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Keeping up with the 21st century and living debt-free

Homeschooling for Safety

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(UPDATE 10/17/18 SEE BELOW)

I just got home from running errands. While I was sitting at a stoplight listening to the car radio, my jaw dropped when I heard Dennis Miller repeatedly tell a caller who was upset about the horrendous school shootings in Connecticut that he should consider pulling his young daughter out of school and homeschooling her. He was clearly serious.

I’m not used to hearing homeschooling being recommended by people like Dennis Miller, but in the wake of Friday’s awful event, I can see where shaken parents all over the country are looking at their children and thinking, “How can I protect them?” when dropping them off at school each day no longer looks like a safe thing to do.

I get that, and being as pro-homeschooling as I am, I agree. BUT, please know that homeschooling isn’t something you do impulsively. It requires serious thought. Most importantly, it requires at least one (and ideally two) highly committed parents.

As I said in The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling, I never pulled any of my four children out of school because I never sent them there in the first place. But I know plenty of parents who did pull their children out of school to homeschool them, and they’ve told me what worked for them. So if the Connecticut tragedy has you ready to pull your kids out ASAP, please read this:

An increasing number of the homeschoolers I meet did not “start from scratch” as I did—they pulled their children out of school. There are many reasons why parents do this (a list of them could fill a book), but the common thread is that something was amiss, something serious enough to warrant reclaiming the child and the responsibility for their education.

I admire these parents because they took action. It would be easier to just ignore the warning signs and wait, hoping next year will be better—better teacher, nicer kids, more interesting schoolwork. But love drives these parents to do something about their displeasure with their child’s situation.

Pulling a child out of school takes guts, and the longer he was in school, the more challenging it will be to reclaim him. (I’m using the pronoun “he” because probably 90% of the people I’ve met over the past few years that have pulled their children out of school had sons. I can understand why this happens. Boys are more physically active and even less interested in sitting at a desk all day than girls are. I realize that’s a generalization, but the way schools are set up, boys often have a hard time “following the program.” Add to that the increasing feminization of schools over time, and you can see why it’s not working for a fair number of boys. School personnel often respond to this by suggesting that the most active boys be medicated, yet another big reason why some parents decide to pull their boys out of school.)

Helping your child become the person he was meant to be instead of the person he’s been trained to be can be difficult. Marshall McLuhan once said, “The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.”

When you reclaim your child from the “homogenizing hopper,” your instinct may be to provide him with more of the same in an effort to make him comfortable. Re-enacting school at home might feel like the right thing to do at first, but consider that the definition of insanity, according to Benjamin Franklin, is doing the same thing you’ve always done and expecting different results. Why replicate school at home when school wasn’t working for the child? That will not create a new enthusiasm for learning. More likely, it will result in total burnout for your child.

So what do you do with this child whose days are no longer filled with school?

The parents who came before you have found that you must begin deprogramming him. After months or years of being trained in the routines of school, he needs freedom in order to see that there are other ways to live. Neither of you are accustomed to that freedom, so this may not be easy. For you, it probably won’t seem like freedom, because you’re not used to having him home every day. So this will be a learning experience for you, too. You’ll have to be patient; helping him become more self-reliant will take time, but will eventually bear fruit.

The days stretch out before you. If you don’t “do school” with him, how will you keep him busy? Busywork is the hallmark of public education, not real education. Your best bet right now is to provide him with learning experiences in an unstructured way, so that he learns to become comfortable with unscheduled time. School trained him to follow its schedule; now you have to train him to follow his own. Instead of diving right into a formal school plan, why not try what has worked for other parents?

You can start by hanging out together at the public library. Encourage him to choose a stack of books to take home. If available, play with educational software together while you’re there. Help him get to know the librarians; in time, they will become partners in his learning.

At home, make regular time to read books aloud together and talk about them afterwards. Even older children enjoy being read to; it doesn’t seem like work, as independent reading often does. One book I highly recommend is Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane.

The parents I know who have plenty of “deprogramming” experience tell me there are other things you can do before you get to the point of adding any formal homeschooling to your day:

• Visit museums and zoos, letting your child take the lead in deciding which exhibits to look at first. He’s used to the teacher calling the shots, but now he needs to learn his own mind.

• Plan meals together. Take him to the grocery store so he can help choose what to buy. Follow recipes together; allow him to do as much of the work as you believe appropriate for his age and skill level.

• Schedule a family vacation (the school year is a great time to do this: lower rates and no crowds!)

• Play age-appropriate board games with your child, including checkers and chess.

• Give your child free reign with art supplies, and the time to be creative.

• Make sure he has ample time to develop and indulge his own interests.

• Put him to work on useful things, like small repairs around the house. This is a good place for dads to get involved, especially if your child has only had female teachers in school.

As he becomes used to the rhythms of home instead of school, you’ll want to establish new ways of thinking. Perhaps the most important is the primacy of family over friends. This won’t be easy if your child has already become peer-dependent. You’ll have to make this change subtly. Don’t drop everything for play dates; instead, fit them in around your family’s plans. While you don’t want to take away your child’s social life, the goal is to replace peer dependency with self-reliance as well as increased identification with his own family.

