Homeschooling for Excellence

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By David Colfax

By Micki Colfax

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THE COLFAXES DIDN’T START TEACHING THEIR BOYS AT HOME TO GET THEM INTO HARVARD – BUT THAT’S WHAT HOMESCