One of my fondest memories of home schooling is seeing three of my children at these small desks we bought for them, my wife at the blackboard giving spelling words and my youngest child riding on her hip.  The youngest actually remembers riding on her mother’s hip during school.  Cute.

This is the time of year that many state organizations are having their conventions and curriculum fairs.  By typing in the state you live in and looking for home school organizations in a search engine, you can usually come up with their web page.

Here are a couple of examples:

• http://washhomeschool.org/    WHO   State of Washington
• https://www.ochec.com/  OCHEC        State of Oklahoma

There are a great many resources available on line listed below:

• http://cathyduffyreviews.com/

Cathy Duffy is a homeschooling mom who has been doing curriculum reviews and speaking at home school conventions for over 20 years.

• http://www.home-school.com/  Official website of the Practical Home School magazine by Mary Pride, another pioneer homeschooling mom.
• http://thepioneerwoman.com/homeschooling/free-online-educational-resources/

For those of you who follow The Pioneer Woman, she also teaches her children at home and her website is a good resource.

• https://www.homeschool-life.com/610/custom/12412

This website gives a list of different educational philosophies used in homeschooling:

• Traditional approach
• The Classical Approach
• The Unit Study Approach
• The Charlotte Mason Approach
• The Unschooling Approach
• The Eclectic Approach

Mary Pride on her website also has these additional types.

•  Textbook/workbook
•  Independent Online
•  Online Academy
•  Traditional distance learning
•  Software – Based
•  DVD – Based
•  Mentor – Based

Although many people use varying approaches to schooling and curriculum, here are some of the curriculum that my wife likes.

•  KONOS Unit studies
•  Making Math Meaningful
•  Math-U-See
•  Teaching Text Books for Math   (They start at 3^rd grade and go pre-calculus)
•  The Writing Road to Reading (Good for the prevention of developing dyslexia)
•  The Little House on the Prairie
•  Exploring Creation   http://www.apologia.com/187-k-6th-grade
•  Understanding the Times http://understandingthetimes.com/

(For High School – Gives a Biblical synopsis of the major world views) Excellent for learning how to see beyond the surface for the underlying goals of the views)

She used a lot of “living” books (good literature) (library — for books about people, science topics like clouds to insects to animals, etc.

She liked the Bible for character development and also Proverbs for Parenting.

She also likes Rush Limbaugh’s books on history.

My wife tried to get their studies done early enough in the day so they could read together in the afternoons.  I remember coming home in the winter time and all the kids are trying to sit on her lap at once as she reads from historical fiction (a great way to learn history and keep their interest).  The dog on the floor and a fire in the fireplace. Quite a nice sight

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeschooled_people

Just as an aside there are some very famous people in history that were schooled at home as the Wikipedia site above sets out such as many of our Founding Fathers and US Presidents.  Just so you know, you are in good company.

During our entire home school adventure, we belonged to HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) https://www.hslda.org/.  They are an excellent organization and they fight for the rights of parents in the United States to be able to teach their children at home. They will also defend you against legal charges brought against you as a result of homeschooling. They will keep you up to date as to what is going on in your state legislature in regards to home school laws.  They are a great ally for home schoolers and a formidable foe to the left leaning socialists.

When our youngest child graduated from our home school called Morning Star Christian Academy. We named it so when people asked our kids, “Where do you go to school?” They could say, “Morning Star Christian Academy.” Then the questioner would say, “Wow, I have never heard of that one.” Sharon could respond, “It is a small private school!”  Saved a lot of explaining!

So at the graduation of our youngest, we are on stage with our daughter giving her the diploma and my son-in-law comes down out of the audience with a dozen roses.  Everyone thought they were for my daughter. He handed them to me, and I gave them to my wife and very loudly said to her, “Thanks!” Then to the audience I said “After 22 years, we are done! We are outta’ here.” I was so proud of and thankful for my wife for her perseverance.

Homeschooling has been normal for teaching children for about 5,000 years until the last 150 years. Now we are told it takes a degree in teaching to teach and do it right.  What it really takes is parents that love their child, and then that parent can step back into the traditions of thousands of years.  Moses was most likely taught by his mother as was Samuel and the baby Jesus to name a few.

I will leave you with this from God’s Word:

Deuteronomy11:18-21a Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand,that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.  And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.  And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:  That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children.

