I homeschool my kids after my oldest spent K through 2nd grade at a public school in Oakland, California. She was tired and bored at the end of a 6 1/2 hour day of “learning”-to-the-test.” Her favorite time of day was the sporadic ten-minute recess, when she visited with her many equally dismayed and depressed friends. At lunch, they all sat on fresh, toxic blacktop to eat for twenty minutes before they were allowed to stand and play for another twenty before returning to their box of twenty plus kids of the same age to ingest uncreative textbook presentations of the world’s workings. I respect my children’s desire to be part of the world and not sequestered into an institution that decides what, how, and when they should learn. The common school environment is only enraging our children. I do believe there are good schools out there, but the majority are purely a low-budget daycare with conformist intentions.

Our teachers are generally underpaid, under appreciated and overworked — our parents are over-worked and our government is expecting more misdirected progress from us all everyday. I felt a responsibility to my children to take them out of the quagmire. Now, they take classes with children of all ages, play freely more often, choose and follow the studies that most attract them …. I feel lucky that I’m able to “home”-school my children. I wish everyone who wanted to do the same were able.

The comments about learning to deal with different situations is interesting. It seems to me that in the public school, you are only dealing with one situation, which is fairly tightly controlled. In homeschooling, you have the option of exposing your child to a variety of learning experiences and environments that are simply not logistically possible in the public school.

At one time, children at least had recess at school, but this seems to be happening less and less. Homeschooled children have a lot more opportunities for diverse learning and social experiences than many people realize. The misperception is easy to make…I made it too. Most of us attended school of some sort and our memories dominate what we believe about it. But my children know the kids in the neighborhood, the elderly neighbors, kids form the homeschool group and the groups they have joined. Even though school is in session, we are getting ready to go to Denver for a week which will be an educational trip as well as a family one.

Homeschooling for most of us is more about opportunity than you might first think!

No homeschooling here, even though I’m a professor in the liberal arts and feel absolutely certain that I would be able to create an excellent cirriculum for my daughter. The main reason it’s not even an option for us is the simple fact that you have to learn, sooner or later, how to relate to all sorts of people and deal with all sorts of situations. There’s no better place to learn these than in public school, and the younger the better.

We had the best influence on our decision: we’re good friends with a homeschooling family. Seeing all the different ways they learned and the flexibility it can have, I know we can make it work for us when the day comes.

I’m not some super-organized, super-crafty person either. Call me arrogant, but I just think we can do a better job of giving our child a complete education than a long line of maybe good-maybe bad teachers who have to deal with 25 other kids and, more often than not, have to teach to a test.