My youngest went to a small public school and by five he was reading newspapers. He later taught himself to play piano and now a blues harmonica. I never could have homeschooled them. I was too impatient. My life was a disaster at that time and homeschooling wasn’t really being touted then. The school they went to wasn’t a bad school but this was in the 70’s. My grandchildren go to the same school. They aren’t TOO politically correct yet. I offered to pay for one of my granddaughters to go to our christian school but nobody would take me up on it. Ah, sad but true (LOL).
I graduated from high school in 1973. Public high school. I had all excellent English teachers. I had a geometry teacher in my sophomore year who had just returned from service in the Peace Corp. Although he was somewhat wacky, and I’m sure he was a liberal, he knew how to teach math, and I learned.
But before I graduated from High school it was easy to see which direction public education was headed. One history teacher loved to talk to us about how great it would be to smoke weed in a space suit. History and social studies teachers were then trying to discredit our nation’s founding fathers — BIG TIME — and introducing to us, more globalist and socialistic alternative. to the U.S. Constitution. I believe one was The New States Constitution.
Nine years after I graduated from high school, our first child was ready to begin kindergarten. We had kept an eye on the schools. In 1982, public school was not even a consideration for our children, come what may. But you see, our children’s spiritual and moral welfare had priority over developing careers or wealth. Our children were more important than owning two cars or a house. But we’ve almost always had two cars, anyway, and we’ve owned two decent houses completely debt free (never been in debt to a bank for a house). We are debt-free today, and I give all glory to God! I believe that He particularly blessed us for keeping the priorities straight.
I am not at all saying that home schooling guarantees freedom from debt. Not at all. Wouldn’t it be stupid to say so! What I am saying is that American people used to hold the spiritual and moral development of their children in priority far above wealth, or keeping up with the Jones’. And there was a time when God did bless this nation, as a whole, accordingly.
Now we have DEBT CRISES. We’ve had it before, but my conclusions are the same about the previous periods. The 1920s saw an era of moral licentiousness, spiritual decline, and twisted family priorities, and great evangelists were trying to tell the nation so. The 1930s -— I think we could call that DEBT CRISIS.
We’ve never fully recovered from that earlier spiritual and moral declension; we just started inviting more of it from the 1950’s on to the present. And so by the beginning of the 1980s, for us public school education could not have been an option for our children.
We are 26 year veterans in home schooling. We still have a 15 year-old, an 11 year-old and a 6 year-old in the house. So, when we finish, we will retire from home schooling after about 38 years . . . unless we also help with the grand children, of which we already have four.