One comment homeschoolers receive time after time is "How can you be qualified to teach your child? Where are your credentials?"
That people still ask this amazes me.
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We don't need credentials to get married, give birth, keep house, cook for our families, shop for our families, nurse our sick children, be nannies to our children, do home repairs, take home videos or photograph our children. No one questioned us when we taught the alphabet to our 3 year old, and suddenly, we aren't qualified to teach that same child how to read or calculate or conduct scientific experiments?
The reason school teachers need credentials is because they aren't teaching their own children. They are not only not teaching their own children, they are managing an entire room full of children - 20 to 40 children at a time. That does indeed take special skills and special education and to be credentialed is important for class room management and the specialized skills of imparting information to large groups of children. Teachers should be honored for the work they do - imparting the basics to large groups of children year after year. Homeschooling in no way detracts from what they do - for those parents who both send their children to school and homeschool, it supplements and enhances it, giving children the needed specializations and the personalization that classroom education can't provide.
Homeschoolers aren't teaching 20+ children at a time, nor are they concentrating on one specific subject for a large group of students. They aren't responsible for the safety of children who don't belong to them.
They are teaching their children - children with whom they are intimately familiar. They are using a wider variety of learning opportunities that are experiential and hands-on that classroom teachers just don't have access to. The learning isn't confined to one interrupted hour a day per subject, but spread out throughout the day from waking to bedtime. Every moment, for a homeschooler, can be a learning opportunity.
Cooking in the kitchen is fraught with reading comprehension, math, chemistry, biology, botany, and physics lessons.
Yardwork is filled with biology, botany, chemistry, engineering, physics lessons.
Housekeeping is filled with even more chemistry, physics, and engineering opportunities. Magnetism, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering - it's all there.
Reading comprehension happens in the kitchen when reading the labels of food. It happens when reading the instructions for tools and equipment use.
Math is endemic everywhere. Fractals, fractions, calculus, algebra, geometry...these are used daily, unwittingly, by nearly everyone. Homeschoolers just point it out and highlight it.
Homeschooled children learn something schooled children don't learn as easily or as obviously - the practical, daily applications of the information they are learning. Classrooms are like labs, the information is there and structured examples are provided, but translating that to the "field", as it were, is not always easy. Homeschooling makes the transition from knowledge to practical application easy.
Homeschooled children also have greater opportunities for field trips, because every journey away from home becomes a field trip. The produce section of the grocery store leads to talks about agricultural practices food transportation issues, food storage and preservation, food processing and presentation. The imported foods aisle leads to discussions of geography and culture, food habits of other nations and why and how those habits arose.
The beauty of homeschooling is that any parent can do it. Any parent willing to invest the time and effort. Even parents who send their children to school can supplement their child's "formal" education with millions of homeschooling opportunities.
I was a single parent, and had to send my children to school because, for me, it was the affordable alternative to hiring babysitters. But even the best classroom teacher can't provide the quality of education a homeschooler can because the classroom teacher doesn't have the personal opportunities, doesn't have the familiarity with each child that a parent has. Parents can direct a child's enthusiasms and hobby interests into areas that increase their learning abilities that classroom teachers may never know about.
You don't need to be credentialed to teach your own children anything. Parents are and will always be a child's primary teacher.
We teach our children the alphabet, how to tie their shoes, get dressed, brush their teeth, we teach them to talk and walk, to climb and run, to play on slides and to swim, to swing, to put away their toys, to play with those toys, we teach them card games and board games, we teach them to cook and clean house and do laundry and do small home repairs and do yard work. We teach them how to play with their friends, and how to behave in restaurants and stores and at friends' homes. We teach them how to behave in public and with people of different ages. We teach them the laws of our area. We teach them sports and art and pet care.
How can we believe for a New York second that we are not qualified to teach them? Math, chemistry, physics, biology, botany, literature, geography, social studies, mechanics, foreign languages, history, laboratory science, civics, drama, physical education, technology, health, computer skills and keyboarding, budgeting and personal finance, economics, debate, meteorology, government, politics, philosophy, logic, nutrition and more - we use these practically every day. Sharing them with our children is inevitable. As parents, we need to be aware that this is what we are doing. Our children model themselves on us, they do what we do. We do all of these things, so they learn and do all those things, too.
Even if we didn't achieve a high school diploma or a GED, we are still qualified to teach our children, because we still do the things that we do to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table - and each of those things is an educational opportunity. Formal education in a classroom setting is not the only education out there. With modern resources, such as access to libraries and the internet (often available now on cell phones!), educating our children ourselves or supplementing their education with what we can share has never been more achievable.
The question isn't "Am I qualified/credentialed to teach my children?" but "Why am I not teaching my children myself?"