For me, the homeschooling process became clearer after my wife had our seventh child in November and I took over as substitute teacher. Taking over the reins as pedagogue, I was determined to show my wife how to structure homeschool activities. I feel obliged to say that I was generally humbled by my inadequacies, while my wife gave respectful audience to my meager achievements. Mainly, I learned that homeschooling is essentially self-paced. Like they do in public school, I tried to breeze through lessons, administer the test, and move on to the next topic. If the children didn't do well, they needed to try harder. My wife explained that my approach was flawed and that education is cumulative. Each fundamental skill is used in building up to the next level of skills. The failure of public school education is due, in large part, to pupils moving on to the next skill without mastering the last lesson. As mastery of the next skill often requires competence in the prior lessons, they cannot consistently move beyond a basic skill level. In the United States, for example, a performance gap begins to emerge in public schools around 4th grade as students move beyond basic arithmetic to general math skills. By the time they reach middle school or high school, the average student is so lost in math class that any attempt to understand Algebra is futile. And so, ironically, as much of my frustration was that public school was holding my children back, the best way for me to help them to move forward was to take my time and ensure that they understood the material.
The pace of our progress this year was slow at first, and the older the children, the slower the progress. I strongly suspect that the cause was not chronological age or socialization, but prior conditioning from their years in public school. For our 10th grader, the most obvious problem was that he expected someone to go over each lesson with him individually. For the most part, homeschooling doesn't work this way. Homeschooling, especially the program in which my children are enrolled (Seton), is reading intensive. The children, especially the older ones, read a lot of books and write many reports. Compare this to public school where they have few reading or writing assignments, and where there are ample teacher lectures and multiple-choice tests. Our tenth grader was simply unprepared for the amount of reading and writing that his homeschooling program required. Concerned, I had him read aloud a paragraph, and his reading was fluid and appropriate. This is a boy whom the public school will miss for his PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) scores. Though he is not a leisure reader, he has been consistently above-average throughout his public education. But to rank above-average from a pool of mediocrity doesn't say much. Quickly, it became apparent that his reading comprehension was sorely lacking. Sure, he could read aloud fairly well. But when asked to summarize what he just read, he was stumped. He couldn't remember. He was waiting on someone else to tell him what it meant, explain the significance, and tell him what he needed to know for the test. In short, he had been conditioned not to think for himself. Though we have met with considerable resistance from him, this scenario has only strengthened our resolve to continue homeschooling. For him, progress has moved at a tectonic pace, but he is gradually developing some skills as we become less tenuous. We are optimistic that he will have a major breakthrough this coming year.
Part of the reason we suspect a pending breakthrough with our 10th grader is the trajectory of our 4th grader this year. A very bright boy, our 4th grader struggled until after Christmas time, began to catch on during the third quarter, and ended the year on fire. He, too, had major problems with reading comprehension, though he too was considered above average by the public school system. It was easier for us to figure out why he was struggling. Rather than read material from A to Z first, he went straight to the review questions and tried to find the answers in the text. For eighteen weeks, he told us, "But that's how they told us to do it in [public] school!" During a break home from college, our oldest son confirmed that, during this era of teaching-to-the-test, teachers are actually discouraging students from reading and encouraging them to scan the text for the answers first. That, our older son explained, was the only way to pass the test on time. Speed was another problem we encountered with him. For the past several years of public school, he has been repeatedly drilled on his basic arithmetic skills using timed exercises. He developed a degree of pride because he was usually the fastest in his class. A side effect of all these timed exercises has been a decrease in accuracy. His papers, especially in math, have been riddled with simple mistakes. Another problem we encountered related back to the "No Child Left Behind" and the "Do Away with Ability Grouping" mentalities. This problem, we figured out toward the end of the year, when he was already devouring his assignments. In the 3rd grade of public school, he used the Saxon Math 2/3 text. We enrolled him in regular 4th grade at Seton and received the Saxon Math 4/5 textbook. We assumed that they simply printed these books to be good for two years of school. We were mistaken. The Saxon 2/3 text is actually a second grade text, with some material for the next year previewed. In an effort to keep every caught up, the public school was a year behind, included my "gifted" son. So, when we enrolled in Seton, our 4th grader skipped 3rd grade math, covered 4th grade, and previewed 5th grade. This turned out to be fortuitous because he eventually caught up, and as he became more challenged, his simple mistakes assuaged. And on a measure of achievement that I've been tracking, he showed amazing improvement in his math skills, as well as marked improvement in his reading.
His younger sister entered the 1st grade this year, and oddly enough I entered the year perhaps most anxious about her progress and ended the year the most confident. Her reading, especially, was markedly improved. As a substitute teacher, I could easily see why teachers often prefer girls. She was on-task and enthusiastic. She took to her coursework like a frog in a swamp. She has been especially receptive to her religious education. We also did some pre-school work with her younger brother and some arts and crafts with the two-year-old. Juggling everything can be quite daunting, but overall the children have been enthusiastic and hungry to learn.
An ongoing concern that has gone mostly unspoken by my siblings and mother is that the homeschooling program is heavy on religion and light on science, and I have had the opportunity to ponder this objection. My general observation is that children have a tremendous aptitude for religion, but little comprehension of science. Conversely, teens and college students—especially those with little or no prior religious education--have almost no interest or comprehension of religion. And a scant few are motivated to learn about science. It seems to me that, while some ongoing exposure to science is important, saturating early education with science is a bit like teaching monkeys how to type. Not everyone IS a scientist. Children with natural scientific proclivities will naturally gravitate toward science education as they complete high school and enter college, unless their education takes the life out of the subject.
We did have one interesting science field trip in the break this summer. We went to the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Walking through the huge hangers and displays, I was struck by the speed at which the technology progressed, especially from Wilbur and Orville Wright until about the end of World War II. Then, it seemed to me, that the rate of change slowed down, at about the time of Sputnik and the dawn of so-called modern education. Even the Apollo rockets were designed and built by people who read Shakespeare, wrote in cursive, and learned long division. Since then, most of the advances have been in size, electronics, and puzzle-solving. My observation probably contradicted the gross number of patents during recent years, but it seemed to me that most of the changes since the seventies have been refinements on technologies that already existed. It seemed to me that Alvin Toffler was wrong and that we are less shocked by the future than we are oblivious of the past. Again, at the Air Force museum, I saw an interesting contradiction between the progress of technology and the atrocities of WWII, Vietnam, and the Cold War. Though science may be an important topic, perhaps it was best understood by people who had a more classical education first.
On another note, our eldest returned from his first year of college having made the Dean's List twice and having studied Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, deTocqueville, Dostoyevski, and Tolstoy, among others. Though his public high school education was lacking, he is nonetheless a reader and his first year of college has filled in some of the gaps. And I think not coincidentally, he is a changed man. He has acquired a newfound determination, seriousness, and work ethic. I believe his newfound maturity comes from his classical education. So, it does appear that for some at least, homeschooling is not the only path toward the moral and intellectual development of young men and women.
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