by Steven Horwich
Let's assume for the moment that you've decided you should homeschool. Now the question becomes can you homeschool.
So what is required to homeschool?
Well, first of all, you need to have the legal right to homeschool. As of this writing, a number of nations do not permit homeschooling, and they are militant about it.
The worst of these are probably Germany and Sweden. Carrying on in a tradition started long ago by the Nazi Party, these two governments will take legal action against homeschoolers,
and even take their children from them and place them in foster homes, as if homeschooling somehow endangered those children...um, more than placing them in the hands of strangers...um, more than their notoriously dangerous schools. Of course, the Nazis made home study illegal so that they could control what children learned to the extent that kids would finally turn in their parents to der fatherland.
Ask yourself, why would a government make homeschooling illegal?
Because it's seen as a threat to a government's ability to completely control how kids are indoctrinated...er, what they learn.
These nations have insane governments. And they have stupid governments, because homeschoolers score higher in academics than schooled children. So they are cutting off their best and brightest in favor of enforced lower results and prospects.
Of course, the Nazi's made a mania of doing just that, and destroyed much of the world and their own nation in the process. Some countries never learn.
Who else wants to see homeschooling restricted?
Often, teachers do. After all, they only have jobs so long as they can force government to force children to go to schools.
Does it surprise you that teachers do not always have the best interest of children at heart, or that they would place their jobs above the best interest of children? Does it really? Well...welcome to the real world.
Anyway, your nation, state or city may have specific laws on the books to make it hard or impossible to homeschool.
You'll want to check whether it's legal or not to homeschool.
What else do you need to homeschool?
You'll need the willingness of your student, who is usually your child.
Often, that's easy. But leaving behind friends in school can be a hard step to take unless you make it clear that you'll support a social life (within reason) with sleepovers, visits, what have you. Also, and I strongly suggest this, you might start a homeschool group with one or several other families, and for all kinds of reasons which you'll explore in Part III in this book.
Assuming you can get your student's agreement, what next?
I'd get the agreement of the rest of the family, since homeschooling may well involve everyone in the house. Certainly all parents should agree that this is a good thing to do, whether their married or divorced.
You'll need a place for the student to study.
It's not called “home school” for nothing. A room that can be largely turned over to this activity would be great, but even a corner of a room will suffice. It doesn't take much. A place for books, a place to sit and write, a computer probably. You'll look at this more closely later in this chapter.
You'll need the minimal finance required to homeschool.
You may need to join an accredited organization that registers homeschoolers so that the government sees that your child is “in school”, but you also you may not need to do this. It depends on state requirements, and it should be inexpensive if you need to do it.
You'll need some materials to study, no doubt.
Some homeschoolers spend nothing and cobble together studies. There are plenty of resources to do so, from libraries to the Internet, but it is a time-intensive approach to education, and perhaps not as fruitful as combining that approach in a more limited manner, with an established curriculum you trust and that Junior responds well to.
But none of this should cost much at all.
You'll need a clear-cut set of ideas of what to teach, and how. These will be developed in our chapters on Goals, and on the section on Curriculum. But I'm sure you have some idea of what you'd like to have Junior Study, and I'll bet that Junior has a few ideas of his/her own.
You'll need some time for homeschooling to happen, probably about 4-6 hours a day, five days aweek or so. You may want to put more or less time in. You may, as the parent/teacher, need to be available for all or part of that time each day, depending on the curriculum used and the student's needs.
You'll want to figure out some interesting field trips that fit Junior's Studies. Don't have “school” happen in one small room!
P.E. will need to be handled, as well. Most states have minimal requirements – and believe me, they are very minimal, as low as 45 minutes, twice a week. I'd try to do better than that. But “P.E.” might be dance for your child, or martial arts, or a baseball team he plays on in the
afternoons. There are many ways to satisfy this requirement, and you should find one or two that make your student happy to comply.
And the most important requirement – a person to serve as the adult supervision, or a “teacher” if you prefer.
(Use of some curricula removes the need for a “teacher”, as the courses do theteaching, and the parent then does not require expertise as a teacher, or in that subject. My own curriculum, Connect The Thoughts, does exactly that.)
You, potential homeschool educator, are the second most important part of this question. Well?
Can you run a homeschool?
Can you facilitate your student in discovering life and the world and knowledge, given sufficient help to do so?
