Homeschooling can be a valid option

By Linda Zlatkin

Everything in life is a learning experience. Fifteen years ago, Debbie Smart had an experience that made a lasting, and learning, impression.

When her daughter Isabelle was just over two years old, Smart met some people who were homeschooling their children, and thought: “These kids are really interesting and they’re so intelligent. What a great idea!”

By the time her second daughter, Emilie, came along, Smart began to think that the regular school system might be too rigid for them. She wanted to focus on her children’s natural curiosity.

“My daughters have always loved reading books,” says Smart, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Pincourt. “From the time Isabelle and Emilie were tiny, I would bring them to the library. And even though I always helped them to look for books, often they would go to a shelf and find things they were interested in on their own.”

As the girls got older, they increasingly directed their mother towards subjects they wanted to learn.

“I became their facilitator, not their teacher,” says Smart. “They would watch Scientific American on television and then come back and tell me about the fascinating things they were discovering.”

As a result, Smart has been learning along with her daughters — Isabelle and Emilie Desmarais, now 18 and 16 respectively.

They use a student-directed style of homeschooling called unschooling. “It is education, not schooling,” says Smart. “We believe that everything around us has the potential to become a learning experience.”

In an unschooling family, learning is not forced, judged, or evaluated but becomes a natural part of everyday life. “Children do not need to be made to learn,” wrote the late John Holt, American author, educator and founder of the unschooling concept. Holt believed children did not need to be coerced into learning but would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources.

“Because each child is born with what Einstein called ‘the holy curiosity of inquiry,’ for them, learning is as natural as breathing,” he said.

Homeschooling doesn’t necessarily result in isolation either. The Desmarais girls have been in the Girl Guides, sing in a choir, swim, take French courses, spend time with other neighbourhood kids, and with their mom.

“I really enjoy the time I spend with my children,” says Smart. “If you look at it as a joy and not a job, it makes a huge difference.”

Smart says that there is no one right way to do things and she never forces anything.

“I help them look for books and research information,” says Smart. “We don’t use a curriculum and they don’t have on-line teachers like some homeschoolers.”

And though the girls were never formally taught grammar, Smart says they learned it on their own by talking to people and reading lots of books. It seems to have worked.

“Isabelle has been published in magazines, speaks at conferences and has a blog,” says Smart. “Emilie writes fiction and is working on a novel.”

But will homeschooling cause problems if the child eventually wants to enter the system? The Quebec Education Act says that parents educating their children at home must show that they are providing them with an education equivalent to that provided at school.

“Just like schools are required to cover 180 days of education throughout the year, so are homeschoolers,” says Angie Meklenschek of Dollard des Ormeaux, a homeschooling mom and editor of Homeschooling Horizons Magazine , an all-Canadian homeschool magazine.

Meklenschek says when the decision is made to homeschool a child, the parent has to notify their school board and provide it with a letter of intent. And these parents aren’t that uncommon.

“Homeschooling has become a lot more popular now,” says Meklenschek. “And just like there are many different schools out there, there are different homeschooling styles, too.”
Meklenschek is a traditionalist who follows the school’s curriculum but advances at the child’s pace. The child is not being slowed down by other students, or pushed ahead too quickly.

Getting a copy of the curriculum is easy. “You can purchase it from the same publishers that schools do, or even by looking up homeschooling curriculums in a Google search,” she explains. “They all come with a teacher’s manual that takes you step-by-step … and a lot of the curriculums come with evaluation packages.”

And if you’re worried that the child is not up to par, an educational assessment can be done at the end of the school year, either privately or by the school board.

Meklenschek first decided to homeschool when her son, Dustin, was four. “In teaching him how to read I realized that they are like sponges at that age,” she remembers. “When we moved along to doing math, I found out that he was so far ahead that it made sense to keep going.”

Now 17, Dustin earned his high school diploma through adult education and is currently taking courses to get into specific CEGEP programs. Her three younger children — Alisha, 15, Sharon, 12 and Eileen Blackman, nine — are following in their brother’s homeschooling footsteps.

Homeschoolers must be 16 years old and six months to enter an adult education program without which they cannot get into CEGEP. However, they can be admitted to English universities if they present a portfolio of their work, letters of recommendations and take a series of tests.

In fact, it is possible to enter university without an official CEGEP or high school diploma. McGill University even has a homeschooling policy.

Meklenschek says she chose the homeschooling route because it works for them, and knows that not every child or family is suited for it. “It’s not that I had anything against the regular system,” she says. “Outside schooling can benefit children in so many ways. It all depends on the individual child.”

However, since homeschoolers work on the premise that every child is an individual, when you have a classroom of one, the child’s individuality is completely taken into account.
After all, they are the only one in the class.