What made you decide to homeschool?”
I’ve been asked this a few dozen times over the past eight years. But articulating a well-rounded answer always required more rumination than appropriate for a light-hearted conversation with a well-meaning acquaintance. Other frequent questions have been, “How do you have so much patience?”, “How do you make sure they learn everything in the curriculum?” and “Aren’t you worried they won’t have friends?” My honest answer to the first is: I don’t; sometimes I have to fake it and sometimes I lose my temper. To the second: I buy lots of books, but believe me, your child doesn’t know everything included in the Ontario curriculum, either. And to the third: shockingly, children don’t need to be among 30 other kids every day in order to make friends. Ours made friends by socializing with the children of our friends and with other kids at synagogue. This was the easiest part of homeschooling.
The misconceptions surrounding homeschooling are many and the public mystification at times seems impenetrable (the disdain of education experts and intellectuals doesn’t help, either). I remember one irritated father telling me homeschoolers were people who naïvely thought they could educate their children better than professional teachers. I was neither offended nor annoyed; I had already encountered parents who assumed I homeschool because I’m against the education system or want my children to become free-spirited, anti-establishment hippies. So I was used to being judged unfairly. But neither did I think I could out-teach the pros, nor did I want to raise a trio of misfits.
So again, the fundamental question: Why did we choose to homeschool? What did my husband and I set out to do when we pulled our sons out of preschool and rearranged our life plans by deciding to “do it ourselves”? The story began for several reasons and evolved as the years went on.
Motherhood began with a bumpy start. I was anxious and remember panicking when my son was only three months old that I had no idea how to potty train. My husband convinced me I had enough time to learn and helped me stop spinning catastrophes and start taking motherhood one day at a time. By the time our second son arrived 22 months later, I was a pro. Still, helping me remain calm and patient with my two toddlers was the following mantra, repeated often: “In a few years, they’ll be in school all day.” I relied on the thought that I would drop my sons off at school every morning, have the day to myself and pick them up later in the afternoon. I would only have to figure out how to pass the time with them on weekends.
This probably makes me sound like a monster. I didn’t hate spending time with my boys. I loved watching them grow and figure out how to speak and interact with the world around them. But as every mother knows, raising young children takes it all out of you. Every good mother kills her independent self and gives over body and soul to her children. Looking back, I only feel shame over my selfishness and lack of wisdom. I’ve since realized that I’m not a fully autonomous being whose children hinder her freedom. Rather, my purpose and meaning are derived from serving my relationships with my children, family, friends and community. The presence of my children is (almost) never a nuisance, only a blessing.
As Providence would have it, my oldest son’s start at nursery was disastrous. My morning routine became bringing him to his classroom door, chasing him as he ran away, bringing him back and leaving him to his teachers, who would have their own turns chasing him all over the school. He would also run away when I came to pick him up. His goal seemed to be to run at top speed anywhere there was open space until someone tackled him. Just like in the cartoons, I’d pick him up with his feet still air-pedaling in a blur. We somehow got through nursery, with lots of apologies and grovelling to his teachers.
That fall, my son started junior kindergarten. It was the worst year of my life, a fruitless mission of trying to fit a square peg into a circle. I spent the year in meetings with the teachers, the director, behavioural specialists, occupational therapists, psychologists, the pediatrician and other professionals I can’t even remember. My job was more flexible than my husband’s and so I was the school’s default point of contact. My husband, ironically, is a teacher and was never available during class time.
In one phone call from the behavioural specialist to discuss, once again, my son’s classroom misdeeds, which included refusing to go outside for recess and then refusing to come inside when recess was over, I exasperatedly burst out, “Why do all of these issues only exist at school? My son never behaves this way with me!” After her non-sequitur of an answer, my mind wandered away from her proposed new behavioural action plan and down a new direction: my son was happy and well-behaved with me; he was miserable and misbehaving at school.
Suddenly it was clear how little my children’s education in math, English and science would matter in the end if they were not good people. I also understood the urgency: my son was five and I had 13 more years before he became an independent adult.
