Why Home is the Best Classroom

Are you afraid you are going to ruin your child by homeschooling?

You are not alone; both newbies and veterans alike ask this very question a LOT! 

This is a weight that we must carry if we are going to be good parents, but it doesn’t have to be a crushing weight, if… 

…we remember the one factor that puts homeschooling above any other conventional schooling model hands-down:  

REAL LIFE. 

Books are great, academics are great, but they are not the end of all ends. Kids imprisoned in the four walls of a classroom are not going to benefit from the best learning experiences of life the way they can when their education is home-based. This is our greatest advantage. 

And, there are ways we can make the most of this greatest advantage:

No. 1: We can give kids more time (and tools) for real life learning by being more efficient with our academic training.

This includes the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with the content areas of history and some of the other sciences. I believe the best way to do this is using the vintage materials of the past. Back then they gave kids better educations at the eighth grade level than we give kids today at the high school level, and they did it in fewer months out of the year. 

No. 2: We can include our kids in more of the real life things we do as adults.

When we have our children out of school, we can take them along when we go to the bank, or the store, or to pay bills, or to negotiate for a landscaping job. They watch how we conduct business, they watch us make decisions, and they watch how people interact with each other.  

We also require them to participate in the mundane activities of life, such as cleaning out the washing machine filter, washing the car, cleaning out the rabbit hutch or chicken coop, entertaining the baby, and on and on.  

No. 3: We can give them more time for playing and pursuing their interests.

When children play, without any input from screens, they are not wasting time, they are experimenting and making sense of the information they have been gathering. As they mature this experimenting becomes more productive, and they begin to apply it to things like textile crafts, music, art, and entrepreneurial pursuits.  

No. 4: We teach them to prioritize relationships over production.

You can’t get a lot of workbook pages done while holding Gramma’s hand as she tells you a long story from her youth. Rocking the baby to sleep will probably not help with long division. But these activities do more than help us pass tests; they build the sweetness of being human in our hearts in a way that puts our minds in their rightful places as the servants they are meant to be. 

No. 5: We can take all of the real-life experiences and turn them into education-eze for recording and reporting purposes.  

We do this by using labels which sound official to officials. Here are a few examples which we can apply to everyday activities: 

• Cooperative Collaboration (working with siblings or friends on some project, from planning a vacation or camping trip to building a treehouse in the backyard). 

• Home Economics (cooking, cleaning, sewing, decorating, shopping). 

• Home Systems Management (maintaining home appliances, central air systems, the interior and exterior walls, ceilings, etc.). 

• Domestic Horticulture (the grounds outside and plants inside the home). 

• Animal Husbandry (taking care of all the domestic animals of the family). 

• Early Child Development (helping care for younger siblings). 

• Conflict Management (learning to get along with those inside and outside the family). 

• Collaborative Politics (learning how to negotiate good deals in every area of life). 

• Cultural Assimilation (visiting people in senior living or in other cultural settings different from one’s own). 

• Cooperative Work Experience (any part time job outside the home). 

• Culinary Arts (learning to cook everyday foods as well as learning to cook different cuisine). 

• Health and Nutrition (planning and making meals for the family from a nutritional standpoint). 

• Financial Survival (observing what it takes to live within the parameters of the family budget and then applying what is learned to one’s personal budget). 

Isn’t it good to know that real life is not unimportant, it is the most important part of homeschooling?

It is the reason we do all of the other studying; so our children can learn to become whole persons, not just cogs in the wheel of industry or as servants to some false utopian dream.  

If you would like to listen to this information in the form of a podcast, be sure and click below:

iTunes: Why Home is the Best Curriculum

Spotify: Why Home is the Best Curriculum