Homeschooling (Part 1)

The idea of homeschooling is something that has been in the back of my mind ever since I started having kids. Kirby has several extended family members who have homeschooled and are currently homeschooling, I had friends in college who were homeschooled, and more and more Christian families seem to be choosing to homeschool their kids rather than send them to public or even Christian school.

Until the 09-10 school year the elementary school that my kids would be attending was right here in Stockport. At that point I was content to make the passive decision to send them to school and if for some reason things weren't going well I would think about pulling them out and homeschooling them.

Then, last year the school board made a decision to create a seperate middle school here in Stockport and move the elementary school to Douds (about 20 miles from here). This was a big dissapointment to us at the time and really changed our thinking about our children's education. For one thing they would have to ride the bus for 1 HOUR, EACH WAY. That is two hours a day on a bus with kids as old as 5th grade. Ummm...no thank you. So, this was something that was constantly on my mind. How is this going to work? I'm not putting my kids on that bus. I'll have to drive them. That will take up at lot of my time. Especially if we happen to have another baby by then. And on and on. All this time in my mind I'm justifying sending them to public school and trying to figure out how it is even going to be feasable, at the same time knowing homeschooling is what God really wants me to do.

Then I watched a DVD message that shed some light on a lot of issues for me. Kirby's cousin Jeff and his wife Naomi homeschool their children. Naomi has known that I've been on the fence about homeschooling so she gave us a dvd to watch called "The Children of Caesar" by Voddie Bauchman. He talks about the spiritual benefits of homeschooling, the spiritual dangers of public school and the refutes several of the common oppositions to homeschooling. I'll get into more detail in later posts. But basically he put everything that I knew in my spirit into words. After watching it all of my logical justifications were no longer vaild and it became clear to me that homeschooling was going to be the best choice for my family.

After watching the dvd together, Kirby finally admitted to me that he has always wanted me to homeschool but he wasn't going to push it on me because I'm the one who has to be the one to actually do it. Not that he won't play a big role in the educating of our kids, but the everyday teaching would have to be done by me.

We have three years to make our decision and we're still praying about it, but as of right now we are leaning very strongly toward homeschooling. I know some people kind of cringe when they hear the word homeschool. I'm still learning about it myself but I am very open to any questions anyone has for me about why we think this is going to be the best choice for our family. There will be many more posts to follow about the why's and eventually the how's of homeschooling.