By Sarah Buchwalder
This summer, one of HOME's board members was interviewed by The Maine Monitor for a forthcoming article on home education. That news article was released this week, under the title “Homeschooling is growing in Maine. Here’s what that looks like.” At the outset of the article, a homeschool parent describes discovering – when COVID-
19 regulations required everyone to do school at home – that her child was both happier and more successful learning that way.
And that right there is exactly the reason why we have always fought for home education in Maine: because children in loving homes thrive at home, with the people who know them best and care about them the most!
Many, many parents in Maine and across the country found that homeschooling was not only possible but far more desirable during the pandemic shutdowns. Here are some more reasons we hear parents considering and choosing home education:
- My child was bullied.
- Chronic health issues make school attendance difficult.
- We are a military family (or move a lot due to another career) and want to give our children more stability and consistency.
- My child has special needs or a learning disability and thrives with one-on-one guidance in a familiar and safe setting.
- My gifted child was bored or not challenged in school. We wanted to provide a more rigorous academic experience.
- My child has anxiety, and the school setting was becoming detrimental to mental health. (My child is a trauma survivor, and the pressure of school was too much. My child was getting stomachaches or headaches every morning before school. My child was having a meltdown every day after school.)
- We live in a beautiful place and wanted to give our children the chance to spend more time outdoors.
- School buildings are ecologically wasteful.
- Kids grow so quickly – I wanted to be able to spend as much time with them as possible.
- Distance: my child was spending too much time on the bus/in the car.
Throughout the rest of The Maine Monitor’s article, a portrait is painted of homeschoolers in Maine as primarily Protestant, young-earth Christians, heavily reliant on homeschool co-ops. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with people of faith educating their children at home or choosing homeschooling exactly for that reason (or joining a co-op!). But we have not found this picture representative of the variety of homeschoolers and potential homeschoolers who reach out to us or join us for events, or even representative of most of those who comprise our organization (which is, after all, founded on faith; and our faith is not something we shy away from). While we know for sure that the secular viewpoint in home education was also made available to The Maine Monitor, it was not included in the article.
Why does that unrepresentative portrait of homeschoolers in Maine matter? For a lot of reasons, but most of all because other parents out there who don’t match that checklist and are thinking about homeschooling may read it and decide, “Well, that doesn’t sound like me or my family. Homeschooling must not be for us.”
We’ve mentioned the reasons we see parents choosing home education. Now what do their families look like? What do their homeschools look like?
Many single parents are turning to homeschooling. Retirees are homeschooling their grandchildren as inflation increasingly pressures both parents in two-parent households to work full time. Work-from-home parents are doing both. Parents with disabilities are homeschooling.
Maine has atheist homeschoolers. Catholic homeschoolers. Homeschooling families with no religious affiliation. Jewish homeschoolers. Contemporary Pagan homeschoolers.
Students who are classically educated. Unschoolers. Hybrid homeschoolers. Charlotte Mason method homeschoolers. Homeschoolers using (HOME's very own!) unit studies. Waldorf and Montessori education happening at home. DIY or eclectic
homeschoolers.
The current model of public school education is 75 years young. While that fills most of our lifetimes and memories, human beings have been raising and educating their children within their families before time was recorded. The current model of school
education is also not infallible. Education is not necessarily best left to “experts” only recently qualified as such in human history. YOU can homeschool, whatever your belief system, and whatever your family looks like. You can also do so without a co-op – or you can create your own!
We wholeheartedly support caring, devoted parents of any stripe educating their own children. We exist to help make that possible and to keep that right and privilege legal.