If you’ll recall my anxiety over potty training, you’ll perhaps understand my mindset: When I looked at my children’s bright curious eyes and uninhibited smiles, I saw their whole lives at once. I saw them as teenagers, parents, grandparents. Although I’m a Jewish mother, I wasn’t planning their careers as doctors or lawyers or scheming ways to assure their acceptance into the best schools. (I of course always thought of their eventual marriages, but like I said, I’m a Jewish mother.)
What I planned for my children were their characters. I planned for them to be God-fearing, kind, conscientious, honest, grateful, compassionate, resilient and more. I didn’t wonder, “Will my son be kind?” Rather, I would think, “My son will be kind.” And I don’t mean setting his Instagram profile photo to the correct social justice flag or colour of the day. I mean performing acts of kindness towards people in his family and community.
During that conversation with the behavioural therapist (who really was a lovely woman), it finally dawned on me that if we kept my son in school, he would not become this type of man. It would not be for lack of effort. The school was sparing no expense at trying to make my son conform to the classroom. But I now realized if I wanted my son to be the man he needed to be, it was not going to happen by going to school. Suddenly it was clear how little my children’s education in math, English and science would matter in the end if they were not good people. I also understood the urgency: my son was five and I had 13 more years before he became an independent adult. How long does it take to form a child’s character? It didn’t seem like something that could be set aside.
The autumn of my elder son’s senior kindergarten year, my husband left his job and began homeschooling our two sons. He was the teacher, while I was scared I just didn’t know enough. I was still on maternity leave with our new daughter, but soon went back to work. We became part of a low-key homeschooling wave across Canada. While the proportion is small at just 0.7 percent of total enrollment, the number of homeschooled kids more than doubled between the 2006-07 and 2018-19 school years (even as public school enrollment declined).
It doubled again in just the first year of the pandemic, to nearly 84,000 according to Statistics Canada. And according to the Canadian Centre for Home Education, 71 percent of new homeschoolers stuck with it after the first year. It could be that many families found homeschooling brought them closer together, or it could be that “remote learning” had opened parents’ eyes to what was actually being taught in schools, and not to their liking. Either way, the overall trend is similar to the U.S., where homeschooling has also been surging, although its popularity there was already much greater, variously estimated at anywhere from 5.2 percent to 6.7 percent of K-12 kids and reaching 4.3 million kids by the end of the pandemic.
It might sound odd that, in this era of heavy-handed bureaucracy and never-ending regulations, we didn’t need to fill out any applications or obtain any special permits to home-school in Ontario. Nor did we need to formally inform and leave the public school system, since we had the kids in private preschool. So we just commenced schooling at home. We would, of course, teach all of the subjects in the Ontario school curriculum.
The rules vary considerably from province to province. In Alberta, where home schooling is the most popular at 1.9 percent of overall enrollment, the rules are among the nation’s toughest (along with Quebec and Saskatchewan). Parents can either follow the provincial curriculum directly or develop their own that must still meet provincial requirements, must submit an education plan and must meet twice yearly with their local school board or private school supervisor. Some other provinces also provide some guidance to parents, and three – Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan – provide funding (Alberta’s will be $901 per child in the upcoming school year). So while most other provinces take homeschoolers seriously, Ontario basically ignores us.
Homeschooling worked wonderfully for us. My husband is a natural educator, loved being with his kids and had endless patience for arts and crafts and make-believe. We turned our basement into a classroom and filled it with small desks and chairs, books, a whiteboard, an easel and toys. They went on nature walks, searched for frogs and built pulley-systems in the trees. My husband carried our baby daughter on his back.
Unfortunately, my earning-power was about half my husband’s and we couldn’t sustain our new system for long. As he had done before, my husband once again encouraged me, this time into being the homeschooler. He found a new teaching job, I quit my job and so we began my oldest son’s grade 1 year. My younger son began senior kindergarten and my one-year-old daughter spent her time climbing on her brothers’ backs and pulling their hair. We did get some help from a babysitter.
