January 15, 2001
CYBERCOLUMN:
Universal home schooling
___By Donna Van Cleve
___"Every parent home-schools--in one way or another. The parents are a child’s first teachers. And they continue to teach lessons, positive or negative, throughout a child’s lifetime. Some parents recognize this responsibility and spend quality and quantity time with their children from infancy on. Others think learning takes place only behind a desk facing a blackboard and certified teacher, and for the most part they relinquish thatresponsibility to the school later on. Too many times parents miss out on their children’s most fertile years of learning before entering formal education because they don’t think they are qualified to teach their own children anything.
DONNA VAN CLEVE
___Not too many years ago, the idea of parents teaching their children at home seemed rebellious toward the status quo, and sometimes the image of home-schooling came across as arrogant, overprotecting or even over-reacting to the situation in the public schools.
___I remember when a friend suggested that we home-school our own children. I thought she was nuts. I’d never heard of people doing something so radical. I thought I was radical enough wanting my children to have a Christian foundation in their education. But after awhile, various reasons led my friend and me to home-school our children from the third through the sixth grades. I felt like we were stepping off a cliff into the unknown, but it proved to be a wonderful experience for our families.
___It was an interesting time, too, for people in the community to get accustomed to the idea.
___One woman stopped me in the post office and asked, "Who gave you permission to do this?" Another person told us we weren’t qualified to be teaching our own children. People also seemed to be more concerned about our children’s socialization skills than whether they were learning anything or not. I probably overdosed my children on extra-curricular activities the first year because of everyone’s concern about their socialization skills. I came to my senses the second year and cut the activities in half. Kids today are dealing with problems because of too much socialization and not enough opportunities to learn responsibility through community service and work, or to truly understand what education means to their futures.
___We knew our children eventually would enroll in public school, so we tried to keep a positive relationship with the schools. I served as PTA president one year even though my children weren’t enrolled in the public school. Several school administrators, teachers and the public librarian were very helpful and encouraging to us during that time. Others seemed to be threatened by what we did, but I understood why. They assumed that since we weren’t with them, we must be against them. Not so.
___Home-schooling probably taught me as much or more than my children learned. I didn’t realize how much I had been depending on others to raise my children--the church for spiritual training, the school for basic skills--and I hoped somebody somewhere was teaching them character training. When I decided to teach them at home, it almost overwhelmed me to take back the total responsibility of educating my children in every way. But I learned that no matter who would be teaching my kids in later years, it ultimately was my responsibility.
___One of the most important things my children learned, which started in the Christian school, was for them to take responsibility for their own learning. I didn’t have to stand over them lecturing, threatening or spoon-feeding them. They knew their education was preparing them for life-—that it wasn’t some necessary evil they had to endure until they could get out and really start to live. Learning took place anywhere, whether it was at the dining room table, the post office, the pasture or the grocery store. The books taught theory, but life was the hands-on lab class.
___Home-schooling taught us many things and brought our family closer together, but the most important thing to us in teaching our children at home was that God was welcome in our school. How we ever sat passively by and allowed the exclusion of our Creator from the process of preparing our children for life is beyond me. It’s like Pinocchio telling Geppetto, "Thanks for creating me—-but I can take it from here." Our societal noses just keep getting longer as we lie to ourselves and listen to Lampwick saying that we don’t have to worry about what’s right or wrong when we get to Pleasure Island. And we try to justify our evolving state of long ears and tails as being fashionable or signs of our own intelligence. And I guess it is.
___Donna Van Cleve is director of the public library in Cotulla, a writer, wife, mother and member of First Baptist Church in Cotulla, where she is pianist.
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