Harboring Homeschoolers
The record of Christian homeschooling has included many bright spots notwithstanding some ominous warnings that the legal status of homeschooling remains insecure, with powerful enemies looking for a rationale to treat homeschooled students as truants from compulsory formal schooling. On the bright side, I am accustomed to reading of homeschooled students who gain admission to top colleges, or win contests like spelling bees.
Accomplishment in competitive sports is something new. The online New York Times for March 16, 2008, carried an article titled “Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team,” by Joe Drape, from Oklahoma City. At the top of the article was a charming photograph of determined-looking teenage girls holding hands as they prepared to start a basketball game. The caption read:
Taber Spani, one of the best high school girl basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins. The national tournament is a kind of jamboree around which families plan their vacations.
The article went on to explain that homeschool basketball has grown in a few years from little more than organized recess to a highly competitive activity, with a national tournament involving 300 boys’ and girls’ teams from 19 states, with logistics and financing provided by dedicated parents. It even boasts a few star athletes who are offered athletic scholarships to colleges and universities.
Many youngsters schooled at home in the primary grades choose to attend a regular high school because of the range of activities available there, including organized sports. But others choose to continue homeschooling through the high-school years, so they can remain close to their families and participate in the homeschool athletic contests. The article made that point by quoting one of the most gifted basketball players.
“We build friendships here with other girls who know what it’s like to be self-motivated and disciplined and to share your values,” said Spani, a high-school junior from Kansas. “I wouldn’t trade this tournament for anything.”
Homeschool Advantages
The article amounted to an impressive rebuttal to the most shopworn complaint against homeschooling: that youngsters educated at home will supposedly miss out on the social benefits of associating with their peers in a normal school. This complaint is based on an unsound premise. The homeschooling families I know pool their resources by forming associations to provide group activities or classes in such areas as languages, crafts, music, dance, and sports.
And homeschooling enables parents to protect their children from aspects of the public-school culture they consider toxic, including premature exposure to sexual temptation, because the children’s principal moral frame of reference is the family rather than the youth culture.
One of the great advantages of homeschooling in a healthy family is that, as children grow older, they learn to take on responsibilities as apprentice parents for their younger siblings, thus growing gradually and comparatively seamlessly into adult life without the jarring interruption of spending their adolescent years in junior high and high school. I have been impressed by the relative absence of adolescent rebelliousness in homeschooled families, which I attribute to children maturing gradually within the family, rather than being thrown into a public-school youth culture steeped in encouragements to rebellion.
Challenges & Competition
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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