Two weeks into homeschooling...

We faced a crossroads this year in our daughter's education. She was admitted to another private school, which asked for a sizeable payment before her other school's tuition was paid in full. Meanwhile, we were trying to pay off our car. We prayed. My wife and I agreed that we were not going to borrow money for the private education of a 4th grader (especially while sending mortgage-sized monthly payments for my student loans). With the recession not bottomed out, we did not want to sign up for any more monthly payments.

My wife eventually asked, "Why don't we homeschool?" We had talked about it when the little one was small, but my wife was a bit nervous about teaching the most basic fundamentals and knew she couldn't forgive herself if her daughter turned into a young nitwit under her personal tutelage. So we sent her for four years to the local Montessori school, which was a good experience overall. Her teachers were excellent, and she became an solid young reader.

About the time we decided we would homeschool, we gave her an annotated and illustrated copy of The Hobbit for her birthday. She devoured it before I could finish reading it to her. I pulled my old copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy off the shelf for her perusal, the same copy I used in college when Thomas Howard taught a course called Modern Myth. My daughter read each book of the trilogy twice before mid-summer and became an unofficial citizen of Middle Earth. We found ourselves suddenly living with a young girl who could enjoy serious books, and it is a great pleasure for us.

We worked hard to find a curriculum that would challenge her and not be limited to the superlatives of our own learning. We became convinced that the modern idea of education as over-specialization founded upon utilitarian math and science informed by reading in dozens of subjects and modern languages was not the path we would take. We found the Classical Liberal Arts Academy on the web. It is newly begun by a classics teacher who is a revert to Catholicism. He and his family live in the country and are doing their best to be good lay Dominicans. About three hundred students are enrolled in their on-line program.

For the last two weeks, despite an illness for my wife and a busy calendar for me, we have read the morning devotions, Mass prayers and lessons, and vespers from the Magnificat for each day and worked with our girl in her CLAA classes of Grammar I, Arithmetic I, and Catechism I, helped her with penmanship and typing, kept up her practice on the piano, and taxied her to extracurricular activities such as gymnastics and art. (As we become more disciplined we might try full participation in the Liturgy of the Hours.) As my daughter progresses we will add additional CLAA subjects from the Trivium and Quadrivium as well as Geography, History, and others. We have good resources in science and the arts nearby.

If we turn into miserable failures as hometeachers, we will tell you. So far we are making it and believe we have chosen the right way. We are finding homeschooler programs at local museums, science centers, libraries, and parks. In the end, our goal is to educate our daughter as Saint Thomas More educated his, Margaret More Roper.



[Above: Saint Jerome, Saint Thomas More (Hans Holbein), and Margaret More Roper.]