Thoughts on homeschooling

This post is in response to a query from a correspondent. I’m going to throw out some random, perhaps somewhat rambling, thoughts on homeschooling. I’m sure that other people’s mileage may vary but I hope these thoughts are found to be of some help.

• No-brainer: homeschooling not for everyone, but for most it beats government schools handily
  

I don’t think homeschooling is a panacea; almost everyone I know who has done homeschooling has been successful with it, but I do remember meeting one family doing homeschooling where I thought the kids were likely to turn out messed up. However, I never did any follow-up with them so I can’t say for sure. Even if the children of that one family did turn out messed up, my personal experience and observations tell me that the success rate with homeschooling is extremely high -- close to 100% (depending on how you define success) -- and statistically speaking it is a far better bet than gambling your kids’ future on government schooling. Part of that may simply be a reflection of the fact that parents who homeschool are a "self-selected" group which tends to have attributes that give their kids an advantage where educational matters are concerned. I think there is that aspect but I think there is also more to it than that. I think that generally speaking the homeschooling environment is inherently healthier for children than the kind of environment a child is likely to encounter in the government-run schools.

(I’m talking primarily with Christians in mind because I don’t have any non-Christian acquaintances who homeschool. I’m sure the number is growing but I have not had a chance to get to know any of them yet.)

• Every educational system has as its aim the creation of a certain kind of adult. What kind of an adult do you want your child to become?
  

For the Christian the primary objective of education is to pass on the faith to the next generation. For the Christian, if we fail in that department then everything else is pretty irrelevant. (For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?) Of course, the modern American government school is just about the worst environment for a Christian to put his kids in if he wants to see them educated from a Christian perspective. Here in Japan, where I live, the government-run schools are not nearly as bad academically as America’s have become, but the main problem from the Christian parent’s perspective remains the same: the schools have a very insidious ability to undermine a child’s Christian faith.

The reason for this insidious ability is not because the schools openly attack the God of the Bible. Rather, it is because they simply ignore God. In ignoring God they claim to be preserving religious neutrality. However, the Christian faith itself is largely irrelevant if it is even possible to give a child a proper education without continually bringing God into the picture. There ought to be distinctly Christian perspectives on every aspect of learning, and when a Christian child goes through the government school system where just about everything is taught without any reference to God, the child is powerfully imprinted with an unspoken message that is seriously harmful to maintenance of the Christian faith: "Child, your religion is for the most part irrelevant to living in this world – see, we can do ALL THIS STUFF without God!" As a result of going though such an education, almost all Christian children become CINOs -- Christians in name only -- at least as far as their thinking and activity on a day-to-day basis in this world is concerned. I have seen numerous reports over the years all giving jaw-dropping numbers on the rate at which children of evangelical Christians fall away from the faith by the time they reach adulthood. Some have said the number is as high as 80% -- nearly eight out of ten Christian children turn away from the faith by the time they become adults. Such things are not entirely unheard of among homeschoolers, but the rate is far lower.

That’s the main reason why my wife and I decided to homeschool our children in Japan, even though the academic level of Japanese schools is not bad and the language was not a problem for us (I’m American and my wife is Korean but Japanese is her first language and my Japanese ability is near native speaker level.) Other, secondary factors entering into our decision included 1) the fact that by homeschooling we could give them a more bilingual education than would have been possible in most schools, and 2) by homeschooling we would be able to afford to raise a larger family.

• Homeschooling without government interference: grateful for relative freedom in Japan
  

Because we are foreigners, the Japanese government could care less how we educate our kids. Total freedom! Believe me, every time I read about how homeschoolers around the world are abused by their local governments I thank God that we were able to "fall through the cracks." (Anyone with an opportunity to fall through the cracks should do so. Get in that crack and stay there! Happy is the man who lives beneath the government’s radar.) Despite the fact that homeschooling is technically illegal in Japan, my Japanese friends who homeschool have had experiences with local school and government officials that range from "only mildly annoying" to "totally cool." I think one of the worse cases was that of one of my friends who is fined 1,000 yen per child per year for failing to send them to an approved school. 1,000 yen is roughly US$10, so it is basically a symbolic slap on the wrist. I have no idea how that was decided; I think it was an entirely discretionary, arbitrary act on the part of some petty local official. A typically Japanese solution . . . whilst American bureaucrats might be sticklers for enforcing the letter of the law, Japanese bureaucrats are often happy to treat rules with some flexibility and as long as nobody loses face in the process, people will be left with a considerable degree of freedom to go their own way.

