Reflections on Homeschooling (14 Years Later)

I was elected secretary of the Hook Spy Agency that we formed with our friends. We never solved a case, but at least we had desks!

 Most of you know (or could quickly guess, if you met me) that I was homeschooled. From preschool to my senior year, my mom was my primary teacher, and I learned alongside my two older brothers and younger sister. We had a formal set-up for most of those years, with designated classes on the hour, although in high school I switched to a more free-form structure that simply required a certain number of credit hours, which I completed on my own time. I graduated a year early and launched myself into the unconventional life that I find myself living today.

As a kid I absorbed the rhetoric, very popular in the religious homeschooling crowd in the 90's, that homeschooling was by default the best way to educate kids (although my parents steered me away from the more conservative homeschoolers who insisted that it was the only way). As I grew older and heard others' experiences about private and public school, though, I began to realize that homeschooling is just one option among many— and not an option that works for the majority of families. (Obviously a lot of students have been "schooling from home" during the pandemic, but this is a very different set-up from most homeschool situations.) I came to appreciate the variety of options available and watched many friends (including former homeschool parents) thrive when they sent their kids to private or public school. (And this doesn't even touch the very valid concerns about homeschooling in an insular nuclear-family setting without accountability, which I don't have time to get into here.)

With all that said, though, I feel glad about how homeschooling has shaped my life, both during the years that I was schooled and in the decade and a half since my unofficial graduation. Although many of these benefits can be chalked up to my parents' influence that would've existed regardless of my schooling type, a lot of these concepts were intensified or amplified by the experience of learning from my parents at home.

So, how did growing up as a Midwestern homeschooled 90s kid affect me— both good and bad? Here are some effects that I've been pondering lately.

1. Predictably, I wasn't exposed to many different perspectives or kinds of people. 

Especially in the 90s, homeschoolers were overwhelmingly white, Christian, and politically/theologically conservative, and since most of my social circles were other homeschoolers (most notably a fine arts school where I took chamber ensemble, orchestra, choir and drama), I wasn't exposed to many new ideas or ways of thinking. 

My parents made an effort to help us see different sides of issues and to stay open-minded (for instance, during the huge "Six-Day Creation/Young Earth" phase of the early 2000s they taught us the Creationist curriculum but had many discussions about how you could still be a Christian and believe in evolution), but I didn't have any serious challenges to my viewpoints until I started traveling when I was 20. 

Fortunately, because of my parents' emphasis on multiple perspectives, I was willing to change my mind, and didn't feel like everything must come crashing down if I changed my viewpoint on a single issue. Still, I had a lot of catching up to do in my 20s to make up for the lack of diversity, and I've significantly changed my views on many things, but this is just part of the learning process. (And, honestly, I might have had to go through this kind of mind-opening even if I had attended public school in my 90% white hometown.)

Only 90's kids remember...

2. I still feel an incredible internal pressure to be perceived as both smart and socially adept. 

Missouri in the 90s was a fine place to be a homeschooler, but my mom knew people in other states who had had family members call social services on them for homeschooling their kids. One family she interviewed for a book had been arrested at gunpoint, and had their kids interrogated on math and science facts. 

Although I never actively worried that Mom and Dad would be arrested (homeschooling was legal in Missouri, after all), in the back of my head I felt the pressure to appear smart and sociable to avoid getting my parents in trouble. On one hand, extended family members, friends, and even practical strangers like my orthodontist would often ask me random academic questions to "test" me; on the other hand, people would assume I was a child genius and act disappointed if us kids watched cartoons or did something else that wasn't "educational." On top of that, I was an extremely shy kid desperately trying to not come off as the "weirdo homeschooler." The social pressure honestly wasn't that frequent, but it happened often enough that I grew up hyper-aware of others' perception of me, which I still deal with.

3. I learned to distrust authorities and the status quo. 

Sure, we obeyed our parents like the good Christian kids we were, but it's really hard to be a homeschooler without a certain underlying suspicion of/disdain for the status quo. We learned, both implicitly and explicitly, to pick apart what the authorities were telling us, whether that was the importance of trusting experts, the theory of evolution, or the values of what made life meaningful.

This had upsides and downsides. On one hand, a lot of parents leveraged this distrust into very specific channels— scapegoating all societal ills to "the liberals," "the media," "the gay agenda," "the godless evolutionists," etc. (this is common in all conservative circles, of course, but its effects are amplified in homeschool families where the feedback loop can often continue uninterrupted by outside sources). It was common to present the entire world as being ungodly, harmful, broken, and dangerous, and that the only safety was found in the (conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical) church and, especially, the nuclear family. There is a whole lot of toxicity there that is all too common in homeschool circles.

