FIFTEEN REASONS TO HOME SCHOOL DURING THE TEEN YEARS A s each school year comes to a close, my husband and I sit down to evaluate how we are doing as a home schooling family. In our house, everything is not always neat and tidy. Projects and papers are sometimes left on the floor or table. Laundry and dishes may pile up. Supper is sometimes cooked at a restaurant. Frustrations occasionally popped out of nowhere. We are not the model home school family where kids are up at the crack of dawn with all their chores done, ready to begin school by 8:00 a.m.
Perhaps, like you, we wondered if this was the path God would have us take for another year. We looked at alternatives and doubted ourselves as home schooling parents. Then God began to work on us and in us (or perhaps we finally started listening to Him). Conversations with friends and the sharing of this article by the wife of the president of HSLDA made us stop and re-re-evaluate:
1. You get to see the completion of your efforts. Something is lost when you turn over your home discipling to others. 2. You can customize your children’s education to provide motivation for their gifts and abilities. No one else will be able to provide the consistent and loving support that you can in weak areas. 3.You can direct them to early college entrance. Even public high schools realize many students are ready for college level courses and have cooperating programs with junior colleges. 4. You can continue the family building process. The teen years continue to be impressionable and formative. This is an invaluable time to cement family relationships. 5. You can be sure that your teens are learning, if they are at home. Studies have revealed that public high school students average 2 hours and 13 minutes of academic work a day. 6. You can continue to have influence over their peer relationships. Teen rebellion is not in God’s plan for the family, but it is the humanist agenda for the public schools. 7. You can protect them from pressure to conform to what the other kids are doing. This pressure is so strong in the public high school. You won’t need to spend time de-programming. 8. If you send your teens to high school, there will be a diversion away from the academic focus, as well as spiritual priorities. Be aware of the many distractions that won’t parallel the home life you have maintained. 9. Your young people will be thrown into things like boy/girl preoccupation, focus on clothes, and pressure to conform in appearance and music. 10. Vast amounts of time separated from the family will affect their relationship with you. We have all put great amounts of our heart and time into our home-schooling years, and we want those efforts preserved. 11. Home school is the best preparation for college studies. The home education "style" is closer to college-type instruction. 12. There is greater flexibility for work/study opportunities. 13. The institutional method of public education is designed around "crowd control," not learning. If and when they learn, it will be a by-product of other priorities to maintain class room order. 14. Home educators have the best available curriculum and greater selection. Public schools offer revisionist history and science that promotes their humanist perspective. The godly commitment of many great Americans has been deleted from public text books. 15. Age/grade isolation or segregation inhibits socialization. Public school children are behind their home school counterparts in maturity, socialization, and vocabulary development, as demonstrated by available research. We thank Ed & Carol Burke for sending this article to us
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