Quite a few years ago my oldest daughter got her first job at a SONIC restaurant.  After about two weeks, she came home one night and said, “I now understand why you homeschooled us.  All the kids at work smoke, drink, have sex and half the girls are pregnant.”

But let me back up a bit.  There are many concerns that people have about homeschooling. Here are some of the ones we ran across:

1. Socialization: People will tell you or you might be apprehensive about your child being properly socialized.  One of Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries defines socialize as: to fit or train for a social environment — to participate actively in a social group.

It has been believed for many years that a child’s personality is pretty well set by the time they are five years old.  There is a good possibility that that occurred because the child was put into a government school at five.  The child then changed his role model from his parents to — not his teachers – but his peers.

What does a child learn from his peers today?  Drinking, drugs, bullying and a great many other bad habits.  We decided to keep ourselves as the role models until our children had hopefully matured to the point they were not so subject to peer pressure.

2. Education/degree: Many people believe that unless you are trained as a teacher in a college you are not qualified to teach your own children. You would not be qualified even if you have a college degree but not a teaching degree.

Who has taught this child for the first 5 years?  YOU!  School is just the next step in the process.  Think about it.  If the subject is so complicated you, being 30 years old, cannot explain it to a 5 year old then it is too complicated altogether.  You start with the alphabet not physics.  You as the parent/teacher learn right along with your child.

Many people have said that by the time they were done teaching their children, they finally got the education they should have gotten when they (the parent) went to school.

You can do it if you are interested.

Sharon has no college degree and if you read her high school transcript it is sad.  Her counselor figured she would never go to college because of her family. So the counselor had her take general math, sewing, home economics, study hall, gym.  No science or higher math at all.

She learned right along with the kids. They studied chemistry, made rockets they blew off in the park, took algebra, etc.  One day I came home from work and Sharon said, “You have got to see this!”  She fetched an entire beef heart she had gotten from a butcher.  They had dissected it, and she was showing me how the blood moved through the heart. She was more excited than the kids were.  Learning together!

4. Patience. Some believe they do not have the patience to teach their own children. There are many different methods of instruction. In some the parent is highly involved and some methods not so much.  We will discuss methods in a later blog.  But for now, the love you have in your heart for your child will go a long ways in helping you teach your children.
5. Sacrifice. I have been in the homes of many people over the years.  One lady told me her son was not really ready for kindergarten, but he had to go anyway.  She was a school teacher.  I asked her why she did not stay home and teach the boy herself.  “We could not live in this house and neighborhood and have these things if I did not work, too.”  So the boy went to a government school.  Sacrificed on the altar of material possessions. Sad.
6. Self confidence can be a stumbling block for some. Just remember that your love for your children will more than make up for any deficiency in your teaching.  If you teach them how to learn, they can always go look up what they may have missed.
7. Peer Pressure. Families can bring much pressure to bear on a family that wants to homeschool. It works much better if both parents are on board with the idea. Sometimes husbands are not into the home education thing at all. If your wife wants to home school, she needs you to back her up. You have a jewel there.  Defend her to all comers.
8. Money. Some are concerned that it will cost too much. Well, how much do school lunches cost, clothes and all the other expenses involved in a public school?  I suspect they are about equal. There is a rumor out that President Trump is proposing to let the money for education follow the child including homeschooling.  That would be incredible.  Call your legislature!

Things your children won’t learn.

I used to listen to local talk radio and news quite a bit.  One day our school district was having a problem in that they were trying to teach their students how to get better grades on their tests, but the complaint of the school was that the fundamentalist Christians were interfering.  When the method was explained, the reason for the interference was obvious. The school was teaching the children how to use spirit guides to get the answers to tests.  The school did not call the method using spirit guides but once it was explained it was obvious.  I will not give the details here for obvious reasons.  At another time they were teaching auto-hypnotization for relaxation and improvement on test scores. Yet another time the football coach in part of the south metro was trying to teach his football players fire walking to improve their test scores.

Once a kid has heard these methods, how do you un-teach them what they have heard?  It would be simpler to avoid the BS altogether.

Additional thoughts — Things we considered before we began.

• There are a great many benefits to teaching your own children. Consider this: in a class of 30 children, how many questions per day do you expect your child can get answered if they do not understand? If the teacher answered one question per child in an hour, that would take up almost half the class time.

Yet in a home environment the conversation can be back and forth all day which is very similar to           being tutored all the way thru school.  The learning can be much accelerated.

