You’re doing WHAT?!

My daughter isn’t going to 4-year-old kindergarten. She didn’t go to 3-year-old preschool either, but it seems the longer we keep her at home, the more shocked people are and the judgement from the world seems to sting that little bit more. Apparently, the way we are parenting our children is quite radical by today’s standards, and our determination to avoid the broken and unnatural structure of our modern society is regarded as preposterous by many. I am not surprised when people think we are crazy for even considering homeschooling. After all, we have been discipled by the system to believe that school is absolutely necessary. It’s just something we do. Everybody goes to school, we need school. We need it for socialisation, we need it to get a job, we need it for healthy development – the list of ‘requirements’ goes on. But when you begin to discover that all of these things are actually complete misconceptions, it makes you question why you would just go along with what everybody else does just because.

I thought I’d pen a blog post to explain how this all began.

Not long ago, we attended an open day for the kindergarten my daughter was, at that point, enrolled in. Afterwards, I went home in tears. The outdoor play area was a dirty concrete jungle with a few broken old toys – I remember thinking of our beautiful big backyard at home which is full of nature, wildlife, a cubby, and more. The facility’s indoor space was just as underwhelming. The educators were unwelcoming and stand-offish, struggling to explain their educational program. They seemed to care little about the children’s needs and more about how how convenient things were for the adults – a common theme in today’s culture. I could go on about everything I witnessed that truly made my stomach sink (I won’t list them all here, but feel free to ask me about some of the very questionable things I saw) but basically, the whole experience felt off.

Obviously, I know this is an anomaly. I know there are lovely kindergartens. I’ve seen them – the beautiful green outdoor areas, nature play, crafts, books, and welcoming and caring teachers. I have fond memories of kindergarten as a child! But sadly, this was not one of them. Nevertheless, even though this experience may have been out of the ordinary, it was something that prompted us to think more deeply about education and it brought us to where we are now.

In the days following, I made some phone calls to try and enroll in different kinders, but we were too late. We were added to some waiting lists but we wouldn’t get a place – the only spots left were at kindergartens that offered 7.5 hour days. There was no way I was going to send my little one, who has only been on this planet for four years, to endure such structured and institutionalised days away from her family as long as an adult’s work day. And so it was decided that she would not be going to kindergarten.

It was then that I started looking into getting our kids involved in some local activities and groups as an alternative to kinder. In our community, there are plenty of homeschool co-ops and groups. After joining them I was amazed at what these unschooled children were doing – book clubs, nature walks, science experiments, incursions, art shows, market days, collaborative online lessons, and more. These kids were absolutely thriving without school! I decided to do some research. In Australia, homeschooled children perform better than school students in every single standardised assessment. They also have more university degrees than their peers (and yes, I’m hyperlinking to real research here). In fact, in some parts of the world, they have staff members dedicated purely to recruiting homeschooled students for scholarships because they are often the best performing and most engaged students in tertiary education courses. Growing up, my piano teacher was one of my biggest inspirations. She had been homeschooled, and she was one of the smartest, most brilliant people I knew – she had a smattering of qualifications on her wall, she performed in concerts and orchestras, she was kind and funny and a great teacher. She impacted lives. I recently managed to get in touch with her again, and she’s now homeschooling her own children who are also flourishing. The statistics (and anecdotes!) may be surprising but incredibly clear about the benefits of homeschooling.

“But what about socialisation?” The question that everybody asks and I can guarantee you are thinking. Well, according to various studies, homeschooled children are happier, more socially engaged, and experience less behavioural problems than public school students. My daughter loves her weekly Sunday School class where she works with teachers and primary aged students to read stories, complete activities and plan for a special presentation performed at the end of the year. She attends a fortnightly multi-age playgroup (including homeschool families) where she learns from the older children and feels proud when she is able to teach and help the younger toddlers. We have recently enrolled her in a local creative arts school that has its own special uniform and runs weekly classes in different age groups. She plays with her little brother endlessly, she learns modelled behaviour from the adults around her, she’s always the one to make friends at the park. She engages in so much natural socialisation – not artificial and engineered in a classroom – but the organic kind of socialisation that happened for thousands of years before school as we know it existed. In addition to this, these regular structured activities mean that, contrary to popular stereotypes about children who don’t go to kindergarten or daycare or school, she does indeed know how to sit and listen to someone when required, follow rules and expectations, and be in a group environment. The children I’ve observed in our local homeschool co-ops and groups are participating in far more socialisation than any children I’ve seen in my ten years of teaching in public schools.

After researching and discovering all of this I began asking myself: Why wouldn’t I want this for my child? What if we didn’t just keep her at home for her preschool years, but for some of her school years as well? The public schools around us are underwhelming, and the whole system in general is unfortunately suffering an ongoing decline. To afford private education, I would have to go back to work full-time to teach other people’s children, in order to pay to have mine be taught by someone else – ridiculous, right? If, as a family, we could make this work, why wouldn’t we choose what could be such a wonderful and beneficial educational path for our children? Yes, with any big decision, sacrifices have to be made. But I can tell you I’m more than comfortable with letting go of meaningless things that fade with this world (money, social status, possessions) in order to forge a life full of things that actually matter.

It’s the path that goes against every grain of our society that tells us we have to do life in a certain way. It’s a decision that is perceived as outlandish and foolish, and before reaching this season of my life I probably would have thought the same. It’s a decision that we wouldn’t make unless it was something we care deeply about, because we know we will be fighting off constant worldly attacks for our choice.

Does this mean I’m opposed to school and families that send their children to school? Not at all! There are some wonderful schools, and we have found many which are a little bit too far from us or just not affordable. What I do believe is that most parents know, care for and love their children more than anyone else in the world and they are capable of making decisions to shepherd them in a way that they believe is right for their family. There is no uniform way to go about life and it is okay to do things unconventionally or to veer from the path that most people just feel they have to stay on because that’s what everybody just does.

We still don’t know what our future holds. Our little one won’t be spending her kindergarten year at kindergarten. As for the year after, her first official school year, we may decide to homeschool – or something else might present itself. If we do decide to homeschool, how long for? Will it be a few years, or a significant part of our children’s education? We don’t know yet – circumstances change! But we do know that this is a serious consideration and conviction of ours that we feel called to live out.

I will leave this first blog post with the following David Gutterson quote, and if you are interested, I urge you to look into the history of institutionalised education, where it all began, and what its initial purpose was. Human beings were sustained by what was essentially home education for thousands of years – school as we know it is a rather recent concept in history. We are designed to live in families and be with our children, and it’s okay to want to do that – even if society is telling you that you’re wrong.

From a historical perspective it is possible to assert that these children are no mere oddity. Homeschoolers are not eccentrics and cranks but keepers of an educational tradition that sustained human beings for thousands of years, as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Compulsory schools, on the other hand, are a relatively recent phenomenon. A modern educational experiment whose results, thus far, are not particularly encouraging. Their failures result in large degree from the neglect of two long-standing historical truths: that parents are natural educators and that family life is crucial to educational success.

David Gutterson