Craig Mortimer
Home Educating Father
Moerewa, Northland, New Zealand
We are supposed to teach “as regularly and well as in a registered school.”
* If that’s all we achieve, I’ll consider ourselves failures.
Craig Mortimer
Home Educating Father
Moerewa, Northland, New Zealand
We are supposed to teach “as regularly and well as in a registered school.”
* If that’s all we achieve, I’ll consider ourselves failures.
Loving and genuinely concerned parents are the best qualified of all to teach their own children. Who else is more motivated to invest the time, the money, the blood, sweat, toil and tears required for the child’s best interests than the parents? Who knows and understands the child better than the parents? Who is more motivated for the child’s success than the parents? A homeschooling parent has the vast advantage of a tutoring situation: one parent/teacher to one or two pupils, recognised worldwide as the most effective teaching method. Because of the logistical and political and practical difficulties associated with the conventional classroom, the average parent involved in home education routinely possesses advantages that outweigh even the most gifted of teachers in the most expensively equipped classroom. Two hours of quality one-on-one time with a parent can easily accomplish what a conventional classroom would take two weeks to do. Whatever they may lack in the area of formal educational qualifications, the home educating parent will usually more than compensate for in motivation and the advantages of one-to-one teaching.
Learning the three r’s, or teaching them, is no big mystery. Children learn most in those first 3-4 years when they are like little fact-sponges and are taught to speak and understand a totally foreign language by Mum with no curriculum. Home education is basically an extension to that. Children are natural learners with their own scope and sequence: the constant questions “Why?” and “How?” Simply answering these questions will cover all and probably a lot more than the Nation Curriculum Guidelines.
Schools and teachers only control the access to “schooling”….lecturing, pre-digested notes, certain classrooms and labs and paper qualifications. They do not control “education”. An education is available to all and is virtually free of charge: it is not in short supply, it does not diminish as more people get it. Schooling in schools and other institutions is in a limited, finite supply, and it is this which people like to control for they can make money out of it. Once a person learns to read, write, do numbers plus some research skills, they can teach themselves virtually anything….that is, a true education is out there to be acquired by anyone with the initiative to dig it up for themselves.
Parents’ biggest concern is that they are unqualified or unable to do this. Not so! Parents already know from lifes experiences what facts and skills their children really do need to know and which politically correct lessons can safely be dropped. If they are not themselves in mastery of the 3R skills (Reading wRiting and aRithmetic), they can learn along with their children, perhaps engaging a private tutor now and again. A parent’s enthusiasm and excitement for learning is contageous and will motivate the chidlren like few things else. In addition, we all know that the most important lessons of life each of us learned were not learned in the classroom. These lessons the home educating parent can teach without the bullying and drugs on the school campus.
Socialisation
This is usually the first objection people raise about home education, even before worrying about academic success. Home educators themselves and researchers both in NZ and overseas, regard “socialisation” as a non-issue among home educated children. They consistently demonstrate superior social skills. Children do not need other children to teach them how to be children. They need warm, responsive adults to teach and model proper social graces. Home educated youngsters generally fit in comfortably with a wider age range and are not dependent upon nor intimidated by their peer group.
Curriculum & Resources
Finding resources is not a problem: there is a vast variety available everywhere you look! There are many packaged programmes available, and many parents simply make up their own. One of the best resources is the public library. Friends, neighbours, relations, local support groups, the internet all have expertise in many areas, just waiting for you to tap into it all!
Costs in Time and Money
It can be as expensive or as economical as you like, and time commitment is extremely flexible. First of all, dispel the picture of a mini-school established in your home: many start that way but few ever carry on that way, for schools are designed to deal with logistical problems completely absent from the home. At home you are in a tutoring/mentoring situation, the most superior setting for academic excellence, social training, physical self-discipline, character development and spiritual growth ever devised. Education is not limited to certain activities in a certain place during certain hours of the day: education and learning are taking place all the time, and parents with their children at home are in the unique position to pretty well organise what they learn, to what depth, in what manner and for what purposes.
Legal Issues
Your child does not need to be enrolled in any school until s/he turns six. A couple of months before this, in order to legally home educate, you need to contact the Ministry of Education to obtain a “Certificate of Exemption”. This takes several hours of work writing out what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and how you’ll know you’re making progress. It is like a statement of intent, rather than a contract, for both the Ministry of Education and the ERO recognise that good parent/teachers will be constntly changing and upgrading their programme.
