It turns out there are a lot of parents who don’t think distance learning is adequate for their children. It isn’t. It really isn’t. Neither is our up close and personal public education. Most parents have known this for a long time, but most didn’t also realize they could do something about it until the pandemic happened.
It’s funny to me that the bluest states in the nation were the ones who shut their schools down the longest. This goes against the progressive fantasy of having both parents in the workplace paying their taxes, while the children are ensconced in the indoctrination enclaves of the schools. Call me a positive thinker if you’d like, but this is ironically a blessed situation.
Please believe me when I say I didn’t seek out these stats on my own. I’m no longer the homeschool champion I used to be who goes out and looks for the answers I want to find. Okay, I was probably never exactly that person, but I used to be more of a homeschool champion. After raising two children who were completely homeschooled, and two more who have been given a greater variety of options, I’ve been tempered in my bleeding-heart idealism. Even though I didn’t go looking for this info, obviously the propagandist media is putting out their whine-fests about these stats, claiming that if the trend continues, it will bankrupt the schools.
La-dee-dah. At least as far as New Mexico goes, I couldn’t care less. We have the worst schools in the nation. It doesn’t matter how much money we pour into them, they do not get better. And oh, the school systems will beg for money. They’ll beg for it, and they will get it because when a high proportion of the population is on one kind of welfare or another, they don’t really care whether bonds pass that will raise taxes. Of course, higher taxes will affect all citizens at some level, but the schools here are such garbage institutions that the vast majority of the population will not be able to calculate or predict how it will affect them personally. That was why, years ago, the people voted to rape New Mexico’s rainy day fund (the kind of fund created for state emergencies like, gosh, a…pandemic) and give it to the schools. Guess what? It didn’t help the schools get any better.
Pouring money at schools doesn’t help. It never helps. Wealthy areas have better schools because upper middle-class parents are generally well-educated and consequently care about their children’s education — they understand why it’s important, and they have the skills to push their children to achieve. It’s not precisely that poorer communities don’t care. Sometimes individuals do; sometimes they don’t. It’s that they either believe they don’t have the skills to help their children, or both parents are too busy working to do much more than nag their children to do their homework.
There is a certain hopelessness regarding life outcomes in poorer communities that was broken or shifted during the pandemic. I’m sure most parents didn’t want their lives disrupted, but it gave them the opportunity to explore homeschooling, and many found that it was actually doable. Not only is it doable, but it gives parents the opportunity to discover what their children do or do not understand and to spend more time on those lessons. In a school setting, if a child doesn’t understand a concept, they will get a paper or test marked with wrong answers, and then the class will move on. In a homeschool setting, when the answers are marked wrong, the children have the time to learn why and correct their answers during school hours. That last bit is important because once children leave the classroom they have little incentive to go back and correct their work, even if the teacher is offering a better grade for doing so.
It always thrills me when people learn they have the wherewithal to fix problems like poor education. Believing you can’t do something is a mental block that will stand in your way your entire life. It doesn’t even seem to matter how poorly educated the parents are in a homeschool setting — if parents realize they can help their children, they will figure out how. If they don’t understand something themselves, they now have the resources at their fingertips to study it and understand it. When I started homeschooling, the internet was new technology. I still did most of my research in books. If I didn’t understand something, I had to find a library resource. And oh, by golly, did I ever. I still do, to be honest. But now parents can look up the concepts they never learned in school in a matter of minutes, so that they can teach their children. How incredible is that?!
I’m sure you’re going to ask how poor parents who work all the time can homeschool. It’s one thing to discover you have the ability to impart information to your children. It’s quite another to believe you have the time to do so. Well, I don’t have an easy answer for that. I only know what I’ve seen throughout my years of homeschool. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There were always those moms in the homeschool group, even a handful of single moms. I’ve personally known two moms who started daycares in their homes to make it possible. I know some who homeschooled their kids for a few hours in the morning before they had to go to work (generally a grandma or another babysitter would come over at that point). Currently, I follow a vlog of a Mexican woman who homeschools her son in the morning before she goes to her shift as a nurse. She and her husband swap shifts. See, it’s even possible in other countries!
Anyway, I hope my positive thoughts on this subject are merited. Some of these new homeschool families will drop out eventually, even though these articles are appearing now because they haven’t yet done so. All I know is small changes in our thinking paradigms can make big changes in the long run. Thus, hope is warranted. Wait…when is hope not warranted? The darkest hours humanity has suffered were much darker than these, and people still had reason for hope.
*When I wrote this post late last night, I titled it “homeschool doubles,” which, I realized, didn’t quite mean what I had meant. So I changed it to “homeschoolers double”….oh, dear, the pandemic weight gain has been a trial, hasn’t it?
Jill Domschot 