thoughts on homeschooling

I am undecided on the question of homeschooling. But I'm very much interested in it because God willing I will be a father someday. Reading First Things today, I find an article that speaks to one mother and father's experience. They write of being more or less forced into homeschooling because of the deficiencies of the current educational fancies operating in American schools. In the process, they articulate what sounds to me like a very appealing educational philosophy:

Home education as the Millmans understand it is about offering children a level of moral and intellectual agency that a school setting cannot provide. “For us,” they write, “education means a kind of growth and development that seems to have no constituency within the school system.” Though they don’t belabor their Christian identity, the very language they use—truth, virtue, freedom—is a vocabulary too mined with a given set of values to be of use even, it increasingly seems, in private schools where egalitarian ideals and “who-are-we-to-judge-ism” are offered as a counterweight to upper-class guilt. Even to think about ideas like truth, virtue, and freedom in large terms is to step outside the institutional conversation, with its overriding concern for what can be quantified. By contrast, in homeschooling, “what matters is not getting the child to produce work but, rather, getting the child to become a fully free and actualized human being.” If homeschooling represents an assertion of the parental right to influence how a child perceives reality, in the Millmans’ view the real point of this kind of education is to develop a person with the clarity to discern what is real. Learning, then, is less about amassing a certain body of knowledge than about cultivating the habit of asking questions and seeking true answers.

This idea, that education should be both moral and oriented to the truth is not a new one. Before John Dewey's educational pragmatism really took hold in American schools, this philosophy of education being about virtue and truth was dominant. It really is unfortunate that we've replaced Aristotle with Dewey, and I think it is a good thing that homeschoolers can correct for this mistake made by the teachers of our teachers.

The only objection I have to homeschooling concerns the natural socialization that occurs in a school environment. This involves, I think, not just learning social norms from peers, but also from sources of authority that are not mommy or daddy. I think this is an essential element of education that I am not sure homeschooling can provide, at least in the same capacity and extent.

Obviously this critique is more or less effective depending on the style employed by the parents who choose to homeschool. Some homeschooling students will find themselves ever occupied with social activities and challenges. There are also a large number of homeschooling organizations that are providing the types of activities that may be difficult for homeschoolers to get involved in otherwise.

Basically I think homeschooling is not the ideal. It's something we do when we're desperate, because the education system is so bad.