Homeschooling testimonial

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to share my family’s experience and to perhaps give support to the position that HB2827 is misguided and should not move forward.

We have homeschooled our twelve children for the past 28 years. Before I continue, I realize that the number of children we have and the fact that we homeschool might lead some to make generalizations about our family. Because homeschooling encompasses a wide variety of beliefs and views of the world and because there is a stereotype that only conservative Christians homeschool, I feel I need to address these possible generalizations because homeschooling is very much a non-partisan issue. We tend to vote Democrat and our views of how society works are very liberal. While we are Christian, we belong to a progressive mainline church, and we certainly have never homeschooled for religious reasons.

I am also aware that much of educational theory and thought is based on outcomes. Therefore, I am going to start with outcomes, at least for those of our children who are adults and on their own.

 [And here I detail the accomplishments of my adult children. But having received more comments suggesting that I die than I'm really pleased about, I am not going to put detailed information about my children here on the blog. Discretion is the better part of valor and all that.]

My children are intelligent, emotionally healthy, successful, independent and well respected in their various employments. Never at any point has their very non-traditional elementary and high school education been an impediment to their success, but it has very likely been a key to it.

And our homeschooling experience has been very non-traditional. We delayed academics, focused on children’s interests, did not grade, did not give tests, and used very few textbooks. At any moment, if some truant officer had come and looked at what we were doing, I’m 100% sure that I would have been held in educational neglect. What did we do? We focused on reading a great many good books, we studies history, we were curious, we learned phonics and college level grammar, we explored, we went places, and we met people. Learning happens all the time; our learning just happened a lot differently than the very narrow view of education that many people have.

But perhaps most importantly, homeschooling allowed our children to not be damaged by their educational experience. Some of my children are adopted and have some significant trauma histories that can make learning challenging. I could adapt their learning to focus on their mental health and emotional well-being, without which it is impossible to learn and remember. Some of my children have disabilities, both physical and intellectual. Homeschooling allowed us to meet each child exactly where they were and take as long as they needed. There was no one dictating what needed to be accomplished when. Everyone celebrated when the child who took five years to be able to recognize numbers past ‘4’ learned to understand numbers to ‘100’. And there was even more celebrating when this same child learned to read independently at age 14.

My children had free time to follow their own interests at a deep level without worrying about bells or schedules or syllabi. If something ceased to be of interest, we had the freedom to change areas of study. All of my children took charge of their educations at some point in high school. I become a consultant, finder of resources, giver of suggestions, and also the giver of occasional reminders. Homeschooling also allowed nearly all of them to take college classes as dual enrollment during their last years of high school. (This is different than dual credit which is a class offered at a high school which earns college credit. Instead, this is a college class which also give high school credit.) All of them did fine with a traditional format despite never having to navigate tests or assigned papers. It does not take a traditional elementary or high school education to be successful in college.

There are many different ways that children can learn and be taught. There is no one right way. This bill implies that there is only one right way; one that can be documented in the right way and makes the right people comfortable. We chose homeschooling because after significant research into educational theory and the neuroscience of how children learn, we decided that traditional school was not the optimal way to educate our children. Twenty-eight years later, we still believe that and we are very relieved that we did not have to change how we taught our children to make some random district official, who would not know our children at all, happy.