1. Home is where you can optimize and personalize your children’s education. One size does not fit all when it comes to learning (or much of anything else, for that matter). Homeschooling enables you to search out the best materials and methods for providing your children with an excellent education.
2. Home is where you can immerse your children in the values you consider most important, where you can immunize them against the emotional and spiritual dysfunction that afflicts a large portion of the adult population today.
3. Home is where your children will be guarded against the negatives of drugs, alcohol, peer dependency, and the many other ills spawned by the institutionalization of children by the state, where they’ll find the nurture and examples necessary to grow into leaders, not followers.
4. Home is where your children will be protected from the many special interests that use state schools as a means to access children.
5. Home is where your children will learn true socialization – where there will be no generation gap, where your children will learn the difference between tolerance and respect and kindness, where selflessness and altruism will meet with real life opportunities for practice, where the foundation for a strong marriage will be laid, where good communications skills will be developed.
6. Home is where your children can be free to soar in their individual areas of talent or passion and learn that life is much more than a lucrative career.
7. Home is where your children will experience true joy and delight in the world around them, because they’ll be exposed to that world, rather than locked away from nature and community.
8. Home is where your children will learn the hard lessons about the world – the war and hatred and terror, the crime and exploitation, the sadness and tragedy – within the context of hope and on a schedule they are prepared to handle.
9. Home is where your children will be taught by someone with their best interests at heart, by someone who will go the distance for them.
10. Finally, homeschooling is good for you as well as your children. It provides you the opportunity to see yourself more realistically and to grow and improve, to make up for many of the ills inflicted on you by your own (likely) institutional schooling. It offers the opportunity to truly know your children and to develop loving, mature, enduring relationships with them. It opens the door to a community of individuals who will support and challenge you intellectually, spiritually and emotionally.
Homeschooling is not always easy, but few worthwhile things are. You may sometimes need help, but most of us do. Some years will be better than others, as is typically the case with life. But in the end, you’ll find yourself smiling and satisfied – and maybe even surrounded by a bunch of little homeschooled grandchildren.
