The College Fix

We’re all familiar the homeschooling stereotypes–long skirt-wearing, gun-totting, religiously zealous, backwoods-living weirdos and wackos.

A friend of mine often ads an explanatory sentence any time he tells someone he was homeschooled. “But we didn’t make our own clothes!” he says. (He’s now grown with a public-school attending family of his own.)

As someone who spent a few years in public school but most as a homeshooler, I’m familiar with public ignorance and misconceptions surrounding homescho0ling, how it works, and what kind of people choose it for their kids.

I recently came across a blog article written by Kathleen M. Berchelmann, a homeschooling mother who also happens to be a medical doctor. The article was provocatively titled “18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool their Children.”

Seems Berchelmann had struggled with some of the “backwoods” stigma surrounding homeschooling, yet she found it to be a great fit for her family. She argues that well-educated professionals such as lawyers and doctors, like herself, are increasingly among those who choose this route for their families.

In other words, homeschooling isn’t “weird” or anti-intellectual.

Alongside the usual caveat of, “It’s not for everybody,” Berchelmann offers an intriguing glimpse into the benefits her family has experienced since she decided homeschool her kids. Homeschooling does require sacrifices, of course. But, interestingly, she claims she actually has more time and less stress than she did simply trying to keep up with four kids’ activities in and travels back and forth to public school. And, naturally, she says her kids have benefited as well.

The full article is interesting and worth a read. Among her “18 Reasons,” many had to do with lifestyle, which, for far too many families, is dictated by the bureaucratic whims of overcrowded public schools.

Number six on her list stood out to me:

I like parenting more, by far.  As a mom of school-aged kids, I felt like my role as parent had been diminished to mini-van driver, schedule-keeper, cook and disciplinarian.  And there was no mercy from the schools– six minutes late for pickup and they’d be calling my husband at work, unpaid 5 cent library fine and they’d withhold my child’s report card.  Every day I’d unpack a pile of crinkled notice papers from three backpacks and hope that I didn’t miss the next permission slip.  I was not born, raised and educated to spend my days like this.  Now, I love being a mom.

For those who are cautious about the overreach of government into our private lives, one of the many appealing aspects of homeschooling is that it reclaims control of our kids’ minds and daily schedules from the U.S. Department of Education and returns it to parents who, after all, know and love their children best.

If you want to read more, check out Dr. Berchelmann’s full article here.

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(Image by Andrei.D40/Flickr)