Homeschooling: Was it really for us?

It was this time last year that we began. T had just turned 4 and C had just turned 3. Even though we could have sent T to PreK the previous September, we didn’t. It just didn’t feel right that a child who isn’t even 4 should be in school essentially full-time. What happened to the 1980s with half-day kindergarten starting at age five and a half? That is when we came up with the idea that we would homeschool our children until they were six, the compulsory school age. This decision would give us time to research all the short-term and long-term scenarios.

In some ways exploring homeschooling seemed natural. While not extremely popular, it kept coming up. We would run into someone who did it or knew someone who did it or asked us if we did it. On the other hand, the idea seemed quite strange. Three out of four of our parents were teachers; and education as well as the institution of school was revered. Our parents gave us the very best private and catholic education possible where we each lived. Liz remembers going to school sick. A fever was necessary to stay home and how dare her classmates’ parents take them out of school for a vacation! Tom’s cousin homeschooled her kids, but her husband was in the military. Wasn’t everyone who homeschooled in the military, overseas for work, or a rural conservative Christian right winger?

Preliminary research, however, showed that most people seemed to be “accidental” homeschoolers. In other words, like the military, they had some sort of logistical issue: a bully got bad, a learning disability wasn’t treated properly at the local school, or some other situation brought on by concrete circumstances, not religion or educational philosophy.

What were we? Accidental? - a reasonable beginning school age was not prevalent in Buffalo (and the rest of the country in recent times) so we came up with our own solution. Or Philosophical? - kids are forced into formal school too young or at least for too many hours a day and we were rejecting formal early childhood education wholesale. Either way, we were beginning homeschooling and a year of research to determine just what our philosophy would be.