Getting into University or Employment
Universities have various discretionary schemes whereby one who is under 20 can enrol without paper school-leaving qualifications if the admissions officer is satisfied (usually after an interview) that s/he is able to do the work. Many also offer full-time courses designed to bridge the gap between high school level and university for theose who have no paper qualifications. Sixteen-year-olds can sign up for classes at the NZ Correspondence School at around $80 per paper, take four in a single year at NCEA Level 3 (one does not need to work through Levels 1 and 2 before tackling Level 3), including the right maths and English papers, and end up with a University Entrance Qalification. Or wait until age 20: all kiwis of this age have right of entry to NZ Universities. All you need then is the enrolment fee.
Employers do not necessarily need qualifications but are certainly looking for character traits such as Reliability, Motivation, Honesty, etc. These are best taught at home. Seek creative ways to introduce yourself, showing the strengths you want the employer to see. Get work and character references from short-term, part-time and volunteer jobs. Really positive references such as these are worth their weight in gold.
Conclusion
Every piece of research has shown that home schooling produces children who are superior both academically and socially. Your family can also experience other wonderful benefits: function as a unit with children being thought of and trained up as vital parts of the family corporation, rather than thought of and treated like expensive freeloaders waiting to leave home. Many home educators experience no teen rebellion or generation gap. Kick the public school habit: be done forever with uniforms, peer pressure, school fees, bullying, drugs, and the bad attitudes and language and finger signs and head lice brought home from school. You’ll be glad you did.
For Reference:
http://www.nheri.org/ –National Home Education Research Institute
http://www.hslda.org — Home School Legal Defence Association(These first two contain many research articles and results.)
www.hef.org.nz — NZ’s Home Education Foundation http://www.home.school.nz/ — More about home education in NZ
For up-to-date information please click on these two links:
and
Home schooling exemption form now online
Needing help for your home schooling journey?
Applying for a Homeschooling Exemption
Tags: homeschooling NZ; Home schooling requirements; Applying for an exemption from the MoE in New Zealand; How To Get An Exemption From School In New Zealand; homeschool application information nz; application for exemption from enrolment; school exemptions; education at home/free; homeschool application form;homeschooling families in new zealand; ministry of education and how can I apply for an exemption for my son; new zealand curriculum; exemption from school; home school schedule; homeschooling government requirements; applying for home schooling exemption; Home school association; Radical Unschooling Association (RUA); homeschooling application
Question:
Hi there, I have just received my application to apply for exemption and was wondering whether there was a way of getting hold of an example to use as a guide, which will help me with my application. I am just getting started so don’t know of many groups and don’t really know who to call upon. If you are unable to help could you please point me in the right direction. That would be much appreciated.
Answer:
Sometimes it’s not best to look at another’s exemption until after you’ve had a go at doing your own first. Otherwise all you can think to write is what you’ve seen in the other person’s sample exemption application. Have a go at writing yours after reading the material below and then have someone look at it before sending it in.
The Exemption application is NOT user friendly, is it? A very intimidating document it is!
However, most of the people behind it, the ones who assess it when you send it back, are pretty postitive about home education: they’ve seen the results and they like what they see.
In addition, once you get past the document’s jargon and intimidating approach, you will discover that it affords you more freedom and flexibility than you will ever meet again from a government department!! Believe it or not, there are NO legal requirements or compulsory subjects!! All you must do is “satisfy” the MoE that the child “will be taught at least as regularly and well as in a registered school” as you see in the application. That is ALL the law requires.
So the first question asks to explain your knowledge and understanding of the broad curriculum areas YOU INTEND TO COVER. Note: it is what YOU intend to cover and as they say in question 2, it is YOUR curriculum vision they want to see explained, not the MoE’s, not the neighbour next door or the school down the street…..they want to read in your own words what YOU intend to do. The list of subjects you’ll see on the exemption application form is only a guide…it is not a list of subject you are required to teach. You can pick and choose from that list or do something completely different. As long as you can clearly and competently explain what your intentions are and how you plan to go about it (that’s question 2) and how you’ll know you’re making progress (that’s quesiton 7, I think, the one on assessments), the MoE will virtually always give you your exemption.
There is an expectation that you’ll provide an academic as opposed to an agricultural or domestically focussed education. As long as you cover what most would cosider the basic stuff: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science in one way or another, you should be fine.The exact list of subjects, which ones you emphasis, which ones you treat lightly, which ones you leave out, which ones you add in which they haven’t got listed….it is all up to you.