• The United Nations and hostility to homeschooling
  

Governments are weird -- Japan is a country where homeschooling is technically illegal and yet apparently just about anyone can do it with only minor annoyances; contrast that with the situation of the Johannson family in Sweden, whose son was taken away by the police despite the fact that homeschooling is supposedly legal there. Generally speaking, Japanese police and bureaucrats are not nearly as noxious in the way they deal with individual people in the society as their Western counterparts are. (I used to own several guns in Japan -- legally -- and when I decided to relinquish my firearms license a few years ago the local police argued with me, trying to get me to change my mind and continue owning guns!)

Because the legal situation surrounding homeschooling in each area can vary, anyone contemplating homeschooling should familiarize himself with the current legal status of homeschooling in their area. One might decide to homeschool even if it is technically illegal, as here in Japan, but one needs to make an informed decision based on the circumstances that actually apply in his own situation.

Some United Nations’ documents that might be of interest:

Convention on the Rights of the Child (especially articles 28 and 29)

Convention against Discrimination in Education

I’m not a legal expert, but it is my understanding that in Japan, the concept of compulsory education is such that THE GOVERNMENT is seen as having an obligation to provide every child with an education (up to the age of 16). In other words, every child under the age of 16 has a legal claim on the government whereby he can demand that the government provide him with an education at no charge. The implications of this for the homeschooling parent include the fact that if the parent decides to homeschool a child even though the child WANTS to be attending a conventional school, the government’s position is that the parent is violating the child’s right to avail himself of the government’s educational services.

The flip side of this, however, is that if it is the child who rejects the government’s educational services (preferring instead to do homeschooling), the parents cannot be said to be violating the child’s rights by doing homeschooling.

In other words, it is my understanding that in Japan the "compulsion" in "compulsory education" is on the government rather than on the child. Up to the age of 16, the child has a right to avail himself of government schooling but no obligation to do so. The state has an obligation to make government schooling available to the child but no right to demand that the child partake of it.

I heard the above from Japanese homeschooling parents who were trying to legally adopt a child who had been placed in their care after his Chinese parents decided not to take the child (then just a baby) back with them to China because China’s one-child policy meant they would be subject to severe penalties upon returning to China from overseas with a second child. The family court judge in charge of the family’s case advised them to withdraw their request to adopt the boy until he became older, and the reason given was the fact that they had decided to homeschool the boy. The judge told them that if he was forced to issue a judgment he would have to judge against them because the fact that THEY rather than the CHILD had opted to do homeschooling, the parents were violating the child’s rights. He added that if it had been the child who refused to go to school and insisted on doing homeschooling, he would be able to judge in the family’s favor and grant the adoption because they could not be said to be in violation of the child’s rights.

I mention that because the judge in question was apparently basing his views upon the way Japan interprets the two United Nations’ conventions referred to above, and since the USA is a signatory of those conventions as well, this perspective may be relevant.

I take it as self-evident that homeschooling will be more likely to succeed and less likely to run into trouble with the local authorities if not only both parents but also the children involved are unanimous in their support of the decision to homeschool.

By the way, I have never met a homeschooled child who struck me as lacking in social skills or "socialization" or whatever people care to call their worry that homeschooled children might somehow lose the ability to function effectively as members of a group, on account of having been homeschooled. I can cheerfully confirm that that is a myth and not something that anyone needs to worry about. Numerous studies have been done and none of them found any difficulties in that department. (The single family whose future prospects for success with homeschooling that I worried about had kids with pretty atrocious social skills, but I suspect they would have been no better in that department if they had been attending conventional schools. Some people are just like that.)

• Major approaches: "Enrolled distance learning," independent use of pre-packaged curricula, "roll your own," local/online tutors, self-study . . .
  

For the most part, a would-be homeschooler in the USA has numerous advantages over homeschoolers in Japan. There is now a full-fledged homeschooling industry in the USA with many curricula from which to choose. In fact I think the range of materials and options available to homeschoolers in the USA can be rather daunting. Japan does not have that yet, but that lack is partially offset by Japan’s cram school industry. Basically, these schools serve as tutors to help students pass standardized tests and the entrance exams for various schools and universities. There are many nationwide chains as well as smaller local operations and probably every student in Japan is within an easy commute of such a school. Many of the schools have correspondence courses where the student studies on his own and answers the assigned questions which are emailed or faxed to the school for grading. There are also many video and DVD courses, and even Japan’s government-run television station, NHK, has numerous educational television programs to augment conventional school courses. Every major bookstore in Japan has a section where the texts for the private-sector and public sector "cram school" materials are sold. So basically there are numerous ways for the Japanese homeschooler to skin the cat of getting an education. Some make heavy use of curricula in English from overseas, some make heavy use of the materials available in Japanese, and some combine the two.

