Seven Compelling Reasons To Homeschool Your Children

Why homeschooling? If you research the topic for five minutes, you will find many reasons to homeschool. However, you may not have heard of perhaps the seven most compelling reasons of all.

They come from John Taylor Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Actually, Gatto – who, back in the early 1990s won both the New York City Teacher of the Year as well as the New York State Teacher of the Year awards – calls these reasons the “seven lessons” taught in a public school setting. Here are they are:

1. Confusion. Schooled children see no connection between one lesson and the next. Because there are none. What they just did in reading has nothing to do with their upcoming science lesson which has nothing to do with the math lesson they will experience after lunch. Furthermore, everything is taught out of context, and the sequence given to curriculums has no meaning and is arbitrary.
2. Class position. Kids have to stay where they are placed, regardless of their interests or true ability level.
3. Indifference. Kids have to learn not to care too much about anything so that they can drop everything at the drop of a hat and move on to the next arbitrary and unrelated lesson.
4. Emotional dependency. A student’s self-esteem depends on the teacher’s ability to correctly ration rewards and execute punishments. He can’t doesn’t even have the freedom go to the bathroom when needed, if the teacher decides that he is lying or should be able to “hold it.”
5. Intellectual dependency. God forbid a child be able to make any educational choices of their own. Who knows what kind of creative thinker she would become if we allowed such behavior? No, children – even high schoolers – must be told what they “need” to know, or they cannot enter society as responsible adults.
6. Provisional self-esteem. In school, you are only as important as your grades are high.
7. One can’t hide. A student is under constant surveillance, encouraged to tattle on other students. Homework is given as a way to make sure that the student is kept under tight institutional supervision at home, as well, because they have no right to their own free time to discover and work on their interests and abilities.

As a former schoolteacher (13 years!) I can attest to the truth of Gatto’s assessment of the real lessons taught in schools – public or private. If you have children and are not already homeschooling, I encourage you to get a copy of Dumbing Us Down and ask yourself: “Is this what I really want my children to experience until they are eighteen?”