This is also a good time to help your child reconnect with his roots by taking him to visit grandparents and other relatives.  Seeing where he comes from will help him reestablish his identity. Spending time with them will help strengthen those family ties.

Encourage individuality and taking the initiative by offering your child choices in clothes, food and daily activities. School, by necessity, encourages conformity and submission to someone else’s agenda. By suggesting he choose between alternatives that you have provided, you re-establish your child’s autonomy without handing over the reins of daily life to him (you’ve probably seen the chaos in families where parents have abdicated their roles and put the children in charge.) You also wean him from his dependency on the teacher and school for the patterns of his day.

Take time to listen to him when he wants to talk. What better use of your time can there be than getting closer to your child when he wants to share something with you? As he talks, he will learn more about himself, a sure step on the way to becoming himself again.

All of these things take time, and as the days and weeks go by, you may begin to feel as though you should be “doing school” with him so that he doesn’t fall behind. Don’t worry; the concept of “falling behind” is a school idea. There are no rules as to when a child should learn something. You want to get back to the idea of self-directed learning, which is the only kind of learning that sticks anyway. If you’re worried about his progress, have him tested (privately) in a year or so if it makes you feel better.

It’s hard to take the time to deprogram a child who has just come out of a difficult school situation. All that pent-up desire to help him doesn’t want to be held back. But it’s important to realize that you need to give your child time to find out who he really is, not who he was within the framework of Ms. Smith’s classroom, or as a student at Hometown School.

The earlier he began school (or preschool), the longer this could take, so you’ll have to be patient. In time, as he becomes re-accustomed to his role in the family and the freedom of being at home, he will become the individual he was meant to be.

(Excerpted from The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling.)

UPDATE 10/17/18: I’m sorry to say that there have been so many school shootings since I wrote this in 2012, that schools now have shooting drills complete with the sounds of gunfire in the building. This only increases my belief that kids belong at home, not in school.

As for Dennis Miller, he no longer has a radio show, but recently began hosting a podcast that, while NSFW because of occasional bad language, is entertaining and informative.

 

Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future, Part 4: College is a Tool, Not a Goal

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen that preparing our children for a challenging future means not replicating school in our homes. It also means giving our children the opportunity for free exploration, hands-on learning and discovering the upside to failure. These are important components for raising children to thrive in the rapidly changing 21st century.

But just as we no longer teach our children to use the slide rule or achieve perfect penmanship because they’re not necessary any more, there are some things we may not need to do to prepare our children to thrive in the 21st century. One of them is to push our children to earn a college degree.

Not attending college is a touchy subject for homeschooling parents. Back when homeschooling first hit the public consciousness, there were many naysayers who didn’t believe that parents could teach their children well enough for them to succeed in life. Here’s the gauntlet those critics of homeschooling held up: “How will homeschooled kids ever get into college?”

They got their answer when homeschooler Grant Colfax was accepted to Harvard; years later, when he and his homeschooled brothers had all successfully completed college, there was more proof. And when some suggested the boys were simply products of excellent genetics, their father pointedly noted that two of his boys were adopted.

Since then, college has become the holy grail for most homeschooling parents. A home-educated child with a college degree is proof to friends and family that this homeschooling thing works. So to suggest that most of their kids probably won’t need to earn a college degree may seem almost sacrilegious to some. But looking at college graduation as a badge of honor doesn’t necessarily help our children.

The push for college in society as a whole over the past 40 years has ignored the fact that many kids are not cut out for college. They may not be book learners, or they may have gifts that are better served by on-the-job training or tech school. Evidence shows that forcing all kids into college has resulted in a low graduation rate (only half of all college students graduate within six years) and a lot of dropouts hampered by large levels of student loan debt racked up during the time they were in college.

Even young people who excelled in college are finding that the high-priced degree they earned is not much help in the new economy. If they can find work, it may not be in their field of study; it may also pay less than they expected to earn. This can result in real hardship if they took on a lot of student loan debt, which can almost never be discharged through bankruptcy, leaving them with a burden of debt that could weigh them down much of their lives.

The fact is that most of the job growth over the coming decade as predicted by the U.S. government does not require a four-year degree, and college won’t be necessary for most workers (I’ve included those statistics in my book, Thriving in the 21st Century.)

This doesn’t mean that we should discourage all of our children from going to college. Those with the smarts and the desire to have careers that logically and/or legally require advanced education (physicians, scientists, etc.) should certainly be encouraged and helped to attend college. But the idea that every young person can and should go to college makes no sense in light of the changes in our economy. We parents need to be brave enough to buck the trend and look at each of our children as individuals, determine which (if any) will likely benefit from going to college, and then help the rest figure out the best way to proceed so that they’ll thrive in the 21st century.

(Thriving in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality is packed with ways to prepare your children for the future. Learn more HERE.)