• For the Christian homeschooler, the Bible is the starting point of all education
  

My wife and I decided to just "wing it." For us as Christians, we felt very strongly that homeschooling is a very "natural" and "organic" extension of family devotions, whereby we pray and sing and study the word of God together as a family each day. The Bible gives us our basic frame of reference for pretty much everything else so it formed the core and starting point of our education.

Deuteronomy chapter 6 provides what I consider to be the most fundamental verses in the Bible concerning education of children.

The whole chapter, from beginning to end, is relevant. It is not long. It is rich in insights into education, from various angles. Note who is doing the saving -- God, and God alone -- and there is no mention of the State as savior anywhere. Indeed, God is presented as saving His people FROM the divinized State in the form of Pharaoh. There is no mention of the State as having a legitimate role to play in education -- none at all. Now in case anyone might be inclined to dismiss that by saying something like "Well of course not -- the ancient world had yet not been enlightened enough to see that the State has an important role to play in education, and as a pre-industrial society they didn’t need much in the way of an education in any case," let me refer such a reader to Daniel chapter 1 which disproves that entirely. The major step in enslaving any people is the enslavement of their minds.

Indeed, in the ancient world, the divinized State, or its god-king, was seen not only as the source of education but of all sorts of social welfare, as represented by the image of Daniel chapter 4 of the god-king as a great tree beneath which all the creatures under heaven gather for shade and to receive sustenance from the fruit therof:

And yet that same chapter shows the one true living God revealing that god-king to be "beastly." And this is affirmed again in Daniel chapter 7; what the god-king Nebuchadnezzar had seen in Daniel chapter 2 as a glorious vision of a mighty man is seen from the biblical perspective in chapter 7: the divinized State is presented as a series of beasts emerging from the sea to ravage the inhabitants of the earth, until they are finally defeated by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, who establishes His never-ending kingdom based on His personal righteousness.

History, and hence education, is largely a war of competing stories. True stories versus false stories, our stories versus their stories. There is power in our stories; God is the ultimate story-teller; He is the one that everyone else has to imitate, and to the extent that their false stories are able to wield influence, it reflects the degree to which they have managed to imitate Him. As a Christian parent, it is hard to imagine any little kid coming up to me, tugging at my sleeve and saying, "Tell me again the story of how we emerged from the primordial slime." In my opinion, that is a great story to tell if you want to destroy your children’s future.

Here is a great quote from Allan Bloom (writing, ironically, as an unbeliever) from The Closing of the American Mind where he explains the role of the Bible in maintaining cultural cohesion over time:

"My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible's commandments, and their explanation in the Bible's stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief.

"I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliches, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished."

• High-quality K.I.S.S.
  

And this brings me to an important point. You don’t need a large number of books to get a good education. A small number of books will do just fine if they are the right books and they are used properly. The library of Harvard University began with just 400 volumes, three-fourths of which were theological works. I’m sure that in many respects, those first students at Harvard, in the late 1630s and 1640s, were better educated than the vast majority of us today. Whilst they could think very clearly, many ostensibly highly educated people today suffer from extremely muddled thinking, despite having access to far more books as well as information through other media.

At its largest point my personal library was about 5,000 volumes but I have downsized it considerably and now I doubt I have more than 2,000 volumes. But actually only a few hundred books have been directly important to our homeschooling.

Each family’s homeschooling is going to be different. I would not be so presumptuous as to suggest to anyone that they must do homeschooling in a certain way, except to point out that for the Christian the Bible must be the most fundamental book in the children’s educational life.

• How we were led to an approach heavy on self-study, with some assistance from tutors
  

We drew a great deal of inspiration from the family of Dr. Arthur Robinson, and anyone interested in homeschooling would find his website to be a valuable resource.

Basically, he stressed the fact that all learning is ultimately a self-teaching process, even if supervised by a teacher. The sudden and totally unanticipated death of his wife left Dr. Robinson with a large family of kids needing to be homeschooled, but he was in no position to spoon-feed them so he decided to have his kids study mostly on their own. The approach worked just fine and he decided to share his approach and his curriculum with other people interested in doing homeschooling.

We purchased his curriculum but ended up using very little of it. What we did use was his basic methodology and for that alone the curriculum would have been worth many times the purchase price, at least for us.

We chose not to use most of his curriculum for a few reasons. First, English is the second language of my children, not their first, and we were able to find some materials in Japanese that were of higher quality than their English-language counterparts. (The English materials would have been just fine if we had not had the Japanese materials available.) Also, as Dr. Robinson is a scientist, his curriculum tends to be better for people interested in getting an education geared toward a career in science and engineering. However, all seven of my children are strongly interested in careers as performing artists (classical music), so we decided to gear their educations accordingly.

