Who doesn’t love a hot mess?

I recently stumbled across a substack post by someone I assume supports homeschooling called “Homeschooling is a Hot Mess”. Possibly to my detriment, I didn’t read much of it, nor am I conscientious enough go back and find out if my impressions of where it was going are fair or accurate. It probably went far better than I expected it to. No shade on the writer at all, I was just really busy that day, and now I’m on to something different. What that post did, though, was spur this sorry blogger on to consider a presumably different topic I’ve touched on over the years. I thought I’d piggyback on just the title, since it was such a banger.

Is homeschooling a hot mess? Are we failing before we even get started?

Our family held a graduation ceremony and party for our third-born child last weekend. It was a nice to-do (though I wish I’d done better with the brisket), and now I only have five students left. Having three more-or-less mature people to show for my efforts, and having hung out with many other homeschooling families these seventeen years or so, including the newest crop of public school refugees, I guess I’m at least somewhat qualified to talk about homeschooling’s current condition.

In an older post, Permission to Be Ordinary, I made a prediction:

The first generation of homeschoolers was almost certainly an unusual group of people. It seems to me that they required a unique set of characteristics–qualities that usually go hand-in-hand with high intelligence and academic achievement–to be able to boost the homeschooling movement from the gravitational pull  of traditional education. That first generation had, at the very least, enough imagination to dream it up, confidence to follow through, ingenuity to figure out how, resourcefulness to keep it going under pressure, and courage to fight the courts and social stigma.

As homeschooling becomes more mainstream, though, we are going to see some regression to the mean (though I doubt that we could ever regress to the abysmal performance of public schools). Because homeschooling really is a viable and superior alternative, and for reasons that have little to do with math, more and more parents who would never have considered such a thing before are going to jump on the bandwagon.

Those stellar statistics are going to level out, homeschoolers.  At some point, our neighbors are probably going to notice that some of us are pretty awful at math and science, and most of our children are going to trade schools or straight to the workforce instead of to Harvard. For that reason, it would be good if we kept our debating skills sharp, so that we can explain why homeschooling is well within our rights, regardless of our outcomes. If our best defense of home education is that other homeschoolers are really smart, we are sunk, because most of us are going to be graduating children who become ordinary people.

If you hadn’t heard it before, “regression to the mean” is a term (though I’m being flexible in my use of it) meaning that we can expect extraordinary data to smooth out as the thing that made them extraordinary mingles with the ordinary. What can’t last, won’t. Initial measurements contain different and fewer data points than later ones.

Early homeschoolers have less in common with later homeschoolers than later homeschoolers do with the public school population from which they are drawn.  

We will regress to our mean. I stand by that prediction. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening yet. Right now, most homeschoolers are not even homeschoolers. They’re public schoolers brought home. This is not where we’re going to settle. Right now I think what we see is more like a tidal wave sucking the water from a shore before crashing back in, or a pendulum swinging. Whatever metaphor you like best, what we’re seeing right now–everybody trying different things, infighting, chaos inside and out, and some parents doing a very poor job while others are crushing all expectations–is, indeed, a hot mess. It’s a mess caused by a whole bunch of new people jumping in to something they’ve yet to understand. They panicked. That is completely understandable, and now they are completely unprepared.

This was bound to happen, as people began to finally discover that public education is every bit as bad as the first generation of homeschoolers said it was. The pendulum is still swinging, or the tide is going to come back and cause some devastation, or the dust is going to take some time to settle, choking us for a while. Please forgive all my conflicting metaphors. My point is that we can’t really judge the thing right now. People need time to figure things out.

Whatever they do, they cannot do worse in the aggregate–individual results notwithstanding–than the public schools have.

Our nation has done a very bad job with its children for a very long time. There is no way to straighten this mess out without bringing it home first. Just let it be what it is and stop worrying. Homeschooling will have results and methods as widely varied as the families themselves are. We will not turn out a uniform product. We have no assembly line or precise formula. We’re turning out souls, not cogs. As in my previous posts on the subject, I call on homeschoolers to defend, not the process of homeschooling, nor their preferred method, nor their results, but the right and duty of parents to raise their children free of interference by the competing, coercive system of secular education.

God has ordained each parent to do this. We can do this.