For the first couple of years that I was homeschooling I kept having the uneasy feeling that I was doing something wrong.
The kids were completely done within 2-3 hours. I only homeschooled 4 days a week. That left me a day to shop, pay bills and run other errands. If a kid needed a dr appt, that was done on our day off or in the afternoons.
I finally had to sit down and figure out where I was ‘going wrong’. I broke it down like this:
My children had only three formal subjects:
- reading/phonics
- writing/grammar
- math
Science and history had a different format. I did have books to guide me, but I taught history by telling my kids ‘stories’. As I’d clean the kitchen, they’d sit at the table and listen and ask questions. In the evenings, the whole family watched the History channel. They loved the format. For science, we did hands-on experiments and watched a LOT of Discovery. So they were learning, but didn’t realize it.
In the time we spent together in the afternoons, I’d teach them about politics, life skills, psychology, relationship-building skills, religion, etc. For us, that was just normal mother/child interaction.
So, although my kids only had 8-12 hours of formal education a week, they were being educated constantly by just being with their mother full-time and their father in the evenings and on the weekends.
Once you take out the time spent going to the next class, the 10 minutes lost with attendance and settling down, another potential 10 minutes with discipline and attention issues, the average public school child is actually getting about 3.5 hours of instruction a day.
The you have to realize that kids who need extra help are lost during the class and kids who already know or quickly grasp the information are held back and bored, and you waste more time there. My kids were allowed to proceed at their own pace. Concepts that they struggled with could be focused on and things that were easy were breezed through.
The fact that I incorporated so many subjects into our daily lives meant that our kids received *many* more hours of education than their counterparts.
I agree with the author that our nation is in serious danger. Evil does threaten our freedom. She is being completely unrealistic if she believes that parents are able to undo the indoctrination after spending so much time in a godless and socialist-funded school.
1) It would take far longer just to deprogram than it would to teach proper principles.
2) Where is the time? Who has it? The most awake and alert hours for the child are wasted in his government indoctrination center. Just look at a typical child's schedule. Where is this time to deprogram and teach history as she suggests?
This was our experience as well. My three homeschoolers rarely spent more than 2 hours in formal studies each day. And,...Like you our curriculum was very basic:
** reading
** writing/grammar
** penmanship and spelling
** math