I have homeschooled my three children for the past 10 years and, as a representative for the New Hampshire Homeschooling Coalition (www.nhhomeschooling.org), I have offered support to many other homeschoolers.
I know I am not the only one seeking a presidential candidate who speaks for progressive homeschoolers. We may not be the largest constituency in the country, but we exist and our numbers are growing. Many of our children are reaching voting age (my oldest child will vote in the 2008 election), and we need someone who will speak for us.
I trust in Barack Obama’s intelligence and open-mindedness and am confident he will consider homeschooling as a reasonable educational alternative. He has already indicated that his educational policies would not discourage homeschooling. On page 344 of The Audacity of Hope, he writes: “none of these policies need discourage families from deciding to keep a parent at home…For some families, that may mean doing without certain material comforts. For others it may mean home schooling….Whatever the case may be, such decisions should be honored.” As a husband and father of two young children, Barack Obama understands “the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions – the sacrifices and just plain hard work – of the stay-at-home mom.”
Like many homeschoolers in our community, our family prefers homeschooling because it gives us an opportunity to do things as a family, to learn from real-world experiences by spending time out in the community instead of shut away in a classroom, and to pursue learning in a way, and at a pace, that makes sense for us. We are part of a large homeschooling network, which includes families from different socioeconomic levels, different religious backgrounds, and different political views. We come together for celebrations, performances, athletic competitions, classes, field trips, theater productions, musical groups, fundraising, community cleanups, library book sales, and more. We have not “opted out” of society; rather, we have become more actively involved in it.
In Chapter 5 of The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama writes that we should be guided by “Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately. In other words, we should be guided by what works.” Anyone who studies homeschooling will quickly discover that it has been proven to be very effective (the National Home Education Research Institute, or NHERI, offers some supporting statistics and information on their website). Homeschooling works because the world is not the same as it was when one-room schoolhouses were first erected and compulsory attendance laws were established. Many families now have easy access to a huge array of educational media (books, software, videos, internet sites) as well as continuing education programs, workshops at museums and parks, athletic clubs, and more. With a desire to learn and a commitment to finding whatever resources are necessary, an enterprising parent (or child) can obtain an excellent education.
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