i’m sure some of you have heard the “rebuttal” that is said in contrast to hillary clinton’s “it takes a village to raise a child.” (“i’ve seen that village and it’s not raising my child!”).

i don’t like it either: the anger and, dare i say it, hatred spewed from the mouths of homeschoolers aimed at public schools. i’ve never entered into that conversation because i don’t believe it. we don’t believe it as a family and i won’t tell my boys that public schools are bad.

because it’s not true. and that’s not at all why we’re homeschooling.

when i am asked why we homeschool, i’m usually at a loss for words. my typical answer is: “because it’s fun! i love learning along with my kids, and we have a lot of fun doing it. it’s not always a bed of roses, but at the end of the day, i’m satisfied 100% with what they’re learning, and how they’re learning it.”

if you asked us why i don’t think they could learn the same way in a public school (or private school) our answer would be twofold:

one,  that in our researching and touring schools in our area, we felt that neither the public nor the private schools we toured emphasized a love of learning. because once you LOVE learning, you can pretty much learn (or teach yourself) anything.  we also fell in love with the classical philosophy of educating (for more on that, see Dorothy Sayers’  The Lost Tools of Learning) and no school around here uses the classical model.

another reason we chose to homeschool is that we always want to emphasize “family-first,” and we see how school activities can take away from a new and growing family life. our kids are little for only so long and we desire that our family be a priority in our kids’ life for as long as they’re  part of us. this choice allows us to be a family for as much time as possible. we’re not torn in different directions, with friends our own ages, doing different things that don’t include our siblings. we spend our lessons together, our meals together, our sports together. of course this doesn’t mean that our kids don’t have friends!

we’re learning not only to read, subtract numbers, and the history of the world, but we’re learning how to be a family. we’re learning how to respect, love and serve each other and others outside of our family (regardless of their age), and eventually we’ll learn how to form our opinions based on everything that we’ve learned and discovered together.

we also do have a lot of fun. one day out of the week you’ll find us with other homeschooling families at our weekly co-op, another doing review and new lessons together at home and then head to a gym class and swimming practice at the YMCA, and then off to soccer practice in the evening. another day is similar to that with another soccer practice after a morning full of lessons at the kitchen table. one day out of the school week we sleep in because we’re all tired!  we take the morning slowly and clean, rest and play and save the afternoon for our lessons. we’re constantly finding fun field trips to attend, overnight-family field trips to historical grounds in our state, and we try to spend time with daddy in the BigCity as often as possible.