Tag Archives: homeschooling

Taking Carschooling to the Extreme

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Imagine traveling in your vintage 1928 auto all over the world. Imagine having four kids (born in four different countries) during the course of your travels. Imagine homeschooling them while you travel.

Impossible? No: the Zapp family has done so for the past 11 years, living out of their car or staying with strangers most of the time. They homeschool their children using curriculum from an online school, but their children’s real education comes from meeting people and seeing the sights in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and most recently, the Far East.

They tried settling down in Mrs. Zapp’s homeland of Argentina, but only lasted a few weeks before they gave in to the urge to be back on the road again.

Check out this article ; there are some great photos and a map that vividly illustrates just how far this young family with wanderlust has traveled.

Children and Television Viewing

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How do you feel about letting your children watch television?

I have to admit, my feelings have changed over the years. When I was a young parent, I only let my kids watch “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers.” The rest of the time they played: in their rooms, in the living room, in the yard and at the park. VCRs were still new and expensive; we rented one once in a while so that we could watch a movie, and we often rented an old Disney movie for the kids.  But that was the limit of our children’s television viewing. We didn’t even buy a color television until 1989; even then we bought a tiny one, hoping its size would keep the kids from becoming addicted.

Then we had more kids. I found that homeschooling the older kids was a lot easier if the little ones had a video to watch. Yes, it was on the tiny television, but it kept them glued in one spot for a while so that I didn’t have to worry too much about someone climbing up the kitchen blinds while we worked on long division in the living room. The rest of the time, however, I limited how much television the kids could watch.

By the time we got a bigger television, Continue reading →

History, Homeschooling and the Internet

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I’ve been addicted to reading since I was three years old. I can’t help it, it’s what I do. 

For many years, well into adulthood, I spent several hours each weekend reading the voluminous Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune. But it’s now a shadow of its former self, thanks to the Internet, which is where I do most of my reading these days.

I love having such a variety of interesting things to read. Once in a while, however, I hit on something really good, something someone has written that is so spot-on that I just have to share it with others. And have I got something good to share today.

Prolific writer and economic historian Gary North has written an awesome piece entitled “Public Education is Going Down” that clearly explains how the rise of the Internet is slowly killing public education. His theory is that, thanks to the growing availability of knowledge online at an increasingly lower cost, we parents are regaining the educational control that was lost centuries ago:

Home schooling is a throwback to the fifteenth century. It lets parents choose the content and structure of their children’s education. But it goes far beyond anything available then. One size does not fit all: all parents or all children. There is enormous diversity today, and it is getting even more diverse.

Read the entire article for yourself, and be sure to catch his last line. It made me smile  🙂

Let Girls Be Girls

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One of the greatest blessings of homeschooling for our family is that it let us give our daughters a girlhood.

I think girls in our society are increasingly pressured to be women before they’re ready, which is a very dangerous thing. By raising our girls at home, my husband and I were able to let them become who they were meant to be without the world’s emphasis on becoming Lolita.

I was reminded of how messed up the worldly attitude toward girls has become when I read this article about companies promoting the celebrity lifestyle to young girls, complete with limo rides and fake champagne, tattoos and opportunities to strut their stuff on the catwalk.

Of course, these companies wouldn’t even be in business if it weren’t for parents who pay for these services. And while it’s every parent’s right to make that choice, it’s my right to think they’re fools. The last thing young girls need is to be pushed toward early maturity.

Our girls rode bikes and roller-bladed, played at the park and had fun with their friends outside. They read books, sewed and made crafts, cooked and baked and played with their siblings. It was our goal to give them that kind of life, and it was well worth the sacrifices it took, personally and financially, to have them home all the time instead of going to public school, where the declining morals of our society proliferate like a noxious mold.

Sometimes I had to be the bad guy. I remember one new girl in our neighborhood who became friends with one of our daughters. She was 9 or 10, and greatly delighted to own Janet Jackson’s latest album that included a lot of music with strong sexual references completely inappropriate for young girls. When I found out this girl’s mom was just fine with that music being played by the girls when my daughter visited, I intervened. This did not make me popular. So what? I was trying to protect my daughter’s innocence. I was doing my job.

Things have gotten worse in our culture since then. I’m glad I’m not raising young girls now. The other day I saw a girl of 8 or so trailing along behind her mother in the grocery store. She was busy texting someone and completely oblivious to her surroundings. Just what a little girl needs…..24/7 contact with her peers.

Texting is just one more way that young girls can act like adults today. But they need to have a girlhood first. Surely I’m not the only mom that thinks so….am I?

Schools and Chicken Legislators

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The highway that runs through the town we live in is the one Democratic members of the state legislature took recently when they ran like cowards from the state capitol of Madison to cross the Wisconsin/Illinois border so they wouldn’t have to vote against the teachers’ unions.

That event was still fresh in my mind this morning when I heard on the radio that Indiana legislators are now copying the Wisconsin chickens by crossing the border into Illinois to avoid voting on school vouchers.

How interesting that they’ll go to such lengths because they don’t want parents to be allowed to direct their tax dollars to the educational institutions of their choice.

The reason, of course, is that if all parents were to do that, the already shaky public school system would weaken, private schools would thrive, and homeschoolers would be able to use tax dollars to pay for the cost of homeschooling their children.*

I know many parents would still send tax dollars to the public schools, and that would be their right. It would also force public schools to cut back on the ridiculously high administrative costs they incur; I’m betting that the current $10,000+ per student per year average cost would drop dramatically. And that would be a good thing.

After all, when I was a kid, and we Baby Boomers clogged up schools all over the country, a school could be run with just a principal, a couple of secretaries, a librarian, a gym teacher and a few custodians. Also, there was no huge bloated district office running our school district; just a superintendent with an office staff. Why can’t this happen again? It should happen again, because in this economy, who can afford continually rising property taxes to pay for schools that can’t even teach most kids to read well?

*Personally, I wouldn’t take money from the government to homeschool my kids, because I don’t want them telling me what to teach. But all homeschooling parents should certainly have that option.