Why do you homeschool? I know why I homeschool. I am a completely secular homeschooler. It isn’t that I don’t have faith, it is that I don’t homeschool for religious reasons. I never wanted to homeschool, I thought my child would need to go to school to learn to be a “normal” kid. After all, she is an only child and needed the companionship, right? By the time she had been in kindergarten for a week, I knew that my child was not “normal” in the same way that other children were.

She would not sit still, she would not be quiet. If she believed something to be true, she would not tolerate the teacher dumbing it down or simplifying something, and she was very vocal about this. By the end of kindergarten I was convinced her teacher must have been a saint. My child certainly was not.

By the beginning of first grade, I pretty much knew that there was no chance my child was going to make it through the public school system. And the teacher, principal, and counselor had decided by October that my daughter would fail first grade because she was emotionally immature. By November, they had decided that she was Oppositionally Defiant, and by December they were saying the only way she could stay in school and not be suspended was to paddle her. What?!

Like I said, I don’t homeschool for religious reasons. My sister, who is the mother of ten children, does homeschool for religious reasons. She considers herself a Christian homeschooler, and emphasizes her beliefs in every aspect of her homeschool.

I have one child, she has ten. I’m a secular homeschooler, she is a Christian homeschooler. We don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, our life experiences are extremely different as adults. And yet, the one thing we do agree on is that home schooling is the best thing for our children. So, why do you homeschool?