The first question basically wants you to outline your understanding of the subject areas you intend to cover with your child. The answer would depend upon the child’s academic level and what you want to teach. Just think over the next year or so and describe that kind of stuff. Note that this is really only a statement of intent: once you get your exemption you can change as much as you like but you’ll never have to re-negotiate the exemption!!
The second question wants you to take a topic of your choice: so look at one of the subject areas, break it down into sub-topics, then each of those into its component parts. Choose one of the sub-topics or component parts and describe a lesson plan over the next couple of months as to how you would go about presenting that topic: there are lectures, field trips, reading books, internet, projects, write a play, a poem, an essay, go talk to an expert, go to the library, etc., etc.
The question on assessments is easy. Because you observe your child nearly all day, everyday, you know when the child has understood the material and when he has not. So you do an informal assessment based on intimate observation. That’s all that’s needed. You may do the odd oral quiz or written one you make up yourself. You may get a hold of formal tests which are available here or there.
The rest of the questions are pretty straight forward.
Let me add a bunch of other stuff I’ve written in the past to others which may be of some help in getting a vision for what you’re going to be doing.
All the best!
Regards,
Craig Smith
PS — A lengthy book on how to fill in an exemption is available for $15 from:
“The NZ Homeschooling Guide to Applying for an exemption ” by KayChristensenTo Order please write cheque to:
Accentor Enterprises
48 Myers Road, Manurewa, Auckland
Ph: (09) 266-9218
Email: robert(dot)ryan@xtra(dot)co (dot)nzCost
$15.00 per copy
plus $1.00 per copy p&pDon’t forget to include your return address
Allow two weeks for delivery
If urgent, we will try to deliver ASAPHome education is a ticket to a vast amount of freedom and flexibility to put together a curriculum that would be tailor made for your son, one that would afford him the best education possible. If you were to bring him home so that it is just the two of you for most of the day, you would already have more advantages, vastly superior, to even the most gifted of teachers in the most expensively equipped classrooms….and that is before we even start talking about curriculum resources! What I mean is this: no one on this earth is more motivated for your son’s success than you. No one is more willing to spend the blood, sweat, toil and tears that may be required to see him mature to full manhood. No one knows him better than you. No one has already done more for him than have you…..you couldn’t PAY anyone to do what you have already done for him over those past 11 years. No one else except perhaps your husband/his dad is as close to him, has his trust as much, is the one with whom he feels most secure. No one else can see when he understands, and when he is struggling. No one else is willing to be with him 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, which means no one else will ever be able to observe him as closely and come to know his interests, passions, aspirations, abilities, inclinations, aptitudes and favourite/most efficient ways in which he learns and assimilates knowledge. As I say, even gifted teachers can only dream about such advantages which you already possess by default.
Education and schooling are two very different things. Schooling is what your son has experienced up til now. If you bring him home and teach him yourself, you can give him a true education. We are talking of a lot more than just a certain body of head knowledge and a few skills. We are talking about the ability to use that knowledge and those skills in the proper way, for the proper purposes, in the context of the real world of the home, the market place, the community and the workplace. That is, you can pass on to him what you know, what you know he REALLY needs to learn, all those lessons in life (the most important ones of all) which I’m certain you will agree you did not learn in the classroom. You can pass on the attitudes, values, standards, concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, wise and unwise, that you are personally convinced about, rather than the ones that just get slipped to him in what they call the “hidden curriculum” at schools. You can train his character and build in the character qualities you know his future employers, his future wife, his future children will want to see in him and that he will definitely need to possess. You can help him to see how the knowledge he gains fits into the “big picture”.
The most important and useful thing you can do for him is both motivate him to learn and at the same time give him a vision for taking upon his own shoulders, as appropriate, more and more of the responsibility for his own education. Once he sees that the whole world is his oyster, you may have trouble holding him back, not that you’d want to do that necessarily; but you both will not have trouble filling in your day, wondering what to study and investigate next: your problem will be that there are not enough hours in the day to follow up all the leads you want to follow.
