The Best Lessons Are Sometimes Discovered at Home

Iam a second-generation home schooler. I was taught at home in the 1970s and early 1980s; now I write, teach college students how to write, and educate my four children at home.

Three of them, anyway. The oldest one, age 17, is essentially educating himself. He spends his school-day day mornings working largely on his own: reading his American history, writing an essay, problem-solving his way through his advanced algebra, finishing off Emma Bovary or Moby Dick, working on his own original writing, taking long walks between subjects to clear his head.

His learning, in fact, now looks a lot like mine.

As a writer, I frequently have to educate myself from scratch on some new subject. Right now I'm writing a four-volume narrative history of the world for my regular publisher, which means I've had to work up basic knowledge of varied fields that I know nothing about: the effects of Confucian philosophy on medieval Korean government, trade between ancient Sri Lanka and the Indian mainland, differences between Scandinavian and Italian methods of waging war.

Occasionally I put out an SOS to an expert, but mostly I go and find the basic texts on the subject, give myself a good grounding, and then review the most recent articles written on the topic to see whether new research or insights have begun to shift consensus in another direction.

I learned how to do this in high school -- just like my son.

My parents pulled us out of regular school, back in 1973, because my brother and sister and I didn't shoehorn neatly into classroom culture. We were early readers, restless in our desks, talkative, problem children. When the local mental health clinic diagnosed us as sane but bored, my mother resorted to home schooling out of desperation.

As young students, we followed a fairly strict curriculum. But as we grew older, and as my mother grew more comfortable with home schooling, she allowed us more and more flexibility in what and how we studied. By the time we were in high school, we were largely self-directed. We had goals for each subject for each year, checks and balances, papers to finish, and exams to take. But our day-to-day study consisted largely of reading, writing, and thinking on our own.

In other words, my home-school high school prepared me for grown-up learning.

Once you're an adult, learning has to be a self-directed activity. You feel the need for information, the need to understand something: perhaps you need to place a relative into the right battle in World War II; or maybe you need to understand why Catholicism looks the way it does in the 21st century, so that you can understand your own faith; or, this election year, you need to truly grasp the complexity of Iraq's history. So you read. You think. You listen to lectures. You write an e-mail to a friend about what you've learned; you write a journal entry to yourself, laying out your conclusions.

Far too many intelligent, educated adults don't know how to do this. They spent their lives in classrooms, where learning came by way of teachers and assignments.

But home-educated students start learning like adults early on.

I'm not here suggesting that home education for high school students consists entirely in letting them follow their own path. Students are still children, after all, which means that their grasp of cause and effect is immature. They won't always be able to see the future benefits of algebra or English grammar. And as much independent work as my high-school son does, there are still subjects I enforce (Latin and advanced math leap to mind) because he isn't yet able to see the down-the-road benefits, as I do.

But home schooling has allowed him to begin to experience real education: something you do because you need to know -- not because you have to check off three more random subjects in order to earn that diploma.

I know plenty of parents who home school younger children, and then decide to put them back into the classroom for high school. That's understandable, and for many families it may well be the right choice. But for high school students, home schooling provides an experience they won't get anywhere else: it allows them to learn, not like teenager, but like adults.
Susan Wise Bauer has published numerous books, including "The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America," "The History of the Ancient World," "The Well-Trained Mind," and the "Story of the World" series. She teaches English at the College of William and Mary and lives in Virginia with her husband and four children. Contact her at susanwisebauer.com.