What is a homeschooler?
Before I knew what homeschooling was, this seemed like a pretty straightforward question. A “homeschooler” is someone who doesn’t go to school; they learn at home.
But then I actually looked into homeschooling and… that’s not quite right. They don’t go to a public school from Monday to Friday, true enough. But they may hybrid homeschool, where they go to a private school or micro school for several days a week, and learn from home the other days. Or, they may learn some core curriculum at home and take classes at a community college, a homeschool co-op, a tutorial service, at museums, or through other local educational programs. So in reality they may actually spend a significant amount of time learning in more formal institutional settings.
Ok, so maybe a homeschooler is a legal term, and you’re officially “homeschooling” if you’ve registered as a “homeschooler” with your state department of education? This sounds plausible, but then that would cut out about 1/4 of the U.S. homeschooling population living in states that don’t require parents to provide notification that they’re homeschooling their child. Ok, so this definition won’t work either.
Perhaps we should consult the arbiter of our collective knowledge, Wikipedia. They actually provide a fairly good definition (even though they take about 800 characters to do so), but doing so requires the use of words like “usually” and “spectrum” and means acknowledging that the “actual practice of homeschooling can look very different” from family to family. They do still make the mistake of referring to it as a practice of learning “outside of a school” which, as discussed above, is not quite right.
Ok, so how would I define homeschooling? Homeschooling is the practice where the parents take the ultimate responsibility for educating their kids. They may take some, or maybe the vast majority of it upon themselves. They may also subcontract parts of it out to others who specialize in a certain area.
For example, maybe your child wants to learn about midwifery after her baby brother was unexpectedly born in the living room. Unless a parent is a midwife or OB/GYN, this is probably somewhat of a black box. Or perhaps a child loves helping with home projects and wants to learn more about plumbing systems. The ideal learning environment for each of these requires certain expertise, specific tools, and deliberate physical spaces where children can be mentored, play around with things, experiment, ask questions, or physically create something.
Or maybe the parents are looking for a social learning experience so their child can learn to be a bit more outgoing and collaborative instead of tinkering all the time alone in the attic, so they sign the child up for a robotics club.
None of these activities involve the parent as the teacher. None of them are even necessarily done in the child’s home. Yet all of it becomes possible because the parent knows it’s their responsibility to make it happen, and unlike schools, they have a lot of flexibility to do so, often in incredibly frugal ways.
Does this mean that some kids who go to school can still “homeschool part-time”? I’d argue, yes. We should not limit ourselves to the false dichotomy of either learning in-school OR homeschooling. We should do what is best to support our children, regardless of the label. Perhaps it’d be more useful to think of homeschooling as Family Guided Education (FaGE… ok that’s awful but you get the point).
Whether you’re guiding your child’s education full time, or part time, you’re doing valuable work and more help is on the way. The educational landscape is changing to increase affordable options, broaden available opportunities, and expand access to new programs, and this will greatly benefit families and children.
Personally, I’m very excited to see what’s next.
