Common Objections to Homeschooling

8. How am I going to teach my child six hours a day?

Who's teaching him six hours a day right now?

As a child, I went to the "best" schools, some public, most private. I was a good student, the kind that teachers like to talk to. And it was a rare day indeed in my schooling when I got fifteen minutes of teaching, that is, of concerned and thoughtful adult talk about something that I found interesting, puzzling, or important. Over the whole of my schooling, the average was probably closer to fifteen minutes a week. For most children in most schools, it is much less than that. Many poor, nonwhite, or unusual kids never get any real teaching at all in their entire schooling. When teachers speak to them, it is only to command, correct, warn, threaten, or blame.

Anyway, children don't need, don't want, and couldn't stand six hours of teaching a day, even if parents wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world doesn't take that much adult input. Most of what they need, parents have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access. They need a chance, sometimes, for honest, serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes, for joking, play, and foolishness; or sometimes, for tenderness, sympathy, and comfort. They need, much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not to feel shut out of it; in short, to go some of the places you go, to see and do some of the things that interest you, to get to know some of your friends, to find out what you did when you were little and before they were born. They need to have their questions answered, or at least heard and attended to (if you don't know, say "I don't know.") They need to know more and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care of kids. They need some friends their own age, but not dozens of them; two or three, at most half a dozen, is as many real friends as any child can have at one time. Perhaps above all, they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm times when there's nothing to do.

Schools rarely provide any of these, and even if radically changed, never could provide most of them. But the average parent, family, circle of friends, neighborhood, and community can and do provide all of these things, perhaps not as well as they once did or might again, but well enough. People do not need a Ph.D. or some kind of certificate to help their children find their way into the world.