Why a Former Teacher Chose Homeschool

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By Wren Everett Before I went back to the land, I was a certified K-12 educator and a naturalist-inresidence. In my years of teaching, I engaged with more than 100 schools around Northeast Ohio, working in elite private schools, dysfunctional inner-city schools, and everything in between. After seeing the inner workings and cultures of dozens of schools, I made a firm resolution: I would homeschool my own children by any means necessary.
I want to share (with names altered for privacy) some of my experiences in public and private schools as proof of why I consider homeschooling to be the superior choice. I will confess my bias — though I believed in the education system at the beginning of my career, I was thoroughly disenchanted by the end. I mean, no offense to those hard-working teachers who are still a part of it, but I cannot gloss over the glaring brokenness of the system at large.
School Environment
Hoisting my tote of animal skins and posters, I walked through the front door of an East Cleveland school to do a nature program. I passed through the metal detector, waited while the armed school guard inspected my purse and tote box, and stepped to the side while two screaming students were escorted to the principal’s office. An hour later, with 52 students massed in an overcrowded classroom, my demonstration was interrupted by a crackling sound. The disintegrating ceiling dropped several clumps of plaster to my right, scattering across the stained floor. I was the only one who reacted — the kids were used to it.
In a rural school 50 miles south, I listened as the teachers took bets as to which high school girl would be pregnant next. At a Christian school to the east, Jessie, dressed in handme- downs and with a uniquely specific interest in animals, was marginalized, mocked, and sat alone at recess. At a large suburban school down the road, the cafeteria slopped low-quality corn nubbins, planks of institutional pizza, and ice cream cones on trays to sustain the students for the afternoon.
I could give you a hundred more examples. As I observed, from the most well-funded schools to the poorest inner-city ones, modern schools are rife with inescapable problems. It’s impossible to prevent violence, bullies, or negative influences when educating so many children has been outsourced to such a small handful of adults.
“Socialization”
Jonah was a bright, shy boy who easily and fluently interacted with adults. He had been homeschooled all his life but had joined my middle school in seventh grade so he could, as his parents put it, “get socialized.” Within three months, after being bullied by his peers, he was quietly pulled back out of school. Dan was a similar case that same year. But instead of crumpling under the pressure of the other kids, he conformed. By the end of the year, he had started making the same crass jokes they did, reveling in their laughs and acceptance.
The majority of the behavioral problems I observed in schools derived from the social structure of the students themselves. Kids can be very cruel, especially in large numbers of the same age (particularly in our age of social media). This is one of the artificial constructs of modern schools that resulted from the industrial revolution: Treat children like items in an assembly line, and stamp them all with a graduation date based on their birth year. That unnatural group of similar children creates social problems that just don’t happen when age groups are mixed. Can you think of any reallife situation where adults only associate with other adults who are their exact same age?
Subversion of Parental Authority
“Can’t we do something about Monique? It’s not fair.” The other middle-school teachers were planning a Halloween party for the students but had hit a stumbling block with Monique. She was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and her father routinely pulled her out of school whenever a holiday celebration was announced, as these went against their beliefs. Instead of respecting her parents’ religious convictions, the teachers spent the lunch break conspiring about how to get Monique involved in the “fun” so that she wouldn’t “miss out.”
Teachers are human and bring their own set of convictions and beliefs to the table. No matter how inclusive the school claims to be in its pamphlets, most teachers teach to their personal biases daily. I observed routine subversions of parents’ religious, political, or moral authority. It didn’t matter if it was a public, private, or religious school: If the teachers disagreed with the parents’ choices, the parents were “weird,” and the teachers were in the right. Their subtle nudges against the parents’ wishes were considered justifiable. The teacher’s ownership of “their” students is horribly understandable, however, as the kids spend 7+ hours with them a day and only a few hours at home with their actual parents.

Separated, Standardized Topics
During my first year of teaching, I looked embarrassingly young, and the students didn’t really see me as being on par with their other older teachers. As a result, they often vented about school in my presence. I’ll never forget how 11th-grade Alex confided in me one afternoon, nearly trembling with frustration. “These teachers teach us facts that we have to barf up for the standardized test, but I know nothing about how to actually live life!”
In schools, we have “subjects” and “classes.” The science teacher teaches science, the math teacher teaches math, and the history teacher teaches history. Furthermore, due to government mandates such as “No Child Left Behind,” teachers must ensure that their students reach certain benchmarks to prove their learning capabilities, lest the school be penalized. As a result, many teachers end up desperately teaching the benchmarks in each topic, with no time or resources to innovate. With that pressure on their shoulders and budgets, classes like shop or home economics are ancient history, and the remaining classes are often hyper-focused on achieving the “standards.”
In real life, however, there is science in art, there is history to science, and there is math in music. Learning separate, itemized subjects presents a fractured view of reality, resulting in students who graduate with little practice in actually integrating disciplines to face their adult lives. They’ve accumulated isolated facts, but they never learned how to actually learn (or how to cook).
As any homeschooling parent knows, these “real” school problems can be non-issues in the home. No one needs to go through a metal detector or past an armed guard to come to the kitchen table, the barn, or the garden. When learning alongside siblings and interacting with adults in the real world, a homeschooled student’s age and grade aren’t a central or limited part of their identity. Teachers aren’t in contention with parents since they’re one and the same, so beliefs and morals are consistent, allowing the child to have a stable foundation to rest on while learning. The subjects can be taught in a lifelike, useful manner: teach a child how to bake biscuits, for example, and they learn about ratios, chemistry, cleanliness, nutrition, and cooking.
No matter how hard I tried as a teacher, I had little real influence over the lives of other people’s children and often felt like a chaperone on a broken carnival ride. But as a homeschooling parent, I find that the time and energy spent on my efforts are actually fruitful and impactful. I know I’ll never regret spending these fleeting, complicated, precious years with my kids rather than sending them off to strangers for much of the day and trying to do damage control at night.
WREN EVERETT and her husband quit their teaching jobs in the city and moved back to the land on 12 acres in the Ozarks. There, they are learning to live as modern peasants: off-grid, as self-sufficient as possible, and quite happily.
Originally published in the May/June 2023 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.