Believe it or not, the law, the Education Act, does not require even schools to teach anything in particular: they have to be open for so many hours and they must teach from a “secular” perspective (“with no religious instruction or observance”) and there is an expectation that they will be getting sex education, but that is as far as the Act itself goes. It does say the schools must teach according to the syllabus handed down from the Minister of Education (a career politician, please allow me to point out, as opposed to a career educationalist) in the Gazette from time to time. What this means is that you have a maximum amount of freedom to put together your own curriculum from whatever materials you prefer. I know this is frustrating at first: why doesn’t someone just hand you the recipe, A, B, C, for you can easily follow that. But please do not overlook the opportunity to give your son the best education he’s ever likely to be offered….and you are the one who can offer it and can most definitely deliver it, regardless of your qualifications or lack of them. Your own personal confidence level and commitment are the deciding factors, not any set of text books or resources or pre-existing ability.
There is no recognised body of knowledge that young people need to know in order to succeed in the New Zealand of the 21st century. What the MoE pushes through the schools is merely their current (politically determined) guess. You, on the other hand, are not politically motivated, but have a much better grasp on the realities of everyday life in the real world. Run with that. There are many local home education support groups out there, many email discussion groups just in NZ, many networks for swapping ideas and curriculum materials. There are many educational philosophies out there, and various learning styles and various teaching styles. Yes, these things require a bit of investigation, but again, you have other advantages in a home education situation that mean you can relax a fair bit about the passage of time as you and your son together investigate these things. Actually the investigation itself is a very useful and practical educational project! These extra advantages I mean here, in addition to the ones I already enumerated, are those of the tutoring or mentoring situation you will have with just you as teacher/guide/mentor and your son the student. One-on-one instruction coupled with a vigorously interactive format is the most efficient form of learning full stop.
For simplicity we normally think of all the academic objectives as sitting in two baskets. The first are the basic skills that must be MASTERED: the 3 Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. These do take a fair bit of intensive tuition in order to master, not just become passable at. Reading, being a form of information intake, includes listening. One must be an accurate reader and listener, comprehending as much as possible, and discerning the difference between reasoned debate and sheer propaganda, between an honest critique and a sales pitch, between fact and opinion, etc. Writing is not just penmanship, spelling and grammar, but also composition of tightly reasoned, logical and well constructed essays. Being a form of information output, writing also includes public speaking, the ability to face an audience of one or a thousand and deliver with confidence a prepared or an extemporaneous talk on a subject of interest or importance. Arithmetic would be to master all the maths that you as an adult use and need on a day to day basis: it probably doesn’t include trigonometry or calculous and may only include some very basic concepts from geometry and algebra. I could add a fourth R: research skills. The child who has mastered these basic skills in this first basket can then teach himself virtually anything after than, with a bit of guidance from you. The second basket contains everything else, and can be covered most effectively by simply reading good books together, watching good videos and educational CDs, doing projects together and field trips and discussing them. This second basket can also be done with a family of several different age groups at the same time: simply expect more from the older ones, less from the younger ones.
Most of what we expect to be doing and producing as a “Home School” is counter productive: desks, blackboards, textbooks, lectures, assignments, home work, marking, standardised tests. These are all logistical developments to cope with the school setting of one teacher and 25 children. None of these things are needed – or useful – to the tutoring / mentoring situation. Because of the distractions, interruptions, strict timetables, necessity to change subjects at every 45 minute interval, the necessity to move at a pace too fast for some and too slow for others and totally irrelevant to still others, the politicised nature of the subjects taught, the enforced recess breaks and lunch times, the length of time it takes to get 25 children sitting in the same room, focused and turned to the same page in the same text book, the boring nature of text books, the mixed abilities and mixed backgrounds and mixed worldviews of the 25 students, plus many other factors….because of all these you can do at home in two hours what could easily take two weeks to accomplish in the typical school classroom.
The implication is, don’t even try to copy the conventional school approach to schooling in the classroom, but instead go for real-life education in the real world. Yes, this takes a bit of climbing up a steep learning curve at first, but doing it together becomes a very profitable exercise in real-world education.
There is formal learning: when parents directly teach, instruct or explain with or without text books or work books. This may more accurately be called formal teaching, for one is not too sure about the learning going on, especially if the children are not allowed to ask questions. If only the teacher asks questions, it is a good bet that little learning is going on.
