There are almost as many reasons to homeschool as there are families who homeschool, so I will only present some of the major reasons, but you may have your own apart from or in addition to these, and if they inspire you to homeschool your children, that is all that matters. Thinking about the possibility of homeschooling is an important first step because it shows a marked interest in your child’s education, which is decidedly lacking in society today. My hope is that this post will give you the impetus to bring your child home to school, if he or she is not already there.

I have briefly mentioned the problems with public school here and here, but there are so many problems with public school, it is quite a task to enumerate them all; these are but just a few.

1. Most of elementary school is waiting, instead of learning—waiting in line, waiting for role calls, waiting for papers to be passed out or passed in, waiting while another child receives help.

2. On top of the waiting, most of the material the children are presented with is dumbed down so that all the children in the class can understand it, therefore, the lowest standard wins and even average children are not challenged.

3. There are all those issues with common core, not the least of which is that math is now taught in such a complicated manner, I’ve heard and read parents who say they can no longer help their elementary children with math because it’s so complicated!

4. The fourth problem with public school is the LGBT agenda and the offensive and massively sinful material available in the school library or even openly taught in the classroom.

5. There’s the usual bullying always found in schools from the dawn of time, I am sure. If your child happens to be the unlucky one to be the focus of that, as I was when I was younger, you will definitely want to homeschool.

6. If your child is even the least bit above average, he or she is most likely bored to death at school, as I felt when I was younger. Nothing challenged me, I almost never had to take home the homework, even in high school with advanced math and science classes, because it was just too easy for me and there was so much down time (Remember the waiting?) that I finished it all in class.

7. The time children are away from home means that you as parents no longer have an influence over your children. They are away for at least six to seven hours, even if you drop them off and pick them up from school. Then there’s the sports practice, the games, the clubs, and finally time with their friends. Homeschooling allows you to be with your children long enough to really get to know them and have more control over all those other influences in their lives.

8. Finally, if you have a child with special needs, they may not be getting the materials or attention that the need in order to excel in school. Many parents of children with special needs end up homeschooling their children after realizing the failings of the public school system.

So, with public school not an option, we look to the nearest private school which we hope will have higher academic standards than the public schools. Also, with their usually smaller class sizes, the individual children receive more attention. But for most of us, especially those with multiple children, this is not an option as private schools cost thousands of dollars each year for tuition, plus the cost of uniforms, and other expenses. Also, many private schools, if not most private schools, can and do suffer from the same problems just mentioned with public schools.

Now, with public schools and some private schools, if you happen to be Christian, religion is definitely a reason to homeschool. All of the time in public schools, religion is completely avoided, or even punished to the point of expulsion if openly practiced! Most of the time, even Christian private schools still fail, as the religious instruction is so general as to be only a single subject separate from all other subjects, and therefore not integrated into the curricula, even history. And at least some, if not most Catholic schools don’t even teach Catholicism. They teach basic Christianity or even just “world religions” with a general overview of the many religions in the world today.

One of the greatest reasons to homeschool is the flexibility it offers. Whether you or your spouse are in the military, or you or your spouse travel a lot for your job, or you or your spouse work weird hours on your job, homeschooling your children can fit with your schedule. Even if you’re pregnant, have a baby or a toddler or both, have a child with special needs, or a child with high aptitudes, homeschooling your children can fit with your expectations and special issues. Whether you only completed high school, have a doctorate degree, or even if you dropped out, homeschooling your children can work for you.

For me, and I hope for you as well, the more I read about public school versus homeschooling, the more I am convinced it is (almost) the only way to educate in this modern world where even mediocre schools are as hard to find as a tiny Lego in shag carpet. But most importantly, almost no schools are suggesting, let alone requiring, material to be memorized. I discussed memorization elsewhere, so I won’t go into that here other than to say, if you think you have found a perfect school (public or private): academically challenging, wonderful teachers, no peer pressure or bullying, no immoral agendas, no vulgar library books, or no propaganda in the curricula—it is still best to homeschool, unless there is a strong focus on memorization! I will say it again, memory work=education, because memory=knowledge. If you don’t have the material put into your long-term memory, you don’t know it.

The final and most important reason to homeschool is to ensure that your children actually receive an education. One of the biggest problems with modern society is the lack of education today, but that problem is compounded by the fact that most people believe they are educated, having completed at least high school, if not a bachelor’s degree or beyond.

As I mentioned previously, school standards today are utterly dwarfed by what many people were taught in even the one-room schoolhouses one hundred years ago and before. Their level of education can barely even be achieved today with a doctorate degree at most universities, because of the lack of professors who have the knowledge to teach such and the severe lack of universities that even offer such a challenging curricula.

Most people today don’t remember a fraction of what they learned in high school, and most of what is retained from college is that which is used regularly in the profession. All other knowledge, is lost down the rabbit hole, and we just google on the spot and consider ourselves good, but if we don’t actually know the information, we can’t think about it, putting it together with other information to compare and contrast, come to conclusions, or discover errors or fallacies.

I’m sure we have all noticed how scattered people’s thoughts are as we browse our Twitter or Facebook feeds, receive texts and emails from businesses, friends, and family, and even read the confused and rambling blog posts and news articles abundant on the internet. Most people make judgments based on little more than an emotional reaction with very little if any sound reasoning behind it.

Even doctors and lawyers are not spared this phenomenon, and we usually think of them as some of the highest educated individuals. For example, I once saw the doctor-host on The Doctors TV show actually break down in yelling and tears because he couldn’t actually come up with a serious reason why we should vaccinate children. Children need to be educated, because without an educated society, democracy falls to the degraded level of the mob.

Homeschooling, by contrast, is what you make of it. It could be just as bad as the public school education, especially if all you do is bring your children home to use the public school curricula, available as a “homeschool” option in many states. Or, it can be as challenging and as fun as you make it for your children.

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