Yes You ARE Qualified to Homeschool Your Children

This post is not the first I’ve ever seen on social media from someone insisting we’re not “qualified” to homeschool our own children. I’ve addressed this before on my YouTube channel many times, within the context of other videos, but here I’m trying to give you some responses you can use to push back on people who say you’re not qualified (because you are).

1. Define Qualified?

The first thing you should always do when someone says you’re not qualified is to insist they define their terms. Don’t assume you know, and start defending yourself. If they throw something at you like “You don’t have a certification,” or “You haven’t been properly trained,” or “Where did you get your teaching degree?” simply follow that with the following:

* What does “certification” do for the teacher, or the student, do you know?

* Define “properly trained,” to do what exactly?

* What do people with teaching degrees have that makes them more qualified to teach my individual child (whom you do not know) than I am?

You could keep going with this all day if need be. The point is not to convince them you are qualified, the point is to challenge the validity of their claim. Unless and until they can define what qualified is, what teachers do that you could not do, and what teacher training delivers that you could not get on your own (if you don’t already have it), they have no point, and should be made aware of that.

There is no specific class a parent takes to learn to teach their child to walk, talk, and go to the toilet, and yet most parents figure out it, often by asking other parents, their own parents, or even the Internet what to do, and those who have a child who struggles with these milestones — if they love their children — tend to start looking for help from people who are trained to find out why. Why would you not be able to do the same thing with teaching your child how to read, write, and do math?

2. How Do You Know Teachers Are Qualified?

It cracks me up how many people assume teachers are qualified to teach, just because the government, or some college or university said so! There’s a teacher shortage, first of all, so many sates have relaxed their standards to make it easier, not harder, for people to “qualify” to teach. Additionally, “qualified” and “certified” are not the same thing (see question above — make sure your interlocutor knows that). Certification has as much (if not more) to do with professional standards, and the laws and liabilities associated with teaching within the government system as it has to to with knowledge of pedagogy or praxis.

3. My House is Not a School.

Why would you need to be qualified to do what a teacher does when your house is not a school? Teachers, by definition, are professionals whose job is to work with many children at one time in a standardized way, covering required material, or material “aligned to state standards,” not to your individual child’s cognitive abilities, or interests. So the school might teach reading at a rate faster or slower than your child’s optimal speed, and there really is no way for the teacher to “individuate” the instruction without discriminating against other students. As the parent, you are not limited by such concerns. You can spend as much, or as little time as you like, and what’s more, you can tailor every hour, not just every day, to your child’s specific needs.

4. What if the Teacher is Not Qualified to Teach MY Child?

You’d think, especially given the abysmal results we’re seeing nationwide on aptitude and achievement tests, at all levels of education, that more people would be questioning the teachers’ qualifications, not the parents’! It defies common sense to assume such a high percentage of students are performing so poorly purely because they are intellectually impaired, lazy, or have terrible home environments. It’s also unlikely that all these students would perform better if the schools just had more money. As a nation, we have been spending more every year, and the results have remained flat, or worsened year-after-year. So it’s perfectly fair to wonder whether parents can’t do any worse than teachers are doing, and might in fact do better if only because they know their children better, and can provide more consistent, individual attention at home.

5. I Have Skin in the Game, Literally.

The anti-homeschoolers can argue all they want FOR school if they like, but they cannot argue that anyone has more to lose (or gain) than you and your family from you taking charge of your own child’s education. They can also say your children “belong” to the community, but they don’t, they belong to themselves, and until they’re 18, legally, to you, not as property, but from a responsibility standpoint, it’s all on you. The school, and every allegedly “qualified” teacher there, won’t have to live with the guilt (or legal liability) if your child fails to learn what he or she needs to learn to graduate, never mind to be happy, well-adjusted, and successful. You will. More importantly, your love and investment in your child will pay huge dividends, even if you don’t do everything perfectly. The fact that you took it on, that you care, that you want to put in the time and energy to help them get the best education they can get, sends a powerful message to your child that they are a priority, and no one is more qualified to tell them that than you are!

For more information on homeschooling specifically, check out my playlist here. Here’s the first in the series.

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