There is informal learning, when you are discussing a book you are reading together or to them, or interacting over the things seen along the way as you drive from A to B. This is the heart of mentoring: reading and discussing and interacting together over all the issues of life as they come your way. Remember the three year old’s incessant “Why?” questions? You never want them to stop asking those questions, for when they do, it may mean they have blocked the in-take routes and are no longer filled with that natural curiosity. In free discussions encourage questions, all questions, any questions. They will not come at you in a logical fashion, starting with grammar and going step by logical step through all there is to know and then changing to maths and taking it step by incremental step as one would find in a conventional school’s scope and sequence. (Actually NZ schools stopped doing this ages ago and now follow a constructivist philosophy wherein the teachers no longer have an agreed body of knowledge to pass on nor are they thought of as repositories of wisdom and knowledge, but are now facilitators whose job it is to provide children with learning opportunities where they can explore and discover and construct their own bodies of knowledge – and arrive at their own personal custom-made concepts of truth and reality, free from the fixed biases of by-gone generations. Hey, I’m not making this up! Go ask a state teacher!) But they will come at you with questions which follow links in their own minds, links that you can strengthen and introduce to other links or ones that you can show to be invalid, unwise, unwholesome, etc., because YOU are the authority, you ARE the authority, you are THE AUTHORITY in your children’s life, just as it should be, just as they need.
There is incidental learning which your children just pick up as you go about your daily business, things that are caught rather than taught. This includes much in the area of character training, which may be far more important and valuable to your children when it’s all said and done than their academic accomplishments.
There is self-learning, self-instruction that takes place when the children have free play, pursue hobbies, experiment on their own, are set tasks and put in charge or made responsible for regular chores, or when they just sit down and start reading for their own enjoyment and edification.
Then there is learning that takes place when you aren’t even there: when they join clubs, go to scouts, church groups, camps, sports teams, visit Uncle Ted up the valley and help milk the cows, etc. As long as they are awake, they are learning something.
The curriculum is all waking hours. Fairly flexible that, not necessarily organised to the last detail. In fact, most home educators who start off really formally soon become rather informal. And those who start off really informally soon become even more informal, and may appear to outsiders to be goofing off all day. It is just that they are pursuing knowledge in a more effective method of reading, discussion, exploration, experimentation and discussion. There may be precious little “work” produced as in schools, but that is because “school work” is another one of those logistical requirements of schools to ensure the children are in fact doing “something”, for the teacher cannot possibly know where each child is up to.
Yours in Christ’s service,
Craig S. Smith
Phone: (06) 354-7699 or (06) 357-4399
Email: hedf@xtra.co.nz
How can you stand having your kids around you all day and not be out there seeking your own fulfillment? |
by Carol Munroe of Auckland
Home-schooling is so much a part of our lives, it is impossible to imagine what our lives would have been like without it.
When we were first married 20 years ago, we had never heard of the word, but it seems like right from the beginning God laid on our hearts to home educate our children. I just could not bear the thought that at 5 years old a child should leave the influence of home and be exposed for the best hours of the day to a situation totally outside parental control, where morality would be taught (or not), and where God would be considered irrelevant to life. It made no sense for God to entrust children to our care only to have us turn them over to someone else to be a major influence at five years old ! So we just never sent our first child to school! That was at a time when it was a bit “hippy” to do it, and we were looked askance at for a while.
Now we are at the stage where we are beginning to see some fruits for our labour, and although we have many years to go (our youngest is six), we know that the benefits are there, whereas in times past it was perhaps harder to see. In fact, there are so many advantages in home-schooling it is hard to figure what is most important.
Life Skills
We found that life skills are learned almost by osmosis. After each child was born the “formal” or bookwork part of our lives fell by the wayside for about six months, as I was just too exhausted to handle my normal routine. But the children learned about how to handle crotchety babies, to be flexible, change nappies and enjoy a new addition to the family. How awful to have to send siblings off to school when a new baby is in the house – all that getting-to-know-you time in the baby stage is lost. At home, it was another part of education – life – that children at school are not exposed to in full measure.
In a home-schooling situation, our children see us warts and all and we can’t hide that from them. It is a constant challenge to model godliness and be the example of Christ to them — showing patience under stress, calmness under pressure, making decisions based on Biblical principles — they see it all. We believe that academics are important, but more important than anything is to build godly character.
One of our children was witness to an argument Mark and I were once having. I have at times “a volatile personality” (politically correct for “bad temper”, due to Irish background and thus beyond my control!!) and this little note was handed up to me. It was a page from a phone message pad, and it read thus:
TO: mummy.
MESSAGE: why are you shouting at daddy all the time?
