How Homeschooling Will Save The Country

by Kiernan OConnor

We began homeschooling about seven years ago, when our oldest child, Patrick, was three years old. I guess you could call it pre-homeschooling, as it was mostly play dates and group activities with other families that also considered themselves homeschoolers.

We had just moved from New Haven, CT, to The Woodlands, TX. We joined a group of Catholic Homeschoolers. We thought we'd moved to paradise. There were a couple dozen families, and it felt like we knew every one of them.

We formed a Blue Knights group, and had no problem filling it with every eligible boy. Talk about tight-knit! Soon after, our second child, Catherine, started attending her Little Flowers group. On First Friday each month, our groups took over the parish life building of our local parish for a couple of hours, and three or four groups, from toddlers to teens, participated in group activities. Soon we were also doing nature study and other group activities.

The main point was to foster community, enhance faith formation and supplement academics. Bread of Life was a support network, purely bottom-up, so much so you couldn't even describe it as an organization. Indeed, what makes homeschooling a radical social movement, as Kevin Williamson puts it, is it breaks down the vertical, siloed structure of government schools, and allows for the free flow of information. This information takes the form of social knowledge. Essentially, women have a need to talk and share, and when a bunch of women are linked together as Catholic homeschoolers, throw in the beauty of technology and social media, and there's a lot of talking going on. All that information creates a whole lot of new knowledge, and that generates a tremendous amount of wealth. Not necessarily the financial kind; not yet, anyway, as the first homeschooled children are just now forming their own families. But wealth nonetheless, of an even greater and more sustainable kind than financial: human capital, the greatest source of wealth.

Fast-forward to today, and Bread of Life is still a pure support group, just with hundreds of families, not dozens. Indeed, I do not know most of the other families in the group (my wife does, though). Patrick still does Blue Knights and Dangerous Boys, Catherine and Mary Margaret are in Pickwick. But these groups are strictly limited in size. Tight-knit is the operative word here. Other friends and acquaintances have their children in similar small groups of their own.

Add to all of this the rise in coops. Coops, if you're not versed in homeschooling lingo, are quasi-schools, that have a more formal structure. They usually meet once a week; again, in limited size. Many of them have a uniform requirement or dress-code. Academics and faith formation are the main focus, from what I can tell, but the rigidness varies depending on the group. Basically, families self-select a coop if they like the structure, if they know and like the other families, and if they think it will benefit their children. Form community, enhance faith formation, supplement academics. Information is shared with other families not in the coops, that information becomes knowledge, and new wealth is created.

Where will all this take us, and what does this have to do with the rest of us, the majority, who do not homeschool? Recently, my good friend Brian Domitrovic chose the topic of compulsory education for his weekly column in Forbes.com. Brian is a professor of economic history, and he pointed out that since the advent of compulsory education, a good century or so ago, the impact has been to dilute the quality of education, increase the waste of resources, both time and money, and a correlation in the overall decline in both economic growth and the state of literary output.

It brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from G.K. Chesterton: "The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense."

Personally, I am always struck by the example of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who at age 16 passed a certification exam to become a teacher. The quality of her education by such a young age in today's terms would embarrass the typical college graduate of today. What makes it even more astounding is that in terms of the amount of time she spent in a formal classroom setting would hardly add up to that of a third-grader today.

A recent report says homeschooling has grown 75% since 1999, that it makes up 4% of all school age children, and is growing 7 times faster than traditional education. The law of diffusion of innovation - essentially a bell curve, puts the critical mass, or tipping point, at 16%, where a new idea or product moves from the fringe into the mainstream. The far left of the bell curve, people like myself, are never enough to generate the critical mass. Early adopters have the capacity to move something from fringe to mainstream, by taking the adoption rate to 16% or higher. That's essentially what's going on here. But, there is a distinct difference with homeschooling. No one is directing it. It's a purely organic, bottom-up phenomenon. That is why I think the long-term impact of homeschooling is being underestimated. The assumption, a correct one, in my opinion, is that we are not going to become a nation of homeschoolers. The conclusion, erroneous in my opinion, is that therefore the impact will be limited.

The perception of homeschooling among a significant portion of non-homeschoolers has dramatically changed in recent years. There is a critical mass who now envy us, who don't think we're freaks, who wonder how in the world we do it, and think they would do it, if only they could...The feel trapped in the government school monopoly, and don't perceive (yet) that there is a viable alternative.

That's about to start changing, and I think coops will play a significant role. It will start with families who just can't take it anymore, but feel trapped nevertheless, perhaps because both parents work. With a little creativity and cooperation, working mom's will form coops with the help of their homeschooling friends. They will realize they are capable of choosing, from the already vast marketplace of homeschooling, the curriculum that they want for their children. They will find that it does not take all day, every day to educate a child. They will discover that textbooks and classrooms are digital, virtual, portable, flexible, customizable and.....most important, optional!

They probably won't even think of themselves as homeschoolers, just parents trying to do what's best for their children. They will soon attract friends and relatives who are not fed up and feeling trapped, but simply attracted to the benefits. The secret will get out that homeschooling is less stressful on family life than sending children to government schools.

This is already starting. It's a slow trickle compared to what's coming. Parents in states that are more oppressive for homeschooling will demand and receive change, or they will vote with their feet. The movement is actually inevitable, and the impact will be more than we can imagine. It will be messy, unpredictable and constantly changing.

Some possibilities to contemplate:

Families will get their time back. A family that spends more time together learns to love better, to live with each other better, to be better, to care for one another.

Local communities will be less influenced by the government school monopoly. The vast sucking sound of time and money going down the drain will be challenged; the property tax system will be found lacking. Real communities will be built and nurtured.

Traditional education will get better. No, we're not going to become a nation of homeschoolers. But, more and more communities will recognize why homeschooling works, and how to adopt that knowledge to traditional schools, government or private.

The arts will thrive. Read a current issue of Art in America if you want to get a visual for our cultural soul. It's depressing. Homeschoolers are rediscovering real art, and they will shape the cultural landscape of tomorrow.

An affordable and dignified alternative to nursing homes will be discovered. It's called the extended family.

Business enterprise built on the foundation of the Compendium of Social Doctrine will be numerous and prosperous, because they will put the subjective sense of work before the objective sense. The Catholic Imagination, as Barbara Elliott envisions it, will have the necessary raw material of well-formed Catholics who need to work. As she also points out, our Evangelical brethren will accompany us in this endeavor, and the spirit that built New York and Chicago and settled the west will be at work again in America.

Of course, those of us who started homeschooling when it was still squarely in fringe-territory, will always feel a little nostalgic for the good old days, kind of like discovering a band before they make it big. Did I ever tell you about my first U2 concert?

About the Author

http://kiernanoconnor.blogspot.com

Kiernan O'Connor lives and works in The Woodlands, TX. He and his wife Jackie homeschool their four children.

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