It was like becoming a new mother all over again. I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew they had to read and write and do arithmetic. How do you teach a child to read words? I looked for reading curriculums, researched how reading is taught in school, bought big books on homeschooling, searched online. I found the mountain of information so stressful that I eventually threw it away. Instead I bought used copies of Dick and Jane that I read to my children, thinking that if they watched me do it, they would surely imitate. We sang the ABCs, read street signs and followed cooking recipes. I did eventually find a wonderful self-guided schoolbook series, called Complete Canadian Curriculum by Popular Book Company, that we used for each grade. I learned early on to buy workbooks rather than create my own. I was not looking to reinvent the wheel.
The hardest part of homeschooling for me was overcoming my self-consciousness around parents who sent their children to regular schools. Separating yourself from what everyone else is doing is always daunting. And I was ever-aware of the veritable cottage industry of homeschooling critiques and takedown attempts.
My new mantra became, “If they learn to read and write then they’ll be able to learn everything else.” It turned out to be true. In my experience, once a child reads, three-quarters of the educational battle is won. Reading came to each of my children relatively young, although not at the same age, and we all settled into the next few years of pleasant learning. Except math. None of us is math-inclined, and it became just something we suffered through. (Tip: I shamelessly use Chat GPT if I can’t figure out an equation myself.) As for writing, I couldn’t think of any way to teach it except to make them write, so we began each school day by writing in a journal. We wrote imaginary short stories, answered silly hypothetical questions and serious thoughtful questions, and recorded our favourite memories.
Learning patience was another big challenge of homeschooling. But the hardest part for me was overcoming my self-consciousness around parents who sent their children to regular schools. Separating yourself from what everyone else is doing is always daunting. And I was ever-aware of the veritable cottage industry of homeschooling critiques and takedown attempts. Critics have hammered homeschoolers as religious zealots and homeschooling as damaging to children. Some of the less heated claims are that untrained parents will provide less rigorous instruction and that kids won’t get the socialization they need to thrive.
Elizabeth Bartholet, former director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, called for prohibiting homeschooling – just as the pandemic set in. Bartholet had previously claimed homeschooling violates a child’s right to a “meaningful education” and places them at risk of child abuse, going so far as to present homeschooling as a kind of plot to promote racial segregation, female subservience and anti-democratic indoctrination. Other journalists have described homeschooling as “sinister” and full of “nightmares.”
We didn’t know anyone else who homeschooled and I spent months explaining our decision to friends and family (who are now our biggest supporters). I would feel ashamed if the kids and I bumped into an acquaintance during a school day, feeling compelled to explain why we weren’t back at home learning – whether it was because we’d been to the doctor’s or were on our way home from a piano lesson. I wish I knew then what I learned only recently: homeschooled children outperform public school kids in both Canada and the U.S.
Sandra Martin-Chang, an assistant professor of education at Concordia University, compared the test scores of primary-age homeschooled to public-school pupils – a study triggered, ironically, by personal controversy over her own sister-in-law’s decision to homeschool. Martin-Chang found a substantial gap, including this remarkable conclusion: “In some instances, home-schooled children were five grade levels higher than those kids being taught in the public school.” She attributed the difference to the focused teaching and intimate understanding fostered by the small-group setting, as well as parents’ superior ability to motivate their own kids. The Concordia academic’s sample size was admittedly small – just 37 children in each category.
Much larger-scale research in the U.S. paints a similar picture, however. According to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), on standardized academic achievement tests the homeschooled typically score 15-25 percentile points above public-school students. This advantage cuts across racial lines, with a 2015 study finding black homeschooled students scoring 23-42 percentile points above black public school students. A study review by the same author found that 78 percent of studies into the schooling divide had broadly similar findings.
Regardless, after a particularly awkward exchange with a woman in the grocery store where I launched into an unsolicited and detailed explanation of why we weren’t at home, I promised myself I’d never again feel ashamed of how, where and when I homeschooled. From that moment, I began building my confidence and pride in the good and noble work we were doing.
