veteranhomeschooler

There was a time when homeschool families pulled their curtains shut during the day, kept the children in the house, not even venturing out to play in the yard or run errands in town, for fear of “discovery.” They were the pioneer homeschoolers, daring to break away from a public school system they felt was not serving their children well. And their choices at the time were truly ILLEGAL! They were truly courageous, innovative thinkers who established the right to homeschool that all American citizens in every state now enjoy and benefit from.

Colorado Homeschool organization has put together a very nice “summary” of the early years of home education with some good links to solid information. I especially like the credit they give one of my personal homeschool heros, John Holt. Truly this man can be called the father of home education. Without his innovative teaching methods and his research and insistence that education could be more than rote and drill, homeschooling as we know it would not exist.

If you are truly interested in learning about homeschooling as a cultural and social phenomenon, begin with reading the works of John Holt in the late 1970’s, early 80’s. For me, as a homeschooling mother, his schooling ideas formed the basis of our homeschool. We used much of what he suggested in formulating our own educational plans for our family.

I read John Holt when our oldest children were in elementary and we applied much of his idealogy to their schooling. We attempted to work within the school system to do so, encouraging their teachers and employing some of John’s methods in our home to supplement what the school was doing. We didn’t homeschool then, we thought we could “change” the school. How naive we were.

By the time our oldest entered middle school in a gifted education program, he hated school but loved learning. We managed to plug along throughout his high school years, mainly because he wanted to “make it”. We didn’t know other homeschooling families and while we knew such a thing existed, by that time we were fully invested in our local public schools. We attempted to shore them up, do learning activities at home and just muddle through what we were becoming more and more disillusioned with.

But by the time our youngest entered elementary school, we knew we had to pull her out. She hated it, this bright, sweet, energetic, enthusiastic learner. And so we finally took the plunge into home education and have never regretted it. It has been an amazing, informative, enlightening, and fun journey. We’ve made life long friends, embraced true learning, enriched our lives with educational forays into whatever subject we wanted to explore.

And we’ve confirmed what that hero of ours, John Holt, the teacher told us. You can’t teach a child, but you can learn with him.

Check out John Holt and the early pioneers of homeschooling. I especially recommend all of John Holts’ books as you begin to “teach” your children. Read them before you purchase curriculum or set up the first lesson plan. Then think about how your family will choose to learn together.

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