Why do we homeschool?

Next week is National School Choice Week, and to celebrate I am helping some other local moms organize a town hall meeting featuring a panel discussion about educational options in our area. I don't plan to serve as a panelist but the process of organizing, coordinating and publicizing this event has made me think really hard about what I would say if I were one.

First, a little background information: I'm not married to homeschooling from an ideological standpoint. I don't think our public education system is "broken." (I do wish it were better funded and better organized, though.) I am not a religious fanatic. I'm not a granola-crunching hippie type who thinks public education is an industrial-military brainwashing scheme. (But for the record, I do like granola a lot.) I'm not a wealthy snob mom who thinks my kids are too good for school and can afford to pay private tutors to educate them instead. Nor am I an example of any of the other various and amusing stereotypes of homeschooling parents.

So why do we homeschool? In short, because right now, in the area where we live, it is the best option for our family. Public school works really well for a lot of families, and that's great. Private schools offer a lot of different approaches and philosophies to education, giving parents who can afford it a lot of choice in how their kids will be educated, and that's great too. Community-supported charter schools can focus their efforts on serving the specific educational needs of the students in their communities without wasting resources on things those students don't need, which is wonderful. Homeschooling, in all its many manifestations, works too. If you're skeptical, read this article.

We didn't start out planning to homeschool. We settled on it as a temporary fix to tide us over while we explored what other schooling options might meet our daughter's unique educational needs. After two years of visiting schools, talking to other parents, reading volumes upon volumes about educational theory and practice, and exhausting myself in the process, I have come to the realization that what we are already doing is better than any of the other options we have explored.

Special needs, you ask? Yes. My daughter is gifted (highly gifted, we think, although we haven't had her assessed yet), and it turns out that giftedness is one of the most severely underserved special educational needs there is. My daughter started reading organically at age three. For a six-month period starting just before she turned five, whenever people asked her "What's your favorite animal?" her response was "Australopithecus afarensis." I'm not making that up. She started reading chapter books at age five. Shortly after her sixth birthday, she picked up a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate factory that I had bought intending to read out loud with her, completed it within 24 hours and, as I discovered when I quizzed her about it, retained 100% of it and understood about 80% - not only was my kindergartener reading at a 4th grade level, she was SPEED-reading and, for the most part, comprehending at a 4th grade level! At the beginning of her (technically) 1st grade year, she became interested in evolutionary biology. She read everything about it that she could get her hands on for several weeks, at the end of which she could summarize the various theories of the origins of life on earth, name and describe the different kingdoms of living things (all of them!), explain the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, and give you a lecture on the importance of cyanobacteria in the development of the earth's atmosphere. And that, I realized, is the most beautiful part of learning at home...she is free to study everything she is interested in, to whatever extent it suits her, without wasting her time on things she already knows while she waits for everyone else to catch up.

But what about GATE, you ask? Our district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program starts in 3rd grade and mostly consists of keeping gifted kids in class with their same-age peers but giving them extra work to do. When we were looking at kindergarten options I left several messages for our district's GATE office inquiring about testing and other services for my gifted five-year-old. They never returned my calls.

But surely, you say, there must be private schools with gifted programs in your area? Well, yes, but the very few schools in our area with truly individualized curricula aren't equipped to cope with my daughter's other special need, which is OCD. She's had periodic episodes of obsessive-compulsive behavior since she was three, and, being that it's an anxiety disorder, her condition causes her to freak out and scream at the top of her lungs occasionally, without stopping and for no obvious reason. Schools aren't equipped for that. Teachers aren't trained to deal with it. However, with the help of a very good family therapist, we have been able to manage it at home very effectively, without disrupting anyone else's learning experience or inspiring any well-meaning "experts" to try to "help" by diagnosing my child with all manner of behavioral and/or developmental disorders. I'm not just being paranoid about that last part - I've actually been warned by three different actual experts who know & understand my child that we should expect to deal with that if we ever go the public school route.

So, that is why we homeschool. We might school some other way in the future if it turns out to be the best thing at that time, and that will be good too. For now, though, we will stick with what works at this moment, in this place. My daughter is thriving. Our family is thriving.

Why would we do anything else?