Missed the first three parts of “Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future”? You’ll find them here: #1, #2 and #3.

 

 

Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future, Part 3: Why Your Child Needs to Fail

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If we want to prepare our kids for the new economy, we must let them learn to fail.

Fail? Failing means getting an F. Why would we want our kids to learn to fail?

Our own public school experiences taught us that failing was bad. That’s unfortunate, because the best inventions in the world have come about because of failure. Thomas Edison (the inventor with a record 1,093 patents to his name) once said:

“I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed ‘to find out anything.’ I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of.”

Our world desperately needs innovators to help us solve our problems, yet we coddle our children so they don’t have to feel the sting of failure. Today’s parents write school papers for their kids so they don’t flunk the class; they take over the building of their kids’ Pinewood Derby cars so they don’t lose the race. How can kids figure out what works if we don’t let them find out what doesn’t work first?

In school, kids are taught to avoid failure. But homeschooling parents can give their children the opportunity to fail, and the time to try again and figure out where they went wrong by letting them have real-life experiences where they learn to fail. If their bread fails to rise, they don’t get an F in baking. But they do see the difference in the loaves that result, and they learn to remember the yeast next time they bake bread.

Homeschooled kids also have all the time they need to figure out problems. If they’re getting hung up on a long division problem, they don’t get a red F on their paper, nor are they urged to finish up quickly because math class is almost over. Instead, they can take their time and keep trying to solve the problem until they come up with the correct answer. This gives them confidence in their ability to tackle a problem and stick with it until they solve it, and also teaches them that failure is merely part of the solution process.

Our world needs persistent problem-solvers. Homeschooling is the ideal training ground for them because it gives them the opportunity to learn that failure is something to learn from, not something to fear. It also helps them become confident problem-solvers as well as persistent ones. This is just more evidence that homeschooling is the very best way to prepare our children for a challenging future.

Next: Part 4, College is a Tool, Not a Goal

Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future, Part 2: Raising Eager Learners

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The new economy is a completely different environment from the one our parents and grandparents knew, the one that’s disappearing. It’s no longer the norm for someone to work for one company for 40 years by doing what they’re told and behaving themselves so they can be rewarded with a gold watch and a nice pension. The length of the average job has already dropped to a little over four years.

Workers are laid off on a regular basis. Entire industries become obsolete and disappear, or simply move to the other side of the world where labor is cheaper. Change is coming at us more rapidly than ever, and those who are willing to adapt to these changes by learning new skills will thrive.

To raise children who eagerly learn new skills, we need to give them the opportunity for free exploration, hands-on learning and real-life experiences where they learn to fail. This isn’t easy for us as parents, because we weren’t allowed to learn this way. We went to school, where we were told what to learn, and we had no choice in how we learned it. But we must do better by our children, because they need to be prepared differently than we were.

Free exploration is important for people of all ages, but in our society it seems that only babies are allowed the privilege. They crawl everywhere, chew on new items they discover, and absorb every experience like the little sponges they are. But before long, they’re sucked into the world of school, where their learning is “guided.” Goals are set by educators, and free exploration comes to an end.

How sad and how unnecessary! It seems like we’ve taken a step backwards when it comes to early education by taking away children’s freedom to explore and learn. Today, two-year-olds are put in preschool, but when I was a child, we were free to learn through our play until age five or six. (The public school I lived next to didn’t even offer kindergarten.) And for generations before us, children didn’t go to school until they were older. Among American pioneers of the 1800s, children went to school sporadically if at all. But they learned what they needed to know while working with their parents to set up homesteads in an unfamiliar environment. Pioneer travels were the ultimate free exploration.

Homeschooling gives children the time and opportunity to learn through free exploration, if their parents don’t force them into the public-school-method learning mode. The children of today who are free to read what interests them, explore computers, and learn about the world by visiting museums and other sites of interest will be tomorrow’s eager lifelong learners.

Hands-on learning is the primary way babies learn, and used to be the way everyone learned. But the pervasive influence of school turned us toward attending classes and reading books as the preferred way of learning. (There’s nothing wrong with reading books, but some subjects cannot be learned by merely reading about them. There’s a huge difference between reading a recipe and actually baking the cake.) And of course, since schools contain large numbers of children, hands-on learning experiences are minimized because they’re so cumbersome.

But this is another area where homeschooling shines. Homeschooled kids can learn with their hands every day. They bake, paint, build and create whenever they feel inspired. Logistics don’t allow this to happen in school. Think about it: there’s a big difference between the mess created by a couple of siblings finger-painting and 35 school kids finger-painting. So finger-painting happens at home a lot more than it does at school, and it’s usually initiated by the kids’ desire to finger-paint, not a directive on the teacher’s lesson plan.

Kids who work with their hands all the time not only learn better, but also become accustomed to being creative. If there’s anything we’re going to need to solve our formidable economic and technological problems in this world, it’s creativity!

Next: Part 3, Why Your Child Needs to Fail