What of our first son’s behavioural issues? I had no plans or professionally developed theories. My husband and I followed our parental instincts. Our son needed to learn manners, so we never allowed him to display bad manners. He needed to learn to share, so we forced him to share and made him do his tantrums in his bedroom. There was no compromise with doing the right thing. To some parents, this may have looked overbearing or too strict. But when faced with the enormity of raising your children to be good and decent people, there are no days off. No one else loves your children enough to do it for you.
At one point, we considered applying for regionally funded speech therapy for our younger son. But we learned that, to qualify, I’d be required to register with the regional school board as a homeschooling family and sign a document stating I understood that the school board reserved the right to inspect my home if they suspected I was not providing an adequate education to my children. Acquiescing to such intrusiveness was not worth free speech therapy.
All three of our kids, of course, needed loving character development and this was just as important as the “Ontario curriculum.” To teach kindness, we made meals for friends who were unwell and delivered them together. To learn conscientiousness, the kids completed all schoolwork and left no mistakes uncorrected. To teach honesty, we treated dishonesty as the gravest mistake and admitting wrongdoing as honourable and praiseworthy. To teach gratitude, the kids wrote thank-you cards (in cursive) for every gift they received, and we listed our blessings out loud. To teach compassion, we regularly visited an elderly relative in a nursing home and volunteered at a food bank. To teach resilience, we didn’t shield the kids from challenges.
Children needed to be literate and most parents were unable to do the job. Schools performed a noble and necessary service to society. But institutions by their very nature must grow. And so the public school system went from educating children in what parents could not, to appropriating their very roles.
For most of history, most families worked and learned together at home in villages or on the farm. Earning a living was typically a family industry with children, parents and grandparents working for common survival and betterment. In all cultures, the family is the vessel by which tradition, culture, religion and values are passed from one generation to the next. With the Industrial Revolution, the cultural format in the West changed dramatically. More men left the home and fields to work. Women eventually followed. Children still needed to be educated and widespread literacy was becoming more important, so general schooling began to emerge.
But if parents and children are no longer at home together, who is passing on the traditions and values? Theoretically, still families, but the majority of a child’s waking time was now spent in school. So who was really enculturating the child?
I accept that there was a clear need and purpose for public education. Children needed to be literate and most parents were unable to do the job. Schools performed a noble and necessary service to society. But institutions by their very nature must grow. And so the public school system went from educating children in what parents could not, to appropriating their very roles. But are our values and traditions aligned with those of the Ministry of Education? Do we want our children to absorb the thoughts and propound the ideas of parents and grandparents or those of the teacher, school board and bureaucracy?
Homeschooling meant returning to my natural state as a parent. My husband and I fully accepted the yoke of parenthood and began the business of bettering each of our children and our family as a whole. I never viewed education as my children’s right but as my duty and their privilege. We took every day seriously. We did everything with care and attention.
And goodness, I have so much fun with my children! Early in the morning we start, everyone properly dressed, beds made and prayers said. Our schedule includes lots of outdoor time, arts and crafts, stories, music, trips and volunteering. We’ve visited farms and museums, attended plays and musicals. We go sledding and skating in the winter, swimming and hiking in the warm months. Googling “homeschool days” has allowed us to find special programs at discounted rates at the aquarium, symphony, pioneer village and more.
We’ve built robots out of old boxes, painted murals in the backyard, done science experiments, baked and cooked, and read so many books we’ve lost count. After my husband explained the term “proximal development” I began reading classic novels to the kids that were above their “age level.” They soon grabbed the books on their own and ploughed their way through Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes and more.
Imperative to managing three different grade levels was teaching my children to learn independently. Each child requires and deserves individual learning time with me, so meanwhile the other two have to do what they’re capable of by themselves. Before they could read, I would give two of them simple tasks while I instructed the third. Once they could read, I created daily work lists, placed on their desks each morning, to be completed that day. I divide my daily teaching time between the three of them. They all became good at following instructions, puzzling out challenges and using their previous work to help guide them. They’re not allowed to disturb their sibling’s learning time with me, thereby helping them learn patience and respect.
