From School To Homeschooling
Originally printed in GWS 63, 1988, this letter is a good example of how parents can help their children get comfortable with learning at home. It is amazing to me how so much of the information we printed is pertinent to our current time.—PF
Janice Prindle wrote in the April issue of Vermont’s Learning at Home newsletter:
On homeschooling a child who’s already been to school—we anticipated problems, but they never materialized. In retrospect, here’s what I think helped:
We let our daughter (then 7 and in her second year at a private school) know that we were exploring many options for the coming year. Of course, this didn’t come out of the blue, because we’d all had problems with school from the start, and even though she liked, or thought she liked, her school she was often unhappy there.
We let her participate in our explorations, which included a visit to another school, but we made it clear that while her thoughts and feelings were important to us, it was our decision, since as her parents it was our job to look after her best interests. I don’t believe in burdening young children with the responsibility of making important decisions (and they know this is important, however reversible the decision may be). I felt a lot of relief on her part, after months of tension, once we stopped asking, “What do you want? What do you think is your problem with school?” and instead began saying, “We know you’re unhappy and we’re going to help you.” In short, let the young child know that you’re taking charge to protect him or her (not officiously, of course!)
Before we made the decision, we visited another homeschooling family with a girl the same age as ours. They were wonderful, interesting, and supportive. Just meeting nice “normal” people doing this “strange” thing was all it took to convince my daughter (and husband!) that homeschooling was a reasonable option. I suspect that the longer a socially oriented child (like my daughter) spends in school, the longer the perhaps subconscious impression that school—no matter how unpleasant—is normal, lasts. The only way you can challenge that idea without arousing antagonism and insecurity is by making friends who don’t fit the conventional school pattern. Most children, like most grownups, want to feel that they fit into some kind of community, I believe. So it’s worth seeking out other homeschoolers beforehand, in a social context, to give the child a positive idea of homeschoolers before he or she has to start thinking, “Hey, I’m a homeschooler—whatever that is. Sounds weird.” If your child is a good reader, I would encourage him or her to read GWS, Nancy Wallace’s Better Than School, etc. We all tend to accept, as part of life, what we see in print.
I personally would not announce, “We’re going to homeschool this year,” without having thought through just how we would do that. The younger the child, I think, the more concrete an image is needed of what homeschooling will be like. I’m convinced we had an easier time because, even before we said we would homeschool, we were (unintentionally) painting a rosy picture with conversation about things we would do if we homeschooled—specifically, sports and social activities that were previously out of the question when we were on a school schedule. We also talked about what our daily routine might be like. In other words, we weren’t comparing a known, school, with a total unknown, homeschool.
Also, knowing that we had approval from the state may have helped invest us with the authority our daughter associated with “real” teachers.