Before you say “no” (if in fact you were going to), consider all the things that you do well right now. Everyone does some things well. Some people do a whole lot of things well.
Are the things you do well things you always knew you'd do well. Or did you uncover skills as you grew into certain activities, skills you did not necessarily have confidence existed until you demonstrated that you had them? In short, can you do some things now that you did not know you could do before you really did them? Have you grown over the years in ability?
I'm going to assume the answer to these questions is probably yes, since it is for almost everyone.And I'd like to suggest that you will find homeschooling will be another skill that you either possess, or will develop, with the aid of this book, some experience, and a willing heart.
People all over the world are homeschooling their children, and the vast majority are not trained teachers.
Many of them have limited educations. Yet their children are doing better than those who are placed in the care of institutional “professionals” in education – teachers.
Can you homeschool? Well...
- Is it legal to do so where you live?
- Does your student want to homeschool, or is he willing to?
- Is the rest of the family okay with this adventure?
- Is there a space somewhere in the house where this work can be done each day?
- Do you have the rather small amount of $ to homeschool that you will need, say $100 a month or so. And remember, it can be done for FAR less, perhaps $20 a month, with care, in the U.S.
- Are you ready to take on this adventure yourself, as homeschooling parent/teacher? Are you willing to get your hands dirty in the educational trenches, to learn fascinating things, and to discover skills that you perhaps were unaware you possessed?
- Can you help your child maintain a reasonable social life while homeschooling, or better yet, homeschool a few other children with him?
If the answers are “yes” to all of the above, you can absolutely homeschool.
If the answers are “maybe”, then you'll need to get some more info before you decide, perhaps – but the likelihood is that so long as it's legal, the other requirements can be met with a bit of due diligence.
Can you homeschool?
Almost certainly you can. So the best question of all isn't should you homeschool, or can you homeschool.
The real question is will you homeschool?
Over to you!
Steven Horwich has been a professional educator for over 40 years, and a homeschool advocate and author of curriculum for 15. His K-12 secular curriculum, STEPS (www.stepsed.com) has been used by over 20,000 students worldwide, and includes world history, science, civics, creative writing, study basics, current events, and lots of arts.
Let's assume for the moment that you've decided you should homeschool. Now the question becomes can you homeschool.
So what is required to homeschool?
Well, first of all, you need to have the legal right to homeschool. As of this writing, a number of nations do not permit homeschooling, and they are militant about it.
The worst of these are probably Germany and Sweden. Carrying on in a tradition started long ago by the Nazi Party, these two governments will take legal action against homeschoolers,
and even take their children from them and place them in foster homes, as if homeschooling somehow endangered those children...um, more than placing them in the hands of strangers...um, more than their notoriously dangerous schools. Of course, the Nazis made home study illegal so that they could control what children learned to the extent that kids would finally turn in their parents to der fatherland.
Ask yourself, why would a government make homeschooling illegal?
Because it's seen as a threat to a government's ability to completely control how kids are indoctrinated...er, what they learn.
These nations have insane governments. And they have stupid governments, because homeschoolers score higher in academics than schooled children. So they are cutting off their best and brightest in favor of enforced lower results and prospects.
Of course, the Nazi's made a mania of doing just that, and destroyed much of the world and their own nation in the process. Some countries never learn.
Who else wants to see homeschooling restricted?
Often, teachers do. After all, they only have jobs so long as they can force government to force children to go to schools.
Does it surprise you that teachers do not always have the best interest of children at heart, or that they would place their jobs above the best interest of children? Does it really? Well...welcome to the real world.
Anyway, your nation, state or city may have specific laws on the books to make it hard or impossible to homeschool.
You'll want to check whether it's legal or not to homeschool.
What else do you need to homeschool?
You'll need the willingness of your student, who is usually your child.
Often, that's easy. But leaving behind friends in school can be a hard step to take unless you make it clear that you'll support a social life (within reason) with sleepovers, visits, what have you. Also, and I strongly suggest this, you might start a homeschool group with one or several other families, and for all kinds of reasons which you'll explore in Part III in this book.
Assuming you can get your student's agreement, what next?
I'd get the agreement of the rest of the family, since homeschooling may well involve everyone in the house. Certainly all parents should agree that this is a good thing to do, whether their married or divorced.
You'll need a place for the student to study.