FROM: andrea
Everything was filled out nicely although misspelled. It brought us up with a round turn, I can tell you! Mark kept it as one of our “precious things”, a humbling reminder that we are constant examples whether we like it or not. While our children have seen us when we disagree, they have also seen us having a hug in the kitchen, holding hands, laughing together, and standing as one when our backs are against the wall. Consequently they will enter marriage realising that at times couples do disagree – sometimes very strongly — but what is more important than anything is to talk it through , and hang in there in the tough times.
Marriage is for life and there is tremendous stress on marriages these days. We want our children to enter marriage knowing that it is “till death us do part”, and we want them to know that every worthwhile marriage goes through hard times and takes work, but they are to be in there for the long haul.
Relationships
As our children have become teenagers, I have enjoyed a different stage in our relationship, I remember someone saying to us years ago when our children were young – “You wait. They are O.K. now but when they get to be teenagers, you’ll find out all about it”. I half expected them to grow horns on their 13th birthdays, but it never happened! In fact, in a number of ways it is BETTER having teenagers because they can discuss issues and think and work things out — all the more reason to home-school through the high-school years, because it is that time that their faith takes on real meaning, and they see how the Bible applies to all of life.
A couple of years ago we went through Understanding the Times by David Noebel, where every area of life – philosophy, law, biology, politics, etc., was looked at through the grid of a Biblical worldview, and we studied at the same time the other worldviews — Marxism, Humanism, New Age – and how they have influenced the world in which we live. It is alarming that so much worldly thinking has permeated Christianity, and we are not even aware of it. It was an exciting time discussing these issues with our teenagers and seeing their understanding of the faith deepen as they learned the relevance of the Bible to every area. What thrilled me was seeing the two children arguing points as they tried to nut out what the BIBLE said, where the world influences our thinking, and the need to yield every thought captive to Christ. We had some very exciting discussions!
Teaching the children at home has enabled us to become good friends with our children. We talk about things, and we as parents are the first port of call in difficulties rather than their peer group. Last year Andrea (16) read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . I had read somewhere that this book was one of the most significant literary works ever written, so I picked a copy up in a second hand book shop and determined to read it. It was fascinating and I could hardly put it down. Andrea wanted to read it too, being an avid reader from an early age, so I passed it on, and when she finished, asked, “What did you think of it?” Then followed a discussion about the characters in the story, whether Anna was justified in her behaviour, the consequences of sin, double standards, was Anna a hero or antihero, the attractiveness (or repulsiveness) of the other characters, whether life is really like that — all sorts of perceptions and insights as a result of reading the book.
It crossed my mind later that there would be very few adults that you could have this kind of interaction with, and here is a 16-yr-old understanding it and wanting to learn through it. Where else does that sort of parent-child interaction take place apart through home education?
An exposure to good literature helps a child appreciate quality. This year Andrea enrolled in a full bursary course through correspondence (“I want a challenge, mum!”) and one of her subjects is English. She has recently been studying NZ poets and some of the material she calls “disgusting”, and “Why do we have to study this stuff?” She has developed an appreciation for the good, and home schooling has allowed us to influence her tastes. I remember reading somewhere that it is not enough merely to keep your children from the bad — you have to expose them to what is good. (Children of a Greater God by Terry Glaspey is an excellent book on this, although some have criticised it as being “too intellectual”). Music has always played a important part of our lives, and our children, naturally, have all developed a love for the classics (and some easy listening) because the music is there and they have grown up with it. None of the children so far has shown any interest in modern “rock” music, because they know that loud noise is not music. At school even Christian children have been heavily influenced by rock bands without really thinking what kind of things these groups are promoting, just because their peers think it is “cool”, and it is unthinkable not to be “cool”.
Home-schooling is a calling for the long term just like parenting. In fact, there is not much difference is there? We need to remember that there are “stages” in life, and we cannot — if ever — have perfection. This goes for our children as well — I have learned that there is growth taking place, that what is true now may not be true tomorrow, and behaviour problems can be worked on and maturity is the goal.