As the kids got older I roped in the grandparents and gave each a teaching job, which they all do with that special love and devotion of grandparents. My mother (a journalist) teaches non-fiction writing and American history and my father teaches Canadian history (my oldest son’s favourite). My father-in-law teaches Jewish studies and my mother-in-law (a former English teacher) teaches novel study. My husband studies Talmud with the boys in the mornings and will start with my daughter in September. Homeschooling is truly the family business.
Financially, we were blessed to find a home with reasonable rent, a big factor in our family’s ability to live a respectable middle-class lifestyle on one income. Our vacations are mostly camping and driving to visit family. We drive used cars and always accept hand-me-down clothing. We don’t spend what we don’t have and are grateful for all the wonderful things we do have.
So back to “why.” The original reason to homeschool was to address our first son’s negative character traits. The next reason became embracing our natural and ancient duty as parents. The third became the blossoming of our three children’s individual characters.
In September, my oldest son will begin high school in a small private school. There were no meetings with behavioural specialists or therapists. He was interviewed by the school and they were delighted to accept him as a student.
My oldest son is 14 and a gifted pianist, playing at a Royal Conservatory Grade 10 level. He has been hired to play at three different events so far. He works diligently, teaches himself skills and topics he’s interested in learning, sets goals for himself and follows through. To my distress, he’s teaching himself parkour through YouTube. He’s still running as fast as he can, only now he runs up walls.
My middle son is 12 and has an artist’s soul. Shyer than his brother, he is still kind, sweet and loving. With a pencil and notebook in hand at all times, he draws and sketches the images that come to mind, most of them cartoons, and has created hilarious comics series. He takes art classes and while the other children paint watercolours of their pet dogs, my son’s last painting was of a ship crashing along the waves in a thunderstorm towards a lightning-wracked lighthouse.
My daughter is nine and is fierce and feminine all at once. Having to contend with two older brothers, she has made sure that she is never overlooked or forgotten. Her urge to create everything from scratch keeps her busy cooking and baking, planting seeds to grow vegetables, hot-gluing popsicle sticks to create doll furniture, or sewing her own stuffed animals (bears and cats are favourites). She knows all the dogs on our street and is counting the days until she’s old enough to become the neighbourhood dog walker.
In September, my oldest son will begin high school in a small private school. There were no meetings with behavioural specialists or therapists. He was interviewed by the school and they were delighted to accept him as a student. (Ontario does not conduct standardized testing for school kids to graduate between levels.) My middle son will, God-willing, follow in his brother’s footsteps the following September. When he goes his sister will begin grade 5 in a private elementary school. As much as I would like to keep my daughter home until she can start high school, we feel the social isolation would be too hard for her.
Recently our family went out to dinner to celebrate our oldest son’s “graduation.” We sit in the restaurant with grandparents, aunts and uncles. I hold back tears as I stare at the face of the boy who had once caused “the worst year of my life.” I see the man he is becoming and I am proud. I look at my husband and think, “Goodness. It worked.”
Lindsy Danzinger is a previous school secretary who became a stay-at-home mom to homeschool her three children. She lives with her husband and children in Toronto.
Some homeschooling resources used by the author:
Books
Complete Canadian Curriculum (series)
Dynamic Math (series)
How to Write an Awesome Paragraph Step-by-Step: Step-by-Step Study Skills
How to Write a 5-Paragraph Essay Step-by-Step: Step-by-Step Study Skills
Core Skills Science Workbook (series)
Websites, Social Media and Search Engines
YouTube (search by school subject for age-appropriate teaching videos)
Search engines
Places
Local library: For young children, ask for beginner readers collections and audio read-a-long sets. Learn to explore the library and interact with librarians. If they don’t have what you’re looking for, make a request and the library will likely purchase it.
Museums, theatres, nature reserves and more: Search “homeschool days” in your city or town. There’s a surprising number of such programs, including reserved days and discounted rates. Or e-mail/telephone specific places of interest to inquire. Some facilities without existing homeschool programs will gladly accommodate a homeschooling family’s visit.
Groups
There are many other homeschooling families out there. Look for them on social media.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
