Wednesday, September 15, 2010

"Secular" Homeschooling (But Not Really…)


OK, so I’ve read that over 70 percent of all homeschoolers in the US do so because of religious or moral reasons. (Don’t quote me here. I don’t have cold, hard statistics. All I have is the “research” I’ve done on the internet.) But the point is, many homeschoolers do teach at home for religious reasons.

We’re not one of those families.

There’s nothing wrong with faith-based homeschooling. Each one of us does what’s right for our family. (And for our child’s education.)

But though I wouldn’t say that we homeschool for religious reasons, we aren’t secular either.

Our faith, indeed, is a big part of our lives. Or maybe more our spirituality mixed with traditions.

But we didn’t decide to homeschool because of our faith.

And we don’t really use any faith-based curriculum (though we wouldn’t have a problem with it, and would use it if it was a good fit for us).

We have friends who belong to religious homeschooling groups and friends who belong to more “secular” (or “all-inclusive”) groups.

We may not all be homeschooling for the same reason, but it is nice to see that we can eventually meet on common ground.

We are all homeschoolers after all.

2 comments:

  1. This is true for us also. Even though our spirituality practices are important to our family, it was not the driving force behind our choice to teach at home. Some of our curriculum comes from faith-based resources simply because we cannot find secular ones that meet our needs. The market used to be saturated with faith-based curricula because so many of the homeschooling 'pioneers' were evangelical Christians, but gradually we're seeing the emergence of secular materials. I think that is a niche worth filling now as the homeschooling community becomes as diverse as the rest of the nation.

    ReplyDelete