Homeschooling and homeschoolers

The Public Square
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My personal experience, having attended CC: the matriarchy was real and frustrating. I can’t recommend it; I found that my male peers fell into two categories:

A. perfectly ok with it, and effeminate
B. rebellious against it

I fell into B. Neither is healthy. There is of course a sinless path in every situation, but the system itself is lacking even if you can avoid the sins of A or B. The male student who manages to keep from rebellion and also from effeminacy will still be denied the rigor, challenge, and camaraderie that only a male teacher can provide, which is very important in high school.

When I switched to a charter school, I suddenly found that I loved Physics and Russian literature, because my teachers in those subjects were men who had my respect.

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Partly due to Pastor Bayly’s commentary on the subject on one of the podcasts, I took over my oldest son’s teaching for this past year’s 9th grade CC curriculum. It’s going well so far. Others’ mileage may vary.

I do see the CC matriarchy, but our particular community has some unusually masculine fathers relative to what one normally finds in evangelical American culture. That may make a difference.

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@iptaylor I don’t deny that was your experience with homeschooling, or with charter schools, but I think your conclusion about both assume that your experiences are normal for both.

As @FaithAlone points out, in any homeschooling situation it’s really up to the father to assume the role of turning boys into men. Truly that’s the job of all fathers, which is why I continue to hold to the idea that homeschooling is really just applied parenting.

The question of when that parenting needs to ramp down to allow the son to apply what they’ve learned is a different question.

Lastly, as to the charter school experience, the only conclusion to be had, is that you were very fortunate and blessed. Public schools and by extension charter schools are excessively overrun by women anyways. The kind of experience you sought and obtained requires a perfectly positioned man in that school, and that almost never happens. Many male public school teachers are already very effeminate, with the one general exception of the football coach. The number of boys impacted by the football coach is usually pretty small compared to the whole school’s population. Getting on the football team is an exercise in exclusion for most.

All that to say, certainly there is no cookie cutter solution either way. But interestingly in my state, homeschoolers can actually participate in public high school athletics. That would seem a creative solution for some.

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It is good for the fathers of boys to know that the Book of Proverbs is a divinely inspired manual for exactly this project.

Comparing the Book of Proverbs to other ancient Near East wisdom literature reveals the fundamental purpose of the canonical Proverbs. In order to instruct their sons, court officials in many lands would pull together the wisdom they had acquired in a lifetime of diplomatic service.

From Egypt we have at least ten such collections, from The Instruction of Ka-gemni and The Instruction of Prince Hor-dedef dating from the Old Kingdom (2686-2100 BC), to The Instruction of Onchsheshonqy in the fourth and fifth century BC. An Akkadian translation of a Sumerian original titled The Instructions of Shurruppak dates from approximately 1300 BC. Ahiquar, who served as vizier to the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the seventh century BC left The Words of Ahiqar. The Proverbs of Solomon, Son of David, King of Israel takes its place alongside these and other collections.

For further details, see Kidner’s commentary on Proverbs, an excellent tool for fathers who are learning to use the Proverbs in the instructions/training of their sons.

Note well: this genre of literature is expressly designed to turn young males into discerning, competent mature males who can administer entire kingdoms. As such, it speaks with the voice of wise men to young men. The perspective of Proverbs is exclusively masculine, not feminine.

There are, for example, proverbs about the blessings of a good wife, and the sufferings of a man with a bad wife. There are, however, no proverbs on marriage from the perspective of a woman. Women can and do profit from the Proverbs of Solomon. But, if one wishes a textbook in the Bible for rearing sons, the Book of Proverbs is it.

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Ken, I was specifically speaking about Classical Conversations rather than homeschooling in general. That particular organization has the issues I described.

It is also a leap to say that all charter schools are just like the one I attended.

One note on simply assuming the role yourself: I don’t think that’s the right solution in high school. You should of course assume the responsibility (it’s yours), but then you should delegate specific tasks to people who are better than you at math, literature, etc.

There are two reasons I say this: 1: There are few things more demoralizing or stunting for a boy’s education than finding that his teacher is inferior to him in the subject being taught, and 2: Why limit your son to your own level of education in a particular subject? You should want him to eclipse you and fast.

Especially in high school, boys need the unquestionable authority of a specialist to sharpen their minds against. For boys, learning is sparring with a superior mind. At some point he will start to peer into the “deeper things” of the subject, and start asking the kind of questions which can only be answered by someone who has been to the end of a subject and back. If he has no “limitless” superior to ask, he will become disheartened and disinterested in the subject, because after all, if the teacher didn’t find the further things interesting enough to know, they must be a mirage or simply not worth finding out.

If you’re thinking, “but I am very good at W and X, I even have Y and Z degree in it,” I would say you’re underestimating (and therefore throttling, because boys rise to the expectation that is set) your son’s capacity to wonder about and understand things.

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Time for another iteration of a recommendation I constantly make when these issues arise. Here 'tis:

Find and watch the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. Josh Waitzkin (played by Max Pomeranc) is a typical seven-year-old who happens to be a chess prodigy. Joe Mantegna stars as Josh’s Father, a sportswriter determined to see his son become a champion. The film is a great illustration of a father taking very purposeful responsibility for his prodigy-son’s advancement in an area of expertise in which the father is utterly unable to mentor him.

But the father can search out and secure the mentorship of a man who has indeed “been to the end of a subject and back” (played by Ben Kingsley). The dramatic tension is sparked when the boy first watches some hot dog chess players in the park, and then begins to best them all except for one man (played by Laurence Fishburne) who throws challenge after challenge at the boy.

Bingo! Now the boy has two wise men mentoring him, and their approaches to the game conflict! What is the conscientious father to do? Add into the conflict the mother who has no sympathy for her son’s talent, and is opposed to her husband’s quest to get the best mentor for his son that he can find.