• In a government school the children are grouped together by age. Rarely will your child find a situation or job where everyone is his same age. In a homeschool the child lives all day every day with people of different ages, much like they will have to do the rest of their life. They learn to cope with them all.

It is not uncommon for children in a family not to want to be seen, or hang out with their siblings.  In school many times the younger kids are shunned by the older kids.  Many times a homeschooled family makes a much tighter family.

• When we started homeschooling our state universities said publically that they would not recognize home school diplomas. But by the time our kids graduated from high school that attitude had changed.

I met a lady on one job that had about five kids in the home.  I asked her about that because it was a school day.  She told me her husband was a professor at Oklahoma University (OU).  He came home one day and told her: those homeschooled kids are polite, come to class on time, have their work done on time, are respectful and are really good students.  He said you are going to teach ours at home.  So the attitude has changed quite a bit.

• Homeschooling can give you free evenings because your kids get their work done during the day.
• You can also take vacations whenever you want, and teach the kids in the car or the hotel or wherever. It could even be a field trip!
• Another advantage of having your children with you all the time is immediate correction of inappropriate behavior. This won’t happen in a government school.
• Unless you decide to, there is no labeling in a homeschool. No one is labeled ADD or ADHD or any kind of special needs child.  They are all students and they learn at different speeds and levels.
• In the 1970’s homeschooling was virtually nonexistent, but according to NHERI (National Home Education Research Institute) it has grown to about 2 million students per year. So you won’t be the only one.  There are probably many people right around you doing the same thing.
• In most homeschools vaccinations are optional!
• You can teach your child to study on their own at a very early age, which will be a great benefit to them if they decide to go to college.

( I had a government school teacher tell me one time that high school students were not mature enough to study on their own, that they needed a professional teacher to be able to instruct them and help them through high school.  I asked what switch the students had built into them so that the next year in college they were able to study on their own.  I told her our kids learned to self study early on, and that really helped them when they went to college.)

• In a homeschool environment, you can individualize the curriculum and instruction to each child. Many children do much better with that kind of care than in a one size fits all class of 30 kids.
• You can pick your own curriculum.
• You can make your study Bible centered.
• You can have the kids do service work in homeless shelters, retirement centers, etc.
• They can experience real life situations.

Just remember that government schools are run by the same people that run the VA hospitals, the post office and that take care of the Indians only on a local level.  And they are staffed by union members.

You as a parent, even without a college education can certainly do at least as well.

If you choose to homeschool, pray a lot and ask God to lead you, teach you, and guide you, pray for your children and for your spouses that make the money for you to stay home and have all the fun learning with your children.

These two blogs have hopefully shown that if you are interested in homeschooling, it is something that you can do, and that there are a great many advantages for you and your children if you choose this route.

Homeschooling is not the answer for everyone.  But hopefully, this gives you some food for thought.

Thinking is part of the Prosperous Life.

President Trump’s new Secretary of Education, Ms. Betsy DeVos is proposing school choice and vouchers and is not opposed to homeschooling. She has helped keep school choice in the news.

About 35 years ago Sharon and I began to entertain the idea of teaching our children at home.   I was listening to Paul Harvey one day and he said, “The federal government estimates that there are about 100,000 families in the United States that teach their children at home rather than sending them to a public or private school.”  I thought, “WOW; I could get interested in that very quickly.”  And thus began our journey.

I asked everyone I saw about this idea of homeschooling and kept coming up with blanks until one lady said: “I don’t do that, but my dentist’s wife does.”  I talked to the dentist’s wife and got a list of books to start on for information.

The books did not talk about homeschooling specifically, but they did address many of the current problems in public or government schools.

Beside Ms. DeVos keeping schooling in the news, the state of West Virginia just proposed legislation that would ban homeschooling, calling it child abuse.  It has since been pulled by the senator who authored it.  http://www.newstarget.com/2017-03-26-bill-in-west-virginia-would-ban-homeschooling-treat-it-as-child-abuse.html

Here is a piece from the article:

An increasing number of parents have decided to homeschool their kids or place them in homeschool communities for various reasons, including health concerns for the child, bullying,         religion, and objections to the common core curriculum taught in public schools. For the schools, the real concerns over the child boil down to dollar signs. As reported by One News Now, in 2014 it was estimated that West Virginia public schools were losing nearly $12,000 of funding per student. Not willing to take such a substantial loss, that same year Ritchie County Superintendent of Schools Ed Toman forced his staff to contact the residences and places of employment of homeschool parents in an attempt to bully them into putting their children back in public schools. During the calls, parents were questioned about their ability to teach their children and asked a series of questions including, “What can we do to get your kids back in school?”  Some families were also guilt-tripped when they decided to meet with school counselors at the beginning of the school year and told that their choice to homeschool could result in teachers losing their job

Many times in life, if you look deep enough you will see that the root problem is MONEY.  Because this topic of schooling keeps coming up and because it is something I have been highly involved in for many years, I decided to write about it here.

