some of the reasons why we homeschool

1. I firmly believe that children should have NO homework before junior high, and then only a little, focusing primarily on what they didn't finish in class.

2. The school day is too long. I don't think children should go to more than 4 hours of school until high school because the 'play' time and outdoor time is valuable, as is time to explore and develop talents, read, and pursue their interests.

3. The school day starts too early. There is ample scientific evidence supporting this, but schools do what is convenient for teachers instead of what is beneficial to students.

4. There is no way for teachers to take into account the personal learning needs of the kids in terms of environment. Some kids learn better in the morning or evening, in a distracting/cluttered room or a sparse one, in groups or solo. Teachers can't deal with this, and kids who don't fit in to the mold are considered inferior or stupider.

5. Unsupervised socialization. Schools tout the necessity of 'proper socialization' as one of the main reason children should go. I'm all in favor of proper socialization, but I don't believe what kids get in school is proper. It is kids teaching kids how to get away with being mean, catty, selfish, sneaky, etc. Without trustworthy adults supervising and teaching values-centered socialization, what the kids get is a good education in being worldly, vain, selfish, mean, etc. How is that proper?

6. Single-level teaching with poorly-designed curriculums. Kids can't learn on their own level, whether that's ahead or behind other students, and if they vary from the mediocre norm, they are teased or humiliated. And when I see kindergartners who can't read at all doing worksheets that don't benefit you if you don't know the letters, I wonder who designed the learning? Not someone who knows about learning--probably a teacher, which is a different thing.

7. Age limits. To support the socialization, the kids are put in age groups. That leaves out kids like Dan, who functions on a very advanced kindergarten level--and he's only 3.

8. The necessity of medicating problems like ADD when a child still has a developing brain--not because it's good for the kid (science says it's not) but solely because of the necessity for a child to sit still and cooperate in class.

9. Homework for parents. This is most homework. Shoot--public school parents spend more time policing and teaching assignments than homeschool parents do! So why send the kids to school? Free babysitting.

10. Misguided educational philosophies like new math and whole language.

11. Classes that are too large.

12. Underpaid, poorly trained teachers who don't like what goes on at school. I have had professional, experienced, top-notch public school teachers tell me they would homeschool their children because they would never expose a child they love to what happens in public schools.

13. A focus on being 'better than' and testing. It seems the purpose of education nowadays is not to improve the quality of life, prepare people to be responsible citizens, enrich lives, prepare people to contribute to society according to their talents, or even prepare them for better jobs. Oh, no. The purpose of education is to be better than other schools and other nations on some arbitrary tests or other measures of academic skills. I thought school was about giving us the best chance at being responsible citizens and having a happy life, not about being better than Japan at science.

14. It's a self-feeding, self-perpetuating system. People who do well at school the way it is structured now go into education. Everyone else--the underserved majority--hated it so much they wouldn't want to. That benefits the people who, like me, flourished, but not most of the people who are supposed to be in the system. Plus, academia lives in its own little world. For example, writing programs in colleges teach a kind of writing and literature that almost nobody reads, almost nobody publishes, and almost nobody likes. Sure, it's pretty, but what about the rest of us? That doesn't even serve the people who are going to be writers, much less the students who simply should be introduced to the joy of books--without valuing depressing stuff over what they would enjoy reading.

15. Little tolerance for differences. Apparently, according to the DSM-IV, the damage kids and adults in the system do to each other is longer-lasting and has more impact than the benefits school provides, especially for kids with unique talents and challenges, like kids with ADD or Tourette's syndrome. Without the problems created by going to school, most of those children who suffer with childhood disorders have a fairly positive outlook for their futures.

I'm sure there are a lot more reasons, including reasons specific to each of my children, but I have to go bake bread.