I heartily recommend any father of a son to view this film as a parable for how a father meets the challenge taking responsibility for the upbringing of a son who has different potentials than the father has.

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Now this is a conversation that’s worthy of the name and giving me joy! Couple thoughts.

First, systems should never be trusted. Trust character. Trust truth. Trust people. When I’ve said homeschoolers are rebellious, I’ve never meant to discourage homeschoolers, but to improve them. As I’ve said before, I don’t care if you send your sons and daughters to a charter public school as long as you are determined to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and you’re hands-on with them. Don’t settle on any method of education or curriculum. Settle on inculcating in your sons and daughters the fear of God and unquestioning submission to His Word. Then even public school will have a hard time corrupting him or her. It drives people crazy for me to say this but my continuing to say it is not stubbornness, but love.

Second, over a lifetime, one of the things I’ve said most frequently when speaking on children and fatherhood/motherhood is that I’ve only once known a man who overestimated the potential of his child. The iron-clad rule of fatherhood—and especially motherhood, with my own mother being the single exception—is underestimating their children. Their perceptions. Their understanding. Their capacity to grow through discipline. Their ability to receive instruction and learn. The wickedness of their sin before the Holy God. The meaning and consequences of their wicked actions for future life and family and church, and so on. Which is to say, set your sights high and watch in wonder as this putty God has given you conforms to your (previously assumed unrealistic) expectations.

This will almost always mean you must relegate your child’s mother to lower tier decider and influencer (particularly if he is a son). The vast majority of mothers put a higher value on safety and risk avoidance than growth whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual. But the very worst thing you can do to a child is render or leave him incurious intellectually. The very worst. Challenge challenge challenge him or her! Don’t allow sloppy speech or thinking. Trounce them. Do it at the dinner table in front of everyone as long as you are not a sadist.

Third, don’t be fearful or insecure in your son or daughter’s relations with others who might better instruct them. Hillary is right. It really does take a family and that is the Family of God. You have a lousy prayer life; don’t worry, God will send another believer to teach your daughter to pray if you pray and ask Him to. And from raising our children, I could repeat such examples endlessly.

Gonna stop now.

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Like some others here, one of my primary motivations to homeschool was the poor quality of education I received in public school. I was a bright boy left unchallenged by a system that specified that students of age X are placed in grade Y where they learn Z whether they already know if or not. The ethos of public education is that the child is made for the school, not that the school is made for the child. And from what I hear, it seems that the public school system in general is neglecting bright children even more so now than decades ago. Some of my colleagues at work express distress at the poor math education their children are receiving in public school and tell me I made the right decision to homeschool. Of course, there are some excellent public schools and charter schools out there, but they are not uniformly available, and there is little real interest in changing the situation.

I figured my children would likely be bright, so I decided they would receive a better education from homeschooling than from the affordable public and Christian school options. I do half of the homeschool teaching before and after my work, and my wife does the other half. I’ve been homeschooling ten years, and my oldest (a girl) is now high school age. How to teach those grades is an important issue, and it is true that many parents are not capable of doing so, but let us remember that a non-negligible number of public and Christian school teachers are also incompetent, something I know from personal experience as a child and an adult.

Although this will not be applicable to everyone, I have found that high school material is not difficult in the sense of being hard to understand. What I lack is immediate mastery, which could easily be gained by a little study, but I don’t have the time to do so for the entire scope of topics. What I have discovered, however, is that at this age my daughter mostly learns on her own. She works through a very challenging math curriculum as well as science textbooks (sometimes college level), doing the problems and then checking her answers from teacher editions of the textbooks that I obtained. My role is to keep my daughter on track and help her with those few things that she still doesn’t understand after looking at the answers. My daughter’s chief frustration is that high school and introductory college textbooks explain the what but not the why. The high school teachers we know are unable to help her with this, so I tell my daughter that unless it concerns physics or math, she must wait for college and then ask the professors.

I agree that it is good for children to be sometimes taught and under the authority of adults other than parents, so I have had my daughter take science classes with lab from a local homeschooling dad, and as far as I can tell, the classes and lab component are better than what I received back in high school. My daughter already knows the subject matter, but she likes the experiments, which I cannot provide, and I see it as a good opportunity for her to get classroom experience with other kids.

Circling back to the beginning of this comment, I will say one thing that surprised me about homeschooling is how it makes me feel as if I am living more like I was created to live. Until very recently in history, children spent their days helping parents on the farm or in the shop, so when I spend a couple hours a day teaching my children or work from home when I can, I feel like I am living closer to as my forebears did. Interacting with people of all sorts of ages, as we do in our church community, also seems a bit like village life. The modern practice of sending husband and wife to different workplaces and children to age-segregated classrooms every day seems mentally and spiritually unhealthy. Of course, schools have been around a long time, too, so I am not saying school itself is unnatural. What is unnatural is how much time children are in school – I don’t think children in prior ages spent anything close to half their waking day in school for two thirds of twelve years of their lives. Sometimes I think the big social struggle of our age is whether we will live as families in self-organized communities or whether we will live as solitary drones in a giant hive.

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The details of our institutional schooling differ, but the outcome was quite similar. This was also a huge component in my decision to homeschool.

I also second your experience with my high-school age kid: He teaches himself almost everything based on the curriculum. I just review his work with him, make sure it makes sense and ask pointed questions. He knows 100x more Latin than I do, but I know just enough to ask, “What does mean? How did you translate it in this context?”

I’m not sure this will work the same with my next kid. We shall see.

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Unfortunately, this is difficult to find even among the “specialists” in the public schools. At least that was my experience.

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