What does successful homeschooling look like?
When our oldest child graduated from high school, I took the opportunity to sit down and evaluate whether homeschooling had been successful for him. He graduated as a National Merit scholar and was admitted to his top choice college with significant scholarships, but those impressive achievements weren’t actually even on our vision statement that I developed for our homeschool years ago.
Yes, we’re proud of our son for working hard in high school and getting into our beloved alma mater with his grades and test scores. It’s a relief to know that we didn’t mess up his life plans by homeschooling him all the way through! But more importantly, did we succeed in our underlying educational goals?
First of all, do our kids love learning? Yes! Our son is intellectually curious about a variety of things, and he wants to go to college because he wants to learn more about a lot of them. His younger sisters are interested and interesting people, as well. My husband and I enjoy talking with our teenagers about current events, their studies, and cultural issues of the day. They’re interested in the things we are interested in because we have spent their whole lives talking to them about our passions and interests.
Next, are our kids good citizens? Every election cycle, we’re treated to a showcase of the abysmal civic knowledge of America’s young people. We’ve wanted to make sure that our kids understand how and why our government is set up the way it is and how best to advocate for the issues that we hold dear. Not only have our kids studied US government and participated in youth-in-government camps and internships, but we took them on a family homeschool vacation to DC to visit Congress, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, and all of the major museums in the area. They understand the importance of being informed voters, and our son looks forward to voting for the first time in the next election.
Are our kids helpful neighbors and good friends? As a special needs foster-adoptive family, we’ve prioritized the work of compassion and hospitality as a family ministry. Our children volunteer in our church and community, and I’m most impressed at how our adult son uncomplainingly assists us in taking his little sister with disabilities to her therapy sessions. Our kids are not afraid of people who are different, whether physically or philosophically. We have lots of practice disagreeing peacefully in our home, and the more they practice congenial debate with family and friends, the better prepared they are to disagree civilly with those who think differently. I’m most impressed with how my son has a close-knit group of friends from an online homeschool writing class they all took six years ago. Christian, Muslim, and atheist, conservative, liberal, and moderate, they certainly have a variety of views on many timely issues, but they manage to be good friends because their relationships come first! If we had raised our children to only be able to be comfortable with people who vote and worship like we do, we would have failed them. Because of the great variety of experiences and activities we’ve done as homeschoolers, we know a lot of wonderful people with very different worldviews than ours.
Are our kids logical, well-informed, confident, articulate communicators? One stereotype of homeschoolers that I grew up with was that they were shy and sheltered, not willing to talk to people outside their bubble. It’s been important to us that even our shy introverts have plenty of practice at public speaking. All of our kids read the newspaper, and our oldest son listens to podcasts on a variety of topics. Because we discuss and debate ideas with friends of all ages, our children are all comfortable talking to adults and children who aren’t in their exact grade or age. This has taken time, especially for our shy kids, but we’re seeing the fruit of this in our friendly, articulate teenagers.
A huge question for most homeschoolers is whether we have successfully passed on our family values. I read online about ex-homeschoolers whose parents were so protective that they actually drove their children away from the faith and values that they kept them home to preserve. Because we’ve both set a strong family culture yet encouraged our kids to ask us anything and have exposed them at the appropriate time to views that differ greatly from ours, our kids have been free to make our faith and worldview their own. We do inculcate our spiritual values through daily Bible study and regular church attendance, and they see their parents practicing what they preach. Kids can see right through hypocrisy. I have no qualms about my son going off to college without us and making the right choices. Two of our girls spent a year as religious minorities in a private school, but it served only to heighten their appreciation for what what we believe.
You may notice that besides mentioning that my son got into college, I haven’t listed many specific academic achievements or boxes that one could check via a standardized test. One of the most eye-opening experiences for me in realizing what I actually valued was the day that our youngest daughter received her intellectual disability diagnosis. The low IQ score and description of her academic ceiling were shocking after having four gifted bio kids. They even sent a social worker in to talk to me in case I was upset or worried. But get this: the shocking thing was actually how my heart burned in excitement with what her education might get to be. In telling me that she would never go to college or live independently, the psychologist actually freed me from artificial societal milestones that weren’t applicable to my daughter. I started getting excited about how I would never run out of time to read all of Shakespeare aloud together with her or study all the amazing artists or musicians or poets that I felt like my high schoolers were missing out on as we made sure we were checking the boxes to get a high school diploma. She and I were going to learn instruments together, bake together, volunteer together… If I was more excited about homeschooling a special needs child for life, why was I so determined to spend the next decade of my other kids’ lives neglecting those fun topics for the sake of a state-issued certificate? Yes, I did want my gifted kids to have an education that would ensure they could get into college, but I also wanted to sit and read and discuss all of Jane Austen with my teenage daughters. I wanted my son to be able to study a third foreign language that interested him, even though he didn’t need to for his high school diploma. I wanted them all to have more life skills than my husband and I did when we got married.
So we pivoted. We still have a rigorous academic program for our four college-bound kids. I’m planning to use the same curriculum (although maybe two or three years in a row for each grade, if needed) with my non college-bound kid until we reach her ceiling. But we started making more time for those other things, and I’m already seeing the fruit of that. When my youngest and I had to spend a couple months in an out-of-state hospital last summer following a neurosurgery, my kids stepped up and helped my husband run the house and cook and clean. When I broke my arm during my son’s senior year and spent months healing, my kids all learned to bake sourdough, do therapy exercises with their little sister, and juggle schoolwork and housework. My son and daughters are all already more capable of taking care of a home than I was when I graduated from college. Because we’ve built in plenty of time for reading, they’ve all read more widely and deeply than their parents—both English majors!—had upon entering college. This isn’t to say they’re angels (they still bicker) or that they’re particularly proficient at folding laundry (a constant battle in our home!), but I would certainly say that compared to their parents at the same ages, they are better prepared for adulthood.
A successful homeschool experience might not last from kindergarten through high school, as my son’s did. My own brothers and I only homeschooled intermittently, but we all credit our parents’ constant attention to our intellectual and spiritual formation, regardless of what school situation we were in each year, with shaping us into the happy and healthy adults we are today. At the core of all positive homeschool experiences is a healthy parent-child relationship. You’re literally raising your future best friends!
