What Your Family Doesn't Get YET About Homeschooling
& Why You Want To Anyway
There is nothing easy about homeschooling.
It’s not easy to be both parent and teacher on a daily basis. It’s not easy navigating how to maintain both your home and adequate income. It’s not easy doing something different from what your loved ones think you should be doing.
It’s also not easy to trust your child to a system that is not working as promised.
Life as we know it has shifted in such dramatic ways we can feel the spin. Just search YouTube for “the truth about modern education” and you’ll find endless summaries, with Sir Ken Robinson’s1 among the most widely viewed TedTalks, Changing Education Paradigms. It’s no longer about what you know, it’s about how you learn.
Your parents likely had a fair amount of unsupervised outdoor play time roaming many miles, while your kids or grandkids are barely more than a few feet out of sight, often with access to who-knows-what in the virtual world. In only three generations, we’re marrying people across the world from where we grew up, doing business without ever leaving our homes, and yet… today’s mainstream schools cannot save our kids.
When I left the public school system in an early retirement (just prior to the covid debacle), I was discouraged with the thought that I had spent decades expending life energy into a system that lacked sincerity or integrity. It was my own feeling that so much time was being wasted in an eight hour day that consisted mainly of managing children.
There was very little joy.
Children weren’t happy, teachers weren’t happy, parents weren’t happy.
Add to this the politics that have crept into our school systems as well as the confusion that career oriented adults within the system seem to have about what the outcome of the product (our children) should be, and it became too much for me to continue.
What I have concluded in the last several years is that the public school system is not the place to begin a healing for humanity. The place for healing begins at the beginning - with the incubation of the family unit. Great teachers (no matter how good they are), and strong curriculum can’t heal a broken nation.
This movement of young parents who, for whatever reason, have decided that it is their charge to instill values and morals and lessons of life into their children is what it will take to create strong leaders for a better tomorrow.
- Jennifer Moore, SkyGarden Play Group
You might not have the support from family and friends you wish you had, but you get to decide what you want and what you’re willing to take on. Homeschooling is one wave, but there is also a growing movement to form local community groups and micro-schools. If you start now, you can find people like you to lock arms with. Maybe you’ll find someone’s retired grandmother to host a stay and play program like Jennifer’s.
“Parents are expected to shadow their children, but seldom do they engage with them. Instead, they visit with each other while watching their children. This time of socialization for both children and parents has proven to be one of the most salient aspects of the playgroup. During this time, parents form bonds that extend beyond the backyard of our playgroup. They discuss ideas and concerns with each other. They share successes. They discuss their experiences with different curricula. They plan and schedule playdates. They organize and go on fieldtrips with each other. They may stay at the SkyGarden for a season or two, but their friendships continue.”
If you need inspiration for what a playgroup program could look like in your community, check out The SkyGarden or The Meadowsweet Year by Caroline Acworth.
If you need to dig into the world of homeschooling to find your courage, check out my series about homeschooling:
All the Ways to Homeschool: Why Homeschool the Waldorf Way? (Part One)
The Ways of Waldorf Homeschooling: Why Homeschool the Waldorf Way, An Education for Our Times (Part Two)
Named one of Time/Fortune/CNN’s ‘Principal Voices’, acclaimed by Fast Company magazine as one of “the world’s elite thinkers on creativity and innovation”, and was ranked in the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top business thinkers.