• Sometimes, go with the flow: your life circumstances may indicate the best approach for your family
  

That brings me to another point: in many families the children will, due to hereditary factors or life circumstances, tend more naturally toward certain types of education than toward others. Don’t ask me why my kids all turned out to have a penchant for music; there are musicians in both our families but neither my wife nor I are particularly musical. (Especially me. My wife does have a very good ear and "sense" for music, and I think that with the right education she might have been able to do a lot musically.) But be that as it may, living in a city like Tokyo, if one gets bitten by the bug to pursue musical studies, the opportunities to study music are truly vast. There are many excellent teachers of virtually every instrument in the orchestra within commuting distance for a child, as well as for voice and instruments associated with early music such as the harpsichord, lute, viola da gamba, recorder, etc. I’m sure this is a characteristic of the larger metropolises in the advanced countries of the world. Probably one could find situations of comparable or maybe even greater musical richness in and around major American cities like New York and Chicago, but for someone like me, having grown up in a small town in the USA, the superabundance of good music teachers came as a very pleasant surprise. Life in the city lends itself very well to certain types of education, while other educations are better suited to life in the country. So the kind of education that you can give to your kids will depend a lot on your particular life circumstances. I am firmly convinced that almost any parent, anywhere, can give his or her kids a good education of some sort or another through homeschooling.

• Even people from disadvantaged backgrounds can successfully homeschool !
  

If you come from what might be considered (either by your self or by others) to be a disadvantaged background, you might be tempted to think that in your case, government schools are a better choice than homeschooling. After all, they are "free." (Hah!) I'm reminded of a Japanese saying: "The most expensive things in life are 'free'." The last thing a person coming from a disadvantaged background needs is to further compound that disadvantage with government-run education.

I remember 12 years ago we took in a Japanese woman with four children whose husband had abandoned them; while they lived under our roof for one year I helped her get set up as a translator (I have my own translation company) and after they moved out one year later she was not only able to support her family as a translator and English teacher, working out of her home, she was able to successfully homeschool all four of her kids. Today one child works for a major international real estate company, helping foreign companies locate appropriate office and retail space around Japan; one maintains the computers and computer network for an American company in Japan, one is in medical school preparing to become a doctor, and one is majoring in economics at a leading Japanese university.

I mention her case because I think it shows that at least some people can successfully homeschool even under extremely disadvantaged circumstances. This is especially true if one remembers that homeschooling is not necessarily about you sitting there spoon-feeding your kids a complete education all day long. There are also many very successful homeschoolers basing their approach around self-teaching.

My blog post of the other day recommended that South African students plagued by a serious shortage of good teachers should turn to self-study using the Khan Academy, and I am convinced that if a student was eager to learn and had access to the Internet, through Khan Academy virtually anyone anywhere in the world could get an excellent education (or at least a large part of one -- the Bible study would still need to be done separately) free of charge.

Americans considering homeschooling might be interested to learn that I know several Japanese families that have opted to homeschool their children using English curricula, so far with apparent success. In fact, one family, despite the fact that the parents have limited English ability, decided to ban the use of Japanese in their home (although they made sure the kids kept up in their Japanese studies and gave the kids opportunities to speak Japanese outside the home). I lost contact with that family for a few years but a couple months ago I ran into them at a concert and was absolutely stunned by the children’s competence in English. Meeting them for the first time, never in a million years would you suspect that they were not high-level native speakers of English. The two oldest kids are now attending college in the USA and I bet they will both graduate at or near the top of their class.

Perhaps many people worry that they might not be able to homeschool their kids, due to a lack of academic credentials. Homeschooling does require that the parent invest time, but as long as a parent has the willingness and ability to invest that time, even a parent who knows next to nothing about the subjects to be taught can lead children in homeschooling. The sole requirement for a homeschooling parent to teach his or her kids is that the parent learn the same material that the kids are learning, staying one step ahead of them the whole time. Basically, that’s it in a nutshell! This means that even if you’re an unedjumacated ignoramus due to being a product of American government-run education (i.e., if you are a typical modern American), you can still homeschool. Not only that, it means that you can finally give yourself a decent education at the same time!

• But what if . . . ?
  

