Where Are The Homeschooling Families Going?

By Linda Dobson

That depends on who you ask. At the most basic level, homeschooling is the act of your family’s taking full responsibility for the education of your own children. Acceptance of this responsibility lets your family step off the public school learning path, which in turn frees you from the accoutrements the public school learning path includes.

Some of these accoutrements are obvious: one-size-fits-all curriculum, mandatory programs having less to do with academics and much more to do with attitude adjustment, high student-to-teacher ratio, and negative peer influence and pressure.

Some accoutrements are less obvious: a time schedule ill-suited to your family’s needs or your child’s inner-sleep timetable, diseases easily spread through a classroom, high costs of the latest fashion trends, and lack of time for exposure to normal socialization available in the larger community.

Once off the public school learning path, your family creates its own educational path, going wherever you want to go. Admittedly, this thought can be overwhelming. The public school learning path is clear and well worn with use. Your family has yet to determine its direction or mark out the route you intend to travel. A homeschool learning journey looms over the horizon as a never-before-attempted experiment with unknown results.

Yes, each individual family’s journey is an experiment, but it’s one quickly modified if you see it becoming too easy or too hard, or if it just plain isn’t working.

YOU Make Homeschooling Fit!

Just as no two families furnish homes in the same way or eat the same dinner at the same time or adopt the same pets, so no two homeschooling families head to the same learning place in the same way. If two families next door to each other purchase the same curriculum and use it with children of the same age, they’ll still experience homeschooling differently.

One family starts at 8 A.M. right after breakfast, the other at 9:30 after a leisurely breakfast and household chores. One family does science experiments in the kitchen, the other joins with fellow homeschoolers at the home of a support group member. One family ends the day by going to the playground, the other by volunteering at the Humane Society. One family sticks to the curriculum provider’s timetable, the other follows along for three months then tosses the whole thing in the trash.

The very nature of the freedom inherent in accepting educational responsibility through homeschooling creates an infinite variety of ways your family may go about its learning day. Indeed, the act can be so fluid as to dramatically change direction within the same household from one day – or one hour – to the next. It can be so fluid as to transcend a mere means of acquiring an education and lead your family straight to a satisfying new lifestyle.

Homeschooling Families Are Going Everywhere

Homeschoolers blaze unexplored trails every day. That’s why they’re going different places depending on whom you ask. You’ll soon see that while this can make it challenging to find a place to start your journey, complete responsibility’s freedom is a strong asset.

See also “Starting Homeschooling: Use Your Local Library.”

From Homeschooling The Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3- to 8-Year-Old Child

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