Now back to the books the dentist’s wife recommended to me.  The first one was NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education  by Samuel L. Blumenfeld.

He points out that public education is a very recent development when it comes to history. For thousands of years people took care of educating their children themselves, paid tutors, parents, grandparents, or local schools.  In the 1800’s a German Kaiser lost a battle because his soldiers either refused his orders or disobeyed them. So when he came home he founded “public schools” in Germany – a place where people “would learn to obey orders and not ask questions.” Interesting.

About that time the socialists in America were looking for a way to change our capitalistic society into a socialist society.  The most well known of these progressives was John Dewy, the father of public education in the United States. Yes, John Dewey and his cohorts were socialists.

But public education by itself was not enough. They needed to get control of what the teachers were taught to complete the transformation.  So they set out to get their (socialist) people in positions of influence in the teacher’s colleges.  Obviously, they were very successful.

This is why now over 90% of all professors are left wing Democrats (Socialists).  It is also why in the 1950’s a book was published called Why Johnny Can’t Read:…  The author found that even though we had no national education policy in the United States, the NEA (National Education Association) dictated to the publishers what the content was to be in the books if their union members were to buy from the publishers. For instance, they wanted spelling to be taught by the “Look – Say Method” (memorization) rather than phonics. People that can’t read are easily led.  Ideal for a strategy to lead us into socialism.

The book NEA, The Trojan Horse…  also lays out many of the quotes from their annual meetings that are disgusting such as “We have the right of eminent domain over a child’s mind.”  Read it for yourself.

The next book she recommended was Who Owns the Children by Blair Adams and Joel Stein.  The picture on the cover about says it all.  Two small girls were being escorted from their home by the State because their parents were abusing them as children.  The abuse? Homeschooling!  These girls tested well above their grade level, but it was considered abuse by the state of Ohio because homeschooling was not sanctioned by the state.

The book uses court cases to show that in the United States parents can only parent at the pleasure of the state.  If you violate the state’s requirements as a parent, your children are forfeited.  In other words, parenting is a privilege granted by the state, not a right because you birthed them.  It was first published in 1983. This is very interesting to read also in light of mandatory vaccinations.

The last of the three books is called Child Abuse in the Classroom written by the late Phyllis Schlafly.  On Amazon here is the first review of the book.

 It was very hard to believe that the kinds of things written about were actually going on in the public   schools until my children started telling me that many of these things were going on in their school. Mrs. Schlafly correctly characterized these things as child abuse, & she couldn’t have chosen a better title for this book. I pulled my kids out of school & finished their schooling at home as a result of what I read in this book & what went on in their school. Although the book came out in June of 1984, the public school     system has changed very little in the interim because the system has found a way to circumvent the Hatch  Amendment. My granddaughter is a 3rd grader and her mother & I aren’t at all happy with many of the things being done in her school in the guise of education. She will most likely be schooled at home before all is said & done. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about their children’s education.

The book is edited testimony given in a few major cities in the United States about the psychological abuse of students, which at the time was against the law.  The Hatch Amendment said it was illegal to use federal funds for the psychological manipulation of children.

The book is the record of representatives of large groups of people telling the federal government Department of Education (mostly stocked with union members) of the psychological abuse in the classroom by their teachers.

When I read some of these records to my wife as she cooked supper, she just stood there and cried.  I doubt it has gotten better since 1984.

These three books were instrumental in us beginning our journey of homeschooling.

The Bible says some about teaching your children also.

Deuteronomy11:18-21a  Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.  And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.  And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:  That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, …

 We decided it was best for our lives to teach our children ourselves.  I understand this is not an option for everyone, but if you want to know more, in the next couple of blogs we will talk about what motivates parents to homeshcool and the resources available to homeschool teachers.

Please give us some feedback as in questions or comments in the email box below, and we will put them up here.

Homeschooling is part of what we considered a Prosperous Life.