Character Building
It used to worry me that our children were quiet, “not outgoing”, and they had not had many opportunities to make friends their own age. Adult peer pressure comes into play here. I had been told that David (now 18) was socially immature and it was because he was home-schooled and he needed to go to school to be socially developed! Mark says the next time somebody tells him their children go to such-and-such a school, he will ask them, “What do you do about socialisation?” Our son David will never be a social whiz, but it was interesting at a Church camp where there were children of the same age and home-schooled (similar interests), there was no problem making friends at all. In fact, we hardly saw him! Now, as he is at university, he is always talking about people he has met, and there is certainly no evidence of personality problems because he has been home-schooled. He has taken to it like a duck to water. I heard a while ago a helpful perspective on this “shyness” issue and I mention it because another home-schooling mother shared she had had a similar experience with one of her children, so it is not uncommon. The world has an “ideal” that we must attempt to conform to — outgoing, life-of-the-party type, good at sport, leader, strong, etc. We need to realise that God deliberately did not make all people like that, and that in fact quieter people sometimes have depths and can be more solid and mature. There is nothing wrong with being quiet, and as home-schoolers we seek to enhance our children’s strengths and build their characters with the God given personalities the children have.
Enjoying Our Children
Like all home-schooling parents, we enjoy our children. Sometimes as I am cooking tea and may be a bit tired or pressured this beautiful music comes drifting out through the kitchen as Andrea plays the piano — our favourite hymns one after another – God and God Alone, Wonderful Grace, The Servant King, Majesty — and my heart is lifted with praise and worship as I cannot help but sing. Or coming home and finding Amy (14) has cleaned the whole bathroom without having been asked (she’ll fetch a good bride price!), Jonathan (12) cuddling up and holding my hand – in public! or irresistibly having to join in when he is just rolling on the floor with laughter, little Cam (6) covering my cheek with kisses, saying, “I love you, mum”. Children are indeed a gift from the Lord, and home-schooling has enabled us to develop the kind of close relationships and memories that we would never have had if we had chosen to send our children to school. We praise God for the privilege and opportunity it has been.
How can parents armed with only love for their child and good intentions provide an education anywhere near as good as a professional with a teaching degree?
Ok, ok, I can already hear all you veteran home educators out there choking and gagging at this one. But let’s break it down and examine it.
The stated issue is that trained and certified teachers are obviously superior teachers to untrained parents. The assumptions behind this are many: that certified teachers are far more knowledgeable than parents about what constitutes education; that the money and resources behind certified teachers in registered schools are clearly superior to what all but the more financially endowed parents can provide; that the entire school environment, from dedicated Ministry personnel and curriculum developers to textbook providers to overworked school administrators and board of trustee members to the enthusiastic teachers at the coalface and the brilliant variety of peers within the typical classroom, that all these things combine to provide a palpably well-rounded and comprehensive educational experience the like of which an isolated mum at home with only some out-dated School Certificate passes could never hope to match.
These assumptions, however, are all false for they are based on the false foundational idea that politically conceived, taxpayer-funded, secular and compulsory mass schooling is equivalent to even a basic education. Leaving aside completely the argument as to whether Christians should allow their children to attend secular schooling institutions, let us examine the simple logistical advantages of one mum teaching a small number of her own beloved children at home compared to the conventional classroom situation.
Most of us are aware of cases where teacher certification has not meant the same as teacher competency. In addition, there is the almost unrecognised fact that classroom logistics can make even the best teacher’s efforts an exercise in futility: over-crowded classrooms, lack of discipline, unsupportive administration, inability to give needed individual attention, time restraints which force them to move on to new material before the previous material is comprehended. Teacher certification does not ensure a quality education. In fact, many students who do not catch on at school must go home and get their parents to help out. There are already many parents out there who do the real teaching at night after school while the certified teacher gets the credit.
Home education is a tutoring or mentoring situation. One mum can give her full attention to one or two or three children at a time for whatever period of time is practical and comfortable for them all. Or she can focus on just one child for a piece of time and move to the next and then to the other. Overall she will have far, far more significant one-to-one time than what occurs in the typical classroom where the teacher can often expect no more than one minute of significant one-to-one time per pupil per day. Because of this the home school mum can cover a vastly increased measure of subject matter in the same length of time even though she may be dealing with a range of ages, possibly including a toddler and a newborn. She can assess more exactly whether each child has grasped the concepts or mastered the skills for she is observing the child for most of the waking day, is far more concerned for the child’s welfare and future prospects and is more intimately in tune with the child, being her own flesh and blood, than even the most highly trained and skilled professional teacher could ever possibly be. The enthusiasm, commitment, love, vision, intimate knowledge, and one-to-one tutoring situation of the home school mum, combined with the God-given heart-desire of the child for its mother, ensures that the average home education teacher/parent is starting with vast logistical and relational advantages the classroom teacher can only dream about.
