How it should be done
BevK August 30th, 2007
Many think that their elite suburban public high schools or Christian schools are the perfect answer to their children’s education. Rod Dreher shares how they turned to homeschooling until they found a school that met their needs for both academics and moral culture. They were motivated by a documentary.
There are two kinds of parents: those who have seen the 1999 PBS documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County, and those who have yet to be freaked out by it.
Our firstborn was barely home from the hospital when my wife and I first saw the show, which investigated a syphilis outbreak in a prosperous suburban high school. It was a damning portrait of a peer culture run wild and well-meaning parents whose indulgent child-raising created a moral quagmire for their kids. When the final credits rolled, we had no doubt that we were going to homeschool.
Scared into homeschooling, they still weren’t homeschooling with a homeschooling lifestyle perspective. When they found a school that met their needs, they opted out of homeschooling. Not all and I believe not most homeschoolers are homeschooling purists who believe that homeschooling is foundational to the way they live their lives. As school choice broadens, especially with online schools expanding, I can see that homeschooling will come to mean many things, but also that a large number of parents who homeschool to provide better academics or to keep their children safe will choose another option when it becomes available and affordable.
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool homeschooler. I’ve got four years to go to graduate the last of my five children, and God willing, that’s exactly what I’ll do. My children wouldn’t be who they are today if we hadn’t had them home. You may take a mother’s claims of her children’s extraordinary capabilities with a grain of salt, but my children are brilliant people. I don’t mean that in an academic brainy kind of way, although they aren’t slouches in that department. They’re people that other people enjoy being with, working with, and trust to help them with their problems. I think that’s because they were home where their strengths were nurtured and their weaknesses weren’t ridiculed. We’re a tight knit family that remain tight knit even across hundreds of miles. Homeschooling as a lifestyle works.