The previous paragraph notwithstanding, it must be admitted that if your kids advance far enough in their education, sooner or later they are going to reach a point where you can no longer teach them. For example, most people who got good grades in calculus class in high school will not be able to teach their own kids calculus. That’s because you tend to forget calculus pretty quickly if you don’t use it. Don’t let that dissuade you from beginning. There is always a solution. Always. Don’t worry about it; just cross that bridge when you come to it. You can use Kahn Academy, or hire a tutor for the "tough" subjects, or even put your kids in a conventional government-run high school. Mind you, I do not like the conventional government-run high schools one bit, and I think it would be preferable to avoid them completely, but even homeschooling just through the elementary and junior high school levels is definitely preferable to enrolling the kids in a conventional government school from day one. I think homeschooling through the junior high school level is within the technical capacity of the vast majority of parents out there.

(By the way, if a parent happens to be able to afford conventional PRIVATE schools, I certainly do not object to the parent considering them -- with the caveat that private schools taking fundamentally anti-Christian approaches to education should not be an option for Christians, any more than the government-run schools are.)

There have been times with all seven of our kids when they were lagging behind in a certain area. It is hard to make generalizations but I think that PROVIDED THE CHILD HAS A CLEAR IDEA OF WHAT HE WANTS TO DO IN THE FUTURE, in most cases even a fairly large learning gap in a particular subject area can be overcome in a relatively short time because the child has a clear idea of what needs to be done to get to where he wants to be. Not that all children have a clear idea of what they want to do in the future, of course. All of my kids did have a clear sense of career calling by the time they were in their early teens -- which makes everything a lot simpler for the parent -- but even among homeschoolers it is not uncommon for children to lack such a clear sense of calling and it's not something to worry about.

• You can lose battles and still win the war
  

Anyone contemplating homeschooling needs to come to grips with the fact that even successful homeschooling has plenty of little failures. Homeschooling is a form of warfare (primarily warfare that we wage against ourselves), and you don’t need to win every single battle to win the war. Space would fail me if I tried to share all the anecdotes about the ways in which our homeschooling and the homeschooling of people we know has experienced minor breakdowns and setbacks, and everyone experiences their share of worries and doubts. Every homeschooling "expert" started off as a rank amateur and made plenty of mistakes along the way, I can assure you.

• Real-world education through work, and through observing a working parent
  

If a parent is able to work out of the home, or is able to bring his children into his work situation, that is ideal. It is even better if the children are able to be directly involved in the family business! Anyone working out of their home or running a family business should be seriously considering homeschooling as these are a natural match, complementing and augmenting each other very well.

Kids learn most by observing their parents. Even single-parent families can consider homeschooling, but certainly one of the most valuable educational experiences for any child is to be able to see than his mother and father love one another. Children need to be loved, but even more than that they need to see that their parents love one another. Additionally, if the parents manifest a life-long enthusiasm for learning (and in the case of Christians this includes learning God’s word), that example will impact the children powerfully. And finally, children who are able to observe their parents working will be greatly blessed thereby, especially if they can work alongside their parents. (Although work can actually provide a child with some of the best educational experiences of his life, parents who put their children to work need to be careful to do so in a way that avoids leaving the parents open to charges that they are economically exploiting their own children in a way that interferes with the children’s education.)

• Happy discovery: the other generation is NOT the "enemy" !
  

Teenage rebelliousness is not unheard of among homeschooled childrern; however, as a societal phenomenon it is not nearly so serious a problem as among children going to government-run schools. The government-run schools tend to drive wedges between children and parents, and expose the children to unhealthy peer pressures. Homeschooling families tend to realize much more intergenerational harmony and more faithful continuity of received traditions, beliefs and values. It is sometimes said that the society which cuts itself off from its past has no future, and we can see that what Allan Bloom described above in The Closing of the American Mind is a process of societal self-disinheritance. The government-run schools have played a huge role in this disinheritance process. However, through the simple act of withdrawing one's kids from the government schools (or never sending them there in the first place) and educating them at home, any parent can make a meaningful contribution to the reversal of this process.The government either has not caught on, or has caught on but does not know how to stop it, but homeschoolers are already engaging in a form of guerrilla warfare against Leviathan. May Leviathan die the death of 10 million cuts!

For the person who is concerned about the government’s constant encroachments on our liberty, it is important to remember that in a very good way, homeschooling is one of the most subversive things that anyone can do. The divinized State is monolithic. If we can defeat the monolith decisively at the point of education, we can defeat it entirely because the myth of its divinity and omnipotence are destroyed through the widespread success of non-government alternatives -- even as the government-run schools continue to fail. People come to realize, "Yes, we can! -- without the State." Homeschooling is one of the great hopes for the future of freedom from government because this is the easiest and most natural area for us to launch a successful attack. Leviathan wants to inherit our children, but we can prevent that. We can inherit our own children, and they can inherit all that we have received from God and from our forebears for millennia, in turn passing it on to the next generation as a legacy . . . all without any help from the State, thank you.