On the flip side, though, homeschooling by its very nature created a discordant note in that authoritative "us vs. them" structure, even one governed by allegiance to father, pastor, and God: distrust of "the way things should be" was so ingrained that many homeschooled kids quickly turned to questioning the very authorities telling them to distrust "those other authorities"! This sure upset a lot of parents, but to me it's not a surprising outcome.

In my particular family, distrust of authority was discussed and reinforced in a mostly healthy way: my parents encouraged us to, for instance, question our pastor's theology, analyze the emotionally-manipulative goals of TV ads, and pick apart the political promises in the vote-for-me mailings common during election years.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but all in all, I chalk up many of my life decisions to defying the mainstream that told me I had to go to college, pursue a career, consume mindlessly, pick up a side hustle, and be a self-sufficient individualistic American. I knew I had other options, because my education had been divergent from the status quo from the beginning.

Me pretending to like the piano. I actually mostly hated it until about a decade later, when I returned to my parents and thanked them profusely for forcing me to stick with it.

4. I learned to value leisure. 

This is certainly not true of all or even most homeschoolers, but my family placed a huge priority on unstructured play time: until high school, we finished school at noon and just had an hour or two of "homework" to do on our own time in the afternoon, leaving us most of the day to run around in the woods out back, build forts, swing on my tire swing, argue with each other, draw pictures, play house in the honeysuckle bushes, go bird-watching, sing songs, pick flowers, hang out with the neighbors, do our daily chores, and, in my case, "pretend" (my first form of writing: walking around telling myself stories). Sometimes I would feel a little guilty that we got out of school so much earlier than our Catholic-school-educated neighbors (although it was balanced by my martyred attitude during snow days, which we didn't get, and during summer when we were still doing schoolwork, albeit on a lighter schedule). But all in all, I considered leisure, large amounts of free time, and my own activities, such as storytelling and making art, as essential components of my day. 

School was important— and, being a fast reader and a self-driven perfectionist, I was quite good at it and enjoyed it— but my "down time" was just as real and important to me. I'm honestly only now starting to realize what a gift that has been in my life, and the way it has affected my life choices. I live my life best when I value both work and play, not divided into "important" work and "frivolous" leisure. Taking walks, baking bread, editing papers, dumpster-diving, making art, reading books, sweeping the floors: it's all part of the whole. I knew it as a kid, and that made it easier to embrace as an adult.

5. I learned to learn.

My parents were adamant about teaching us how to learn: they used a variety of teaching methods and told us over and over that they just wanted to equip us to learn things for ourselves. We were encouraged to figure out what methods made ideas and information "stick" with us. I quickly learned that reading was my go-to method; my other siblings absorbed things best by listening to Mom reading aloud, or by watching educational videos. (These days, with the number of educational YouTube channels, learning apps, and so on, it boggles my mind how much more accessible different forms of education have become!) Sometimes I smile when I'm at the library checking out a massive stack of books about permaculture or food sovereignty or economic theory— because I'm using the exact same method that I used as a kid to learn about ancient Egypt or terrarium building. I learned early on how I best learn, and it's served me well every year since.

6. I learned to follow and embrace my interests. 

We learned all of our subjects through a "unit study" model: every subject was related to the time period we were learning about in history. So for instance, when studying the Revolutionary War, we'd read historical fiction and firsthand accounts, do writing assignments based on that time period, learn about famous scientists, painters and musicians of the time, and so on. This format led me to think about things topically, and to deep-dive into many aspects of a subject at a time— so whenever I got interested in something new, I had an internal sense of how to come at it from different angles. Whether that was origami, birding, or all things pirates, I spent a lot of time and energy following my interests and going through phases in a low-pressure way.

7. I learned to view intelligence in an expansive way. 

Mom and Dad didn't place much emphasis on testing (although we took a test at a local private school once a year to ease their minds), and they always taught us that tests, reading ability, or any academic benchmark was not a measure of your intelligence. Although I always enjoyed the rush of getting a good score on our yearly test, I internalized very early that this was because I was skilled at testing. It was like being good at drawing or having a penchant for music or math coming easily: it didn't indicate that I was good at all the subjects, nor did it prove that I was well-rounded or intelligent. It was just a game that I happened to be good at. 

As someone who tends toward perfectionism, I can imagine how easily I could've tied up my self-worth with my academic success (and indeed, I still have trouble doing things if I'm not automatically good at them), but I appreciate the expansive definition of intelligence that my parents instilled in me through my education.

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Honestly, I still feel like I'm "homeschooling." I visit the library, I follow my interests, I try new skills, I spend time playing in the dirt, and I don't measure my success by outer benchmarks. Whether traveling out of a backpack, touring with a band, or spending six months hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I have treated life as a grand experiment with no set formula for success or happiness. The way of life that I internalized as a kid has served me well ever since.

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What was your schooling experience like? What would you do differently if you could?

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