providing spectacular, extraordinary religious events that stir the student’s faith, but the opposite: immersing students in a community in which a Catholic and Christian world view is so commonplace, so much a part of their lives, that it almost goes unnoticed. For example, we pray all the time around here—before school, as part of school liturgies, before games, with teams in the locker-rooms. We begin classes, often inviting students to pray for things of concern to them. These are typically practical prayers—they pray not for world peace, but so that everyone does well on the test they’re about to take, or for their friend who is sick, or for a special intention. Because it’s so much what we do, it never occurs to even the most macho boy how humbling it is to ask a peer to pray for him. And it’s not just that we teach religion for four years. It’s that we teach it as an academic subject alongside Calculus, or Physics, and that it counts equally into school grade point averages. The result is that it rarely occurs to kids they're giving equal attention to the study of their faith as to Calculus! Just as we don’t notice breathing, we want our faith to be so much of who we are and what we do that we don’t notice we’re doing it.

Virtue. We also want our students to live virtuously. Let’s be blunt. Our children are growing up in a cynical, jaded world that caricatures belief as childish nonsense. There is a natural idealism in our youth but it is too often extinguished by a pervasive cynicism that tells them that a moral life is impossible and that they are prudes to try. Our job—yours and mine—is to challenge their nobler instincts and to show them, through our example, that living out the gospel is not only possible, but noble and right, and yes, even "cool".

Wisdom. Of course, we want our children to be ready for college, as our school name implies. But we want more than that; we want students to be wise, to possess the ability to discern truth from noise, to see clearly what is good and right and to have the courage to act on that vision.

Whose responsibility, then, is it to help children become faithful, virtuous and wise? Our mission statement states it clearly: it’s the adult community’s. Yours and mine.

A strange thing happens to us as parents when our kids become teenagers. When our kids were little, they took what we said as truth on its face. When our kids become teenagers, BECAUSE we said it, it’s false on its face. But here’s the key insight. Someone else’s parent may tell our children the same thing we’ve been trying to tell them, and they regard that parent as a guru-like sage. This is because teenagers are trying so desperately to establish their own identities, and we as parents cast such large shadows, they have to step back from that shadow to begin to establish who they are. But they are still looking for authentic, credible examples upon which to model their lives. So what we need to do is agree together to help each other raise our sons and daughters for a time.

By virtue of being a parent or a teacher in our school, I challenge you to now regard yourself as a member of an extended family. No--aunts, uncles and cousins are not the same as parents, who remain sovereign over their children. But aunts, uncles and cousins do care deeply for their relatives, they do take opportunities to teach them, they keep an eye on each other. Let us agree, as adults, to be that kind of adult presence in the lives our kids. As a parent of a sophomore boy, I welcome phone calls from you if you hear he’s doing some things he shouldn’t be doing, and I hope you will welcome my calls to you. This is what it means to be a family. This is what it means to be part of a community. This is what it means to be a Catholic school.

I’d like to end my segment tonight by passing on to you two recommendations as your child begins high school here:

First, I think we all know that we cannot force our children to join this or that particular club or team, or become part of this extra-curricular activity. We may want our kid to play football, but it’s important that he decides. BUT, I think we can push very strongly with our child that he or she gets involved, as quickly as possible, with at least ONE thing, whatever he or she desires. When our kids play sports, become part of the key club, run for student government, join our government club—whatever—high school becomes a place of joy. They meet new friends, they learn about compromise, they experience ups and downs. Most of all, they become connected. Insist with your child they do at least one thing.

Second, insist with yourself that YOU become involved in at least one new thing as a parent. Whether that’s as an active Booster Club member, a PTO member, helping out with the bookstore, working in the concession stand, get involved. It is SUCH a blessing to get to know the wonderful parents and teachers in this community.

In just a flash of an instant, your child will be graduating. In three weeks, I take my only daughter to college…gulp….and though it's a cliche, it seems like just yesterday she was coming through these doors as a wide eyed freshman. When our kids leave us, we don’t want to look back on our lives and say “I wish I was more involved…I wish I had done this…or that”. Get involved.

The truth is, as much as our kids need a place like Catholic to help them learn to be people of faith, virtue and wisdom, I sometimes think that we as parents might need it more than our children. Seeing the world again through the eyes of our children, we can rediscover what many of us have lost as adults: a sense of wonder and a renewed "respect" (literally, a second look) for our faith and all the gifts God has so richly blessed us with.

I hope it’s a wonderful year for your child and for your family.