It's not called “home school” for nothing. A room that can be largely turned over to this activity would be great, but even a corner of a room will suffice. It doesn't take much. A place for books, a place to sit and write, a computer probably. You'll look at this more closely later in this chapter.
You'll need the minimal finance required to homeschool.
You may need to join an accredited organization that registers homeschoolers so that the government sees that your child is “in school”, but you also you may not need to do this. It depends on state requirements, and it should be inexpensive if you need to do it.
You'll need some materials to study, no doubt.
Some homeschoolers spend nothing and cobble together studies. There are plenty of resources to do so, from libraries to the Internet, but it is a time-intensive approach to education, and perhaps not as fruitful as combining that approach in a more limited manner, with an established curriculum you trust and that Junior responds well to.
But none of this should cost much at all.
You'll need a clear-cut set of ideas of what to teach, and how. These will be developed in our chapters on Goals, and on the section on Curriculum. But I'm sure you have some idea of what you'd like to have Junior Study, and I'll bet that Junior has a few ideas of his/her own.
You'll need some time for homeschooling to happen, probably about 4-6 hours a day, five days aweek or so. You may want to put more or less time in. You may, as the parent/teacher, need to be available for all or part of that time each day, depending on the curriculum used and the student's needs.
You'll want to figure out some interesting field trips that fit Junior's Studies. Don't have “school” happen in one small room!
P.E. will need to be handled, as well. Most states have minimal requirements – and believe me, they are very minimal, as low as 45 minutes, twice a week. I'd try to do better than that. But “P.E.” might be dance for your child, or martial arts, or a baseball team he plays on in the
afternoons. There are many ways to satisfy this requirement, and you should find one or two that make your student happy to comply.
And the most important requirement – a person to serve as the adult supervision, or a “teacher” if you prefer.
(Use of some curricula removes the need for a “teacher”, as the courses do theteaching, and the parent then does not require expertise as a teacher, or in that subject. My own curriculum, Connect The Thoughts, does exactly that.)
You, potential homeschool educator, are the second most important part of this question. Well?
Can you run a homeschool?
Can you facilitate your student in discovering life and the world and knowledge, given sufficient help to do so?
Before you say “no” (if in fact you were going to), consider all the things that you do well right now. Everyone does some things well. Some people do a whole lot of things well.
Are the things you do well things you always knew you'd do well. Or did you uncover skills as you grew into certain activities, skills you did not necessarily have confidence existed until you demonstrated that you had them? In short, can you do some things now that you did not know you could do before you really did them? Have you grown over the years in ability?
I'm going to assume the answer to these questions is probably yes, since it is for almost everyone.And I'd like to suggest that you will find homeschooling will be another skill that you either possess, or will develop, with the aid of this book, some experience, and a willing heart.
People all over the world are homeschooling their children, and the vast majority are not trained teachers.
Many of them have limited educations. Yet their children are doing better than those who are placed in the care of institutional “professionals” in education – teachers.
Can you homeschool? Well...
- Is it legal to do so where you live?
- Does your student want to homeschool, or is he willing to?
- Is the rest of the family okay with this adventure?
- Is there a space somewhere in the house where this work can be done each day?
- Do you have the rather small amount of $ to homeschool that you will need, say $100 a month or so. And remember, it can be done for FAR less, perhaps $20 a month, with care, in the U.S.
- Are you ready to take on this adventure yourself, as homeschooling parent/teacher? Are you willing to get your hands dirty in the educational trenches, to learn fascinating things, and to discover skills that you perhaps were unaware you possessed?
- Can you help your child maintain a reasonable social life while homeschooling, or better yet, homeschool a few other children with him?
If the answers are “yes” to all of the above, you can absolutely homeschool.
If the answers are “maybe”, then you'll need to get some more info before you decide, perhaps – but the likelihood is that so long as it's legal, the other requirements can be met with a bit of due diligence.
Can you homeschool?
Almost certainly you can. So the best question of all isn't should you homeschool, or can you homeschool.
The real question is will you homeschool?
Over to you!
Steven Horwich has been a professional educator for over 40 years, and a homeschool advocate and author of curriculum for 15. His K-12 secular curriculum, STEPS (www.stepsed.com) has been used by over 20,000 students worldwide, and includes world history, science, civics, creative writing, study basics, current events, and lots of arts.
