Mt. Sophia Ideas

Do you ever wonder if public and private schoolers are always having to justify themselves?

“Oh. So, you send your kids to a ‘public school’, eh? Why?”

“‘Private school?’ What’s that? A school that, like, nobody talks about or something? Why would you do that?”

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To this day, I still get asked why my parents homeschooled my siblings and me, as if it was something they had to have a reason to do. So, I’ve worked on developing a stock response:

“Really it comes down to four things: religion, safety, quality, and finances. (1) My parents were worried about whether the relgious aspect of our education could be properly handled by a (non-religious/anti-religious) public school. (2) There were safety issues at the public schools in our area. (3) They wanted to be able to ensure that we kids got a quality education, which is far from guaranteed at a public school. And (4) private schools were just too expensive.”

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But that’s never quite enough. To really justify the choice to homeschool, you have to go on and argue that “things turned out surprisingly well for us kids.” (”Look how successful we’ve all been in college, after all!”)

The only real justification, in other words, seems to be that homeschooling turns out to be better for the children (no matter what it did for the parents).

Which it is.  Homeschooling is/was great for us Tillman kids.  But I get tired of being put on the defensive.

And when I get tired of something, I sometimes get mischievous.

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So, I’m starting to think about adding another justification to the list.

Since I’ve become a teacher myself, you see, I’ve learned a thing or two about teaching — one of which is this:

I get a better grasp of material when I have to teach it than I ever got when I was just having to study it as a student.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you don’t really know something — in the fullest, deepest sense — until you’ve had to teach it.

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When you want to know if someone understands something, you ask them to explain it to you, right? If they can explain it, they understand it. If they can’t, they don’t.

And, you know that sometimes you have to “talk it through” when you’re trying to figure out a problem. You can’t see the solution until you’ve talked to someone about it. Putting things into words helps you figure them out.

Furthermore, have you ever had the experience of not knowing what you thought about something until someone asked you? As you try to figure out what you think, you start to talk — and the more you talk about the issue, the clearer your thinking becomes to you. You figure out what you think by trying to put things into words.

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That’s kind of how teaching is, in my experience. Being forced to explain Plato or Locke (or Aquinas or Kant) to other people has helped me deepen and clarify my own understanding of those philosophers. Having to talk about them in a way that my students can understand, actually helps me learn.

I know the subjects I teach now better than I ever understood them when I was officially a student. In teaching others, I teach myself. I’m “better at” philosophy because I’ve taught it. Teaching has brought my education to a kind of (on-going!) completion I couldn’t have reached otherwise.

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So, next time someone asks you why you homeschool your children, maybe you should say this:

“Self-improvement. I’m taking my own education to the next level. I do it for my kids, of course, but I get something out of it that I couldn’t get in any other way.”

Or maybe this:

“Because teaching is good for me. It helps me see things I’d never seen before. I thought I knew everything there was to know about high school chemistry and history and math, for example, but having to teach it to my kids has really opened my eyes to some pretty amazing stuff. It’s like I knew it before, but now it has really ’sunk in’. I may be technically educating my kids, but I feel like I’m actually the one who’s getting the education!”

Or maybe this:

“Because there’s no higher calling than being a teacher — and a homeschool parent lives life 24/7 as a teacher, rather than just doing it as a 9-to-5 job — and I wanted in on the action.”

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And besides, studying things as a teacher is way more fun than studying them as a student. I’m not sure exactly why it is, but approaching things as a teacher makes them interesting.

So, next time someone asks you why you homeschool your children, maybe you should say:

“Because it’s fun, that’s why. What do you do for kicks? Hmmm?”

Or, if you’re not that excited about it:

“Because I never liked school as a kid, and I wanted to kind of ‘reclaim’ my childhood. Were those twelve years really the tedious waste of time I thought they were? Now that I’m teaching my kids, it turns out a lot of the stuff I found utterly boring in school is actually kind of interesting. I just couldn’t see it at the time. So, homeschooling helps me see the world in a new way. And it helps me think maybe those years I spent trying not to fall asleep in a classroom weren’t really a waste after all.”

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In other words, maybe one of the justifications for homeschooling your children is how much good it does you.

If nothing else, giving such an out-of-left-field response to people when they inevitably demand that you justify your choice to homeschool might surprise them long enough for you to deftly change the topic.

“Why do I homeschool my kids? Because it’s just so good for me intellectually, and I just really needed to just do something for me at this stage in my life, you know? . . . So, what have you been doing for you lately? Anything fun?”

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "graduate fellow"), which he loves.]}

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