Should I Homeschool?

Most of the parents who end up on this page typed some version of “should I homeschool” into a search bar at night, and I’d bet most of them don’t actually want to homeschool. What they want is for the thing they’ve been noticing to stop, and homeschooling is the only exit anybody has ever named for them, so that’s the word they type.

So before we get anywhere near that decision, sit with a smaller one for a minute, because it’s the one that actually matters: is what you’re noticing real?

I taught in public high schools for eleven years, more than two thousand kids, and I’ll tell you what I noticed, because it’s probably close to what you’re noticing from the other side of the kitchen table. Learning was a chore. Not sometimes, every day. Nothing happened unless it was for a grade or a check mark, and getting a room of fifteen-year-olds to do anything with real meaning in it was like pulling teeth, and I don’t mean the kids were difficult, I mean they had been trained for ten years that meaning was not the point. Our staff meetings were about things that did not move the needle. The practices we were handed were band-aids, and everyone in the building knew they were band-aids, and we applied them anyway because that was the job. I went home most days thinking the same sentence: this is not what I got into this for.

Here’s the part that took me years to understand. None of that was the teachers. I worked with people who cared more than you’d believe. It was the design. A system built around calendars and coverage and sorting is going to produce a kid who learns to get it done and stop caring what it’s about, because that is what the system rewards, and it will produce that kid whether the teacher in the room is wonderful or not. I was in the room. I was sometimes the wonderful teacher. It still happened.

What’s actually wrong with the school system (and what isn’t)

School is not failing at what it was built to do. It is doing it extremely well. It was built to move a lot of children through a lot of content on a fixed schedule, and it does that, and the cost is everything that doesn’t fit the schedule: recess, sleep, reading a whole book instead of an excerpt, following a question past the bell, being eight and still playing. Those things aren’t missing because somebody forgot them. They’re missing because they’re in the way.

And plenty of kids are fine. Some kids are built for the structure, some schools are better than the average, and some teachers close the door and do something real anyway (I was one of them, and it was the best part of the job). If your kid is thriving, nothing on this page is an argument that she isn’t.

But if you’ve been watching a kid shrink… if the stomach aches are only on school days, if the questions she used to ask have gone quiet, if she holds it together all day and comes apart in the car, then listen. That’s not you being dramatic, and it’s not a phase, and it is not fixed by a better planner or a sticker chart. It’s the fit. And you’re allowed to say so out loud even if every adult around you says she’s fine.

You don’t have to homeschool to question the system

This is where most of the advice online goes wrong. Homeschooling is one answer, and it’s the one my family chose, and it is not the only one. You can keep your kid in school and still refuse homework in second grade. You can protect sleep like it’s a subject. You can stop asking “what did you get” and start asking “what did you make.” You can read the whole book at home when the class is reading three chapters. Questioning the system is not an exit, it’s a stance, and it’s available to every parent whether or not they ever fill out a withdrawal form.

For what it’s worth, I never filled one out. My kids went to Montessori preschool and then never to public school, and the reason is simple: I knew what I saw happen to other people’s children and I knew I could not change the system fast enough to protect my own from it. That was a decision not to enter, made over years, and it was the right one for us (ADHD and giftedness run in this house, and a standard grade-level classroom was never going to serve kids who are years ahead in one subject and differently wired in another). It might not be the right one for you. The essays below are not here to talk you into it.

Where to start, depending on what brought you here

If you’re here because something feels wrong and nobody will confirm it, start with You Don’t Have to Homeschool to Question the System and then School Doesn’t Just Teach Math. It Quietly Teaches What Success Looks Like. Those two will give you the language for the thing you’ve been noticing.

If you’re here because of a specific fight with the school, the essays are sorted by the fight: homework in elementary school, recess being taken away, the screens on every desk, the reading level your kid got assigned, and why nobody reads a whole book anymore.

If you’re here because you’re actually weighing the decision, read Deciding to Homeschool and Why We Chose to Homeschool for how it happened in my house, then Why Homeschooling Makes People Uncomfortable for the conversation you’ll have at the next family dinner. And if you’re comparing philosophies, Montessori vs. Public School, Reggio, Montessori and Waldorf and Charlotte Mason vs Montessori will save you a month of forum reading.

One thing to do tonight

Don’t decide anything. Deciding is what the internet wants you to do, and you’ve got time. Instead, take eighteen minutes and go through You’re Not Imagining It. It’s free, it’s eighteen statements about your kid this week, and at the end it names the pattern you’ve been seeing instead of handing you a score. It will not tell you to pull your kid out of school. It will tell you whether what you noticed is real, which is the question you actually came here to ask.

Then come back and read whichever essay matches what it named.