WHY I AM HOME EDUCATING MY CHILDREN

MRS TANYA O'BRIEN

TALK GIVEN AT ENDEAVOUR FORUM PUBLIC MEETING, 25 MAY 2007

Thank you Babette for the challenge to summarize why my husband and I home-educate. I tried to convince Babette that there would be many others who would be much better speakers and also speak with experience and fruitful results. Certainly having met many of these wonderful people myself has been a strong reason to give it a go. But you all know Babette. It is impossible to change her mind and that is probably why she is such a great pro life/pro Family leader.

So my talk is very idealistic and I would like to acknowledge that my husband Ben and I are only beginning on this journey. It is something we have chosen together and I would strongly recommend it is only ever a decision that is made together. I know some amazing people have been able to do it single-handedly but they are sole- parents so it had to be that way. However if you are married then it must have both spouses to support it. I have seen a marriage end mainly due to the different way the husband and wife wished to educate.

Ben and I do not know what the future holds for our family so for now we intend, hope and pray that we might educate all our children at home until such time as they decide where they wish to concentrate their talents eg. trade school, employment, university.

# I hate traffic jams and seeing that the local primary school has over 600 students, there is bound to be one regularly.

# Not interested in studying first hand all the different diseases out there by having my child catch some viral strain I cannot even pronounce.

# Ben and I have had children close together (by modern day standards) and we don’t like to interrupt our baby’s sleep patterns with kinder and now school trips which would require going out at least twice a day. We even had our last baby at home (unintentionally) !!!

Seriously though….Ben and I see children as an integral part of our marriage, the crowning jewels if you like, not an accessory or a burden to be child-minded by strangers. We take seriously the Church teaching that parents are the primary educators of their children although the State Education Department stated the opposite view at a meeting held last year with home-education parents. We hold that the family came before the State and families make up a State. While many parents choose to delegate the role of education they must still spend time checking on the school curriculum. How do you check that your children learn what they need or do not need to know?

We only own one car and sending our children to Kinder and school would make owning a second car compulsory not to mention the expense. Ben is a shift worker and we find this gives him more time with the children with a variation of mornings and afternoons. It means that I am freed up for shopping or appointments while the education continues.

We wish our children to grow up knowing and loving one another which is obviously happening because of their regular contact. We see them already helping each other with school work on whatever level that may be. Our four- year -old manages to throw in a bit of competition for our Prepie when he is on the ball and she is being distracted by something else. We want our children to learn to relate to other people - a skill that is being rapidly lost in our fast-paced IT society. Age segregation in school means that children are restricted in who they mix with. One of the impressive attributes of meeting Home Educated children is their ability to converse with children of any age and adults alike.

We use the term “Home-educating” as opposed to “home-schooling” because we are not trying to reproduce the classroom as in a school setting but rather educate in a home environment. This is what we wish for our children. While helping in the home to their capacity, they learn responsibility and form a picture of reality. I see this as an advantage to classroom education where the child only returns late afternoon and has been apart from the day to day chores and interactions with other age groups. By far my easiest child has been my fourth mainly because Sarah’s siblings provide her with attention and entertainment and welcome this new person with such joy. They are also good accident preventers as they let me know quite loudly when she is heading for trouble. “Muuuum, Sarah’s eating paper”.

I am not a qualified teacher and yet I am qualified to teach my children by virtue of the fact that I know them better than any other teacher. I have nurtured them since they were conceived and have taught them some of their greatest achievements so far. As any parent would sympathize, toilet training being our biggest!!

School teachers are disadvantaged as they only know children through teaching them while parents have a charism to teach their children. I know each of my children’s personalities and whether they are really trying or just being lazy. I already know that our 4 ½ year-old boy will get a lot more addition and subtraction done if he is counting trains or planes rather then some useless dot. I can already see that my 2 ½ year-old will do well if we have lots of songs to teach the subjects and keep her interested.

Home Education allows us the flexibility to go on excursions as a family like our recent holiday to East Gippsland where we visited Powerworks. The brown coal mine was probably more amazing for Mum and Dad at this stage but the children thoroughly enjoyed the interactive displays.

A frequent criticism of home education, and I think by far the easiest to answer is “How will you socialize your children?” We have watched our friends withdraw their children from school a few years ago and one of the major changes they acknowledge is that when they came home from school they needed detoxing. The children themselves admit they came home with “attitude”. We certainly do not want our children socialized with attitude and a general nihilistic outlook on life. I think the effects of original sin gives us all enough attitude without looking for more.

Being involved in the pro-life apostolate as Helpers of God’s Precious Infants provides natural socializing for our whole family as great friends become like family. A trusted environment is formed through meeting these God loving people on at least a monthly basis where each of our children has been passed around while they were babies . While witnessing to the sanctity of human life the children are exposed to the anti-life opposition who call themselves Campaign for Women’s Reproductive Rights, familiar to those who attended Tony Abbot’s speech here not so long ago. Far from being sheltered, our children learn about opposing forces even before they can read Babette’s articles.

My 6-year-old responded to their chant “You don’t care if women die”… by saying “Mummy we do care if women die.” Bernadette has learnt that we must pray for these people who oppose us as they do not know Jesus.

Teaching the Faith to our children is a major motivation to educating our children ourselves. It will vary from year to year what teachers in the school system will be like and how they will live the Faith themselves. Teachers cannot impart the Church’s teaching on contraception if they themselves are not living a chaste life. We know from statistics of teachers completing their training that the vast majority rejected Catholic teaching on abortion and contraception. An abysmal starting point.

Some school’s reflect the teaching in society where you work out your own moral principles. Recently in Tasmania, teachers have been instructed not to use the word “no” to their students. As you would agree, as parents we use this word for our children from a very young age-even as young as Sarah (8 ½ months) as she is attracted to the power points. Children need to know the boundaries and “no” is a very effective way of teaching them.

We are very concerned about the content of sex education which is being injected into children at a younger and younger age, becoming more and more explicit. This as we know robs the child of innocence which cannot be restored. Our children are too precious to allow this to occur.

We are raising adults with the help of God’s grace. We enjoy mixing with other Home Educating families on regular get-togethers where we exchange ideas, share frustrations and compare curriculum’s.

I was amazed to discover how much support is available and the variety of work books and suppliers. I take my hat off to the pioneering families who did it hard trying to make up their own studies in the face of much opposition.

I am really enjoying the challenge and the rewards. It was a great joy earlier this year to hear my daughter begin to read. One of the workbooks we use has little sentences to help us remember the different sounds one letter can make. For example the letter “O” has 4 sounds. The little ditty says “On phone to Mother”. I look forward to a future where my daughter will still want to be talking to me on the phone.

Evan O'Dorney, a 13-year old homeschool student from Danville, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington DC in May 2007. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that throughout round after round of constant challenge, he hurtled through words such as "schuhplattler", "Bewusstseinslage" and “rascacio". Edmonton champion, Nate Garke, misspelled the word "coryza" and lost closely before Evan finished with "serrefine", or "a small spring forceps used for approximating the edges of a wound, or for temporarily closing an artery during surgery." Beating 285 other top spellers from throughout the country, Evan won a trophy and over $40,000 dollars in prizes.

After the competition, Evan admitted he enjoys other subjects such as math and music for more. "The spelling, it's just a bunch of memorization." So what makes him different from the other children? According to the SF Chronicle, not only is he a top spelling champ, but he plays piano concertos, has a first-black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and is a math champion as well.

Is it just random chance that the winner of the national spelling bee is a homeschooled child? Home school advocates suggest that home study has a significant impact on the development of a normal child. Home schooling doesn't try and make a child fit one specific size or mold. Sometimes children can be working on two or three different grade levels at once. If they love science, they might be a couple of levels ahead, but if they're struggling in English, they might go a bit slower to make sure that the concepts are cemented in before moving ahead.

Charles B. Lowers, Executive Director of Considering Homeschooling, says "Homeschoolers overall do better academically, socially, and most important, spiritually”. The majority of Christian parents still send their children to public school, he says, not realizing the catastrophic spiritual and social damage most children may suffer there. "While some parents maintain that their local school is different, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear”, says Lowers, that the public schools are no place for Christian children."

Weeks before the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Evan O'Dorney's mother coached and quizzed him for up to two hours each day, showing how personal attention and a flexible schedule at home gave him added freedom to do his best. In similar ways, homeschooled students throughout North America are proving to excel in various academic pursuits and public careers

Most importantly, however, a strong home faith environment helps many homeschooled children to personalize their faith instead of ingesting a constant stream of secular messages.