So what does a true and useful education consist of? For the school teacher it is in a politically determined mix of subjects pitched a certain way for a classroom full of children from all sorts of backgrounds and filtered through legal and other socio-political parameters with the aim a producing an outcome in students’ lives which matches a stated objective in a Ministerial document. If the powers that be decide a change is necessary, it will be a good seven years before the drafts are formulated, trialled, assessed, redrafted, approved, adopted and actually introduced and implemented. By then of course the initial problem has mutated beyond recognition and the target children have passed through the system and a new set are being served a special mix designed for a situation and a time which no longer exist.
For the home educating mum it consists of those basic skills plus general and specific knowledge she knows are required to get on in the world: she and her husband and extended family talk about what it’s like out there to be a worker, an employer, a homemaker, a spouse, a parent. They know the character qualities employers want, that they have always wanted throughout history, and that neither School Certificate exams nor university degrees impart those qualities. Christian parents in particular are individually crafting unique children to serve the God of the Universe according to the syllabus He has provided in the Scriptures. They are not that impressed with the state’s attempts through the schools to improve children, which the politicians constantly tell us are this country’s most valuable natural resource (right up there with wool bales and chilled lamb carcasses), or with the socialists’ attempt to inculcate the simplistic non-judgmental vision of tolerating every perversion under the sun, somehow making our “global village” a “better place in which to live”.
The home educating mum knows that rooms, desks and books are dead things. It is imparting life from her heart to her child that makes an education. The most important lessons in her life she did not learn in the classroom but in the school of hard knocks. This is what she imparts. The children are not left interminably to interact with books or CD ROMs, but are encouraged to interact with mum and dad and other siblings and people in the real world of the home, the marketplace, the workplace and the community. They don’t only do word problems from a text book, but do real-life problems like working out the week’s menu from the available budget, balancing the cheque book or helping plan and implement a strategy for improving the safety of the neighbourhood.
Christian parents in particular can hardly justify leaving their children in the care of those who discount, deny and even despise their Christian faith. Even Christian teachers in state schools have their hands tied, for the NZ Education Act Section 77 declares that “the teaching shall be entirely of a secular character”. Every Minister of Education with whom this writer has communicated from David Lange onwards has concurred that the working definition of “secular” as it is used in the Act is “with no religious instruction or observance”. This clearly is not a neutral stance toward Christianity, but one that seeks to eliminate it from the classroom.
The Scriptures tell Christian parents what teaching qualifications are necessary. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might.” Not much left to love anything else. Do you love the LORD this way? Well, one thing is for sure, that teacher in the state school is not legally allowed to demonstrate such a love even if he or she should actually have it. And how many of them that you know actually do? Then Deuteronomy 6:6 says, “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart.” Of course, that which is on your heart will be constantly running through your mind and coming out of your mouth. The Christian teacher in a state school cannot allow that to happen, for it would mean her job. Yet these are the Bible’s credentials for teaching, as the next verse, Deuteronomy 6:7 says, “and you shall teach them diligently to your children.” Note that the word “them” is referring to the words of God. What the Bible commands teachers to teach, teachers in state schools are forbidden by law to teach. Mum at home has no such restriction.
If you are inclined to argue that the verses in Deuteronomy are addressed to parents and not teachers in the classroom, think again. Some say that teachers are still considered in loco parentis, in the place of parents, and therefore theoretically required to conform to whatever parents demand (impossible in our pluralistic society), and Christian parents would need to demand teaching according to these verses. Otherwise the Christian has to justify allowing his child to be filled with nonChristian presuppositions and philosophies, which of course he cannot do and still remain consistent with Scripture. The fact is, Christian parent, you will be held responsible for what you allow your children to be exposed to and influenced by day after day after day.
Deuteronomy 6:7 further says, “and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.” There is the context and frequency parents are to employ when teaching: all the time in every situation; that is, in the context of everyday life. Classroom instruction is in an artificial environment, segregated by age groupings and separated from the real everyday life experiences in the workplace, the home, the marketplace and the wider community. Classroom instruction cannot do as the Bible here bids. Mum at home can do this as she goes about her everyday business.
In short, marriage, parenthood and homemaking are probably the best teaching credentials one could have.
“Parents only need a shot of confidence to realise that they are qualified to teach, and in most cases will actually do a superior job. Whatever they may lack in the area of formal educational qualifications they will usually more than compensate for in motivation and the advantages of one-to-one teaching.”
– Craig Smith