It all used to start with “kindergarten.” Then came pre-K, 4K and 3K. It seems like once they stop pooping on themselves and no longer need to be breast-fed, governments these days are more than happy to take your kids off of your hands.

I know that people like the term “public schools” over “government schools,” but there’s really nothing public about them, other than the funding. It would be like calling the military a “public military.” Not only are they not public, there are even times when the parents don’t have the freedom to come and pick up their own children.

When we were evaluating the ways to allow our children to get a good education, we came up with three potential options:

• “Public” school

• Private school

• Home education

For many reasons, we opted to utilize our freedom and chose home education over the other options. Personally, I do not really agree with everything that goes on in the basic “schooling” method anyway.

First off, the age segregation is contrary to the rest of life. I have never interacted with 20 – 30 people my same exact age since graduation. I believe that interacting with a wide variety of ages is more beneficial. When people raise the objection to home education by claiming that the children with lack socialization, it is only a false socialization that they miss out on, and eventual that ends after graduation anyway.

Within the schooling method, the attention that can be given to each student is also lacking. A child capable of much more is often held back by the rest of the class, able only to progress as much as the rest of the class. Because of the age segregation, if they are allowed to “move up” a grade, they often feel and look out of place, and may even be treated as such by the older students.

Many time in my years going school I also observed students that were struggling who were not able to receive more attention and instruction because of the time constraints and large number of other students in the class. No one tries to be a D or F student, but when they start to fall behind, they often lose hope and become comfortable not succeeding, sometimes even no longer putting in the effort that would be needed to attempt to succeed.

At home, parents can provide special focus on each child. Juggling multiple “grade levels” with the different children can be difficult, but teachers once accomplished it in the “one-room schoolhouse” days, and many parents these days are choosing to do the same thing. The biggest difference is that the children are their own, and less “grade levels” need to be covered.

When our oldest daughter had a sudden interest in bats, we could adjust the education in appropriate areas to allow her to learn more about those fascinating creatures. I even had to remove a couple from a building at work during that same period, so I brought them home to relocate them and allowed her an opportunity to see them a little more closely. When we were deep in a cave sometime later and encountered some hanging from the ceiling, she already had quite an understanding about the creatures.

It seems that school is often a “sterile environment” where life skills are attempted to be taught in a way that is disconnected from reality. Letters and words are written repeatedly just for the sake of practicing them. Our children can write actual "snail mail" letters that can be mailed instead, which also allows them to build relationships and interact with others, while at the same time practicing penmanship, spelling, grammar, and punctuation. A student in a school classroom may measure lines on a paper over and over again in an attempt to learn how to use a ruler. Our children may make measurements on some lumber instead, and then I can cut the wood so that we can build a birdhouse or chicken tractor out of it.

Real life skills learned in a real life situation are my preferred method of teaching my children. Often, they take care of my purchases at stores too. I hand them a pile of money, and they get to listen for the amount and appropriately pay the cashier. Not only are certain money and math skills worked on, but they get to practice interacting with strangers in a business setting. Interacting with others of different age groups in real world settings may be considered to a more realistic form of “socialization” anyways.

When it comes to teaching your own children at home, it is not a matter of why someone would start to do that. Technically, the moment a child is born, parents begin to teach them. Many just stop teaching them certain things once they reach a certain age, and place that responsibility upon the shoulders of the government instead.

Personally I don’t mind being responsible for my own children. Many wonder about the qualifications of a parent when it comes to this issue, especially if the parents never went to college. Many studies have been done on the matter, and often the results are astonishing. I remember seeing one report where single mothers that dropped out of high school who home educated their children did a better job than the “public” school system did. It appears that when the child’s education is somehow connected to the rest of their life, the children learn better.

Many inquiries into the amount of education vs. the amount of indoctrination have been raised over the years. Comments like “the government is sterile, it can’t have kids so it wants yours” have also been made. Basically, a child is a precious thing in the world, but they are also impressionable and naïve, so we must be careful.

I feel that too many parents just don’t want the responsibility. In many cases, they would just rather not deal with their children all day, and are happy to have someone else step in for free and take them off their hands for most of the day. However, my children are incredibly precious to me, and I must protect them.

I can’t even recall all the times that bomb threats were called in at schools that I was attending. I do know that we have never had a bomb threat at home though. Also, my wife have never taken the children to an undisclosed location for a terror drill and refused to allow me to see them. Yet, such is becoming more and more commonplace in schools these days.

Personally, that concerns me.

I understand that real threats do exist and that a disaster could occur at any moment. However, if I’m at one job, my wife is at another, and our children are spread out between various day-cares and schools, it’ll be a lot harder to regroup than if we are at home when something big hits.

There are still many opportunities to practice repetition like you would get in a "real school", but we like to have things be actually applicable to real life too.

There are many reasons that parents choose to educate their children at home, and I am glad that we have freedom to choose to do so. I have met some very intelligent, well-spoken and polite children that I immediately knew were not the product of a “public” education system. Whenever I made that call ahead of time, I have never yet been wrong about it. Like many choices in life, there are pros and cons, but we have weighed our options, and home education is the choice that we have made.

Some of our reasons have been shared here, and some others exist.

Once, such was much more common, yet many still make this choice. It is just one of the ways that our family is making the long, strange journey home.

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CHECK OUT THE PREVIOUS POSTS IN THIS SERIES IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY DONE SO

• PART 1 - INTRODUCTION

• PART 2 - THE FOOD SUPPLY