Guest Post from a Real Live Homeschooling Parent

Thank you to R. Daniel Aldrich who kindly put together a fantastic guest post on the subject of homeschooling, a subject that has come up nearly everytime tuition is addressed on this and on other blogs. I welcome guest posts. If you have a subject you would like to write about, feel free to contact me.

Orthonomics Guest Post: Homeschooling
Daniel P. Aldrich

The topic of homeschooling is a touchy one for Orthodox Jews. School-based chinuch is such a historical and critical Jewish tradition that the idea of parents pulling their children out of the well-traveled standard school system to somehow pass along our precious mesorah sounds somewhat sacrilegious -- many observers must imagine that such parents couldn't really "make it" in the "normal" system. After all, most of us living in Golus pay $10,000 a year or so per child to send our children to our local cheder / day school / yeshiva to be trained as Jews, and we find it hard to believe that we could educate our children for a lot less. Moreover, professional educators are often suspicious of the idea that untrained parents could somehow do as well or better (since my parnassah comes from being a university professor, I admit I can fall victim to such sentiments myself). Another point that is often raised is that homeschoolers cannot provide the excellent mussar and middos training that our Jewish schools are so famous for, and those homeschooled kids receive none of the socialization that our schools are providing. Finally, and most obviously: which families have the time and patience to homeschool their kids?

Or maybe we're wrong. For those of who imagine that homeschoolers have gone off the path established by Jewish history, let's take a closer look at the introduction of schools as described in the Oral Torah. Our avos and imahos only began mass-schooling, i.e. having 20-40 children in one class as an adult tries to engage them, with the coming of the takana of R' Yehoshua ben Gamla as described in Maseches Bava Basra 21a. It is well known that our rabbanim, including Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, zt'l, have lamented the fact that individual parents - fathers, more specifically - no longer are able to fulfill their obligations in transmitting our Torah. It is clear that until some sort of societal breakdown- perhaps one result of the brutal Roman occupations of Israel - the Jewish tradition was not passed along bygroups, but instead by parents. Only once we collectively lost the ability to work individually with our children – perhaps because of so disrupted families and war orphans - did we turn establish mechanchim and morahs as our shluchim. So it can be argued that homeschooling, not mass schooling, that is the ideal and historical derech for us. To put it in halachic terms, mass schooling is b'dieved, and homeschooling is l'hatchila.

Next, is it possible that homeschooling parents can possibly compete with teachers? One might assume that homeschoolers are not doing as well on at least the three "R"s. This assumption, however, proves to be incorrect. Most large-scale studies of standardized test scores across the North American population show that homeschooled kids do better - around 30 percentage points better - than average. Of course, one explanation is that homeschooling parents have passed along their intellectual genes totheir children, so that no matter where the kids went, they'd do well. (That would just reinforce the argument that these parents, with their higher than average intelligences, are making better choices inseeking to individualize the training for their children, rather than blindly following their peers by putting their children into schools where they may be bored. And, not to drive home the point too finely,but the results from the 1999 National Household Education Surveys (NHES) show that home schooling parents tend to have more education than those that don't home school. ) Or, you could argue that thesechildren score better in areas like math, writing, and reading because they have more one-on-one instruction, which is also pretty obvious. Which is to say, if we are educate each child according to his or her way ('Chanoch l'naar al pi darko') as Mishlei 22:6 instructs us, we must know the child's learning approach and possess the time to alter our teaching style to match it. Once you have 30 children in a class, your time is spent in discipline and teaching to the middle, not establishing 30 different tracks of communicating the lesson. Disagree? Please visit your child's classroom to see if the one teacher there has time to adjust his or her lesson for each child. Even the best trained, highest motivated, and most eager teachers simply lack the time to do this.

Either way, home schooled kids come out being able to read, compute, and write at least as well, if not better, than their counterparts in mass schools.

Another common argument tossed off by opponents is that homeschooling doesn't give our children socialization and mussar, as they get in school. However, in our personal discussions with parents who dislike the idea of homeschooling, the most common argument that they raise, bizarrely enough, is that "events" like bullying, peer pressure (to do things like smoke, drink until passing out on Simchas Torah and Purim, etc.), and negative interactions with teachers who don't get along with our children provide "learning opportunities" in mass-schools that homeschooled children miss out on. This seems to bethe "encountering unpleasant things makes you into better people" approach that stereotyped the basic training of the U.S. military. If we really believe this, then mosdos chinuch should bring skinheads andmissionaries into the schools to provide such challenges to the children - because that is really best for them! I think we all really want our children to receive personalized attention and a supportive environment - so bullies and unpleasantness are not part of the standard curriculum. The broader canard of "socialization" has been destroyed time after time in studies by scholars beginning more than twenty decades ago with the research done by Gustaven (1981), Ray (1990), Shyers (1992) and Stough (1992). You can find these academic studies and read them for yourself (see the source list at the end of this post).

Even when the homeschooling is done, as the name suggests, at home, the children have a major outlet of social interaction in the form of extracurricular activities. Most parents who take the time to homeschool their children think about which activities – whether sports, arts and crafts, or extracurricular group learning trips - will be best for their children. After all, such parents home school precisely because they want to be able to better match their childrens' needs, and parents recognize that academic skills need tobe rounded out by social ones. (One homeschooling mom joked with me that if she really did all of the activities that she could, she wouldn't have time to get the academics underway.)

We've found that most of the classic arguments against homeschooling simply don't hold water, and we believe that the main opposition parents have to homeschooling really boils down to the following issues: most of us don't homeschool because we don't have the time or energy or ability, or think that it would damage our kids or perhaps our reputation in the frum community. If both parents are working out of the home full time, mass schooling is a logical thing to do. Well, perhaps not. If you calculate taxes from the second income, nanny and day care fees, day school tuition, and so on, having one parent stay home full time to homeschool may in fact be financially advisable.

Many of us are probably concerned about what our community might think of us if we didn't put our kids into the local school; I had this discussion with a family in Lakewood that wanted to homeschool their kids because the schools there did not meet their expectations, but they ended up not doing so out of fear of social repercussions. Another family in a Midwestern community told us of the pained looks and strained conversations they have had once they took their daughters out of the local schools to educate them at home. Our community certainly stigmatizes a number of things, and not sending our kids into the "standard" schools might indeed be on that long list.

Alternatively, there are those of us who can handle the social pressures but are worried that we're not "up to it." As one of my chaverim pointed out, parents may not trust themselves to be able to pass along their yiddishkeit. This can be particularly true of BTs, but FFB can have this worry as well. One such refrain could be, "I'm such a b’dieved Jew, and don't even come to the ankles of the mechanchim who are steeped in Torah, let alone the menahel/Rosh Yeshiva. Surely, the less I am mashpiah to my own kids, the better." It is certainly true that as individuals we have less yichus and perhaps even less training than our hard-working teachers. But at the end of the day, who knows our children’s needs better? And who is motivated to ensure that those needs are met? And, think back to the period of time when there were no public schools – even then, generations upon generations of fine Jewish children were raised solely by their families. (For readers interested in Rav Desslers’ thoughts on the concept that most yeshivish schools seek to produce gadolim even at the cost of those [many] students who do not benefit from such an educational approach, see the ongoing discussion at Da’as Torah http://daattorah.blogspot.com/2008/10/r-dessler-produce-gedolim-even-if-most.html ) For parents worried about their personal chesronos, tremendous resources are readily available to back them up and support them in their drive to home school. Resources include the hundreds of lesson plans, worksheets, and curricula at Torah u'Mesorah's Chinuch.org, MorahMoriah.com, as well as virtual support groups from various on-line list servers including Chevra and JewishOrthodoxandHomeSchooling on Yahoo Groups. You don't need to be a professional educator or recreate the educational wheel to be able to work with fantastic and creative materials; with the generosity of these mechanchim and community members all of us can develop our children’s potential.

A final concern from parents who are considering homeschooling is that a lot of the social "glue" in the frum world comes from Jewish geography in which we compare common experiences - schools, camps, yeshivas, neighborhoods – to figure out what we have in common. Are we denying our children normalcy by not enrolling them in a cheder or yeshiva? One simple solution is to ensure that you regularly access,if not live in, a strong frum community where you and your children participate in chagim, shiurim, and events such as Bnos, Pirchei, Father and Son Learning, etc. Another approach – for those with the resources – would involve regular summer camp enrollment. Finally, many homeschooling parents expect that eventually their children will enter a “standard” yeshiva or seminary when they are older – so that those children will also be successful at Jewish geography.

Perhaps the most critical message here is that we as parents – despite our financial investment in schools – remain responsible for their spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual development. If you're dissatisfied with the schools that your children attend, you ALWAYS have another option – going back to the really “old school” technique of raising and teaching your children yourself.

Sources:
Gustavsen, G. 1981. Selected characteristics of home schools and parents who operate them. Doctoral Dissertation, Andrews University. University Microfilms International No. 8205794.

Ray, Brian D. 1990. A Nationwide Study of Home Education: Family Characteristics, Legal Matters, and Student Achievement. Published by NHERI.

Shyers, Larry Edward. 1992. Comparison of Social Adjustment Between Home and Traditionally Schooled Students. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Florida. University Microfilms No. DA9304052.

Stough, Lee. 1992. Social and Emotional Status of Home Schooled Children and Conventionally Schooled Children in West Virginia. ERIC ED# 353 079.