Home Schooling - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Having the option of home schooling is a great blessing that we Americans enjoy. I've been home schooling my children for 15 years. I have 7 children, ranging in age from 8 to 21. So far, I've home schooled them until they reach high school. Many people prefer to home school their children through elementary school. Others prefer to home school them through high school. A rare few actually home school themselves through college. There are good and bad sides to home schooling. In my opinion, the good outweighs the bad.

The first few years of home schooling were a learning experience for me. I gathered various pieces and parts of curriculum from libraries, friends, the public school book warehouse, and books I had at home. In those days, home schooling was not so popular and there were not as many resources or curriculum programs available. I have a friend who actually began writing curriculum for home schooling because there was such a void. She still writes, publishes and sells her curriculum. The standards for schooling were also much lower then. That was the era when American academia was in a downward slope, and we were no longer ranking at the top internationally. Kindergarteners only needed to know numbers to 20, the alphabet, the basic colors, as well as, how to cut and paste. Now kindergarteners are expected to know how to read phonetically, and do some basic adding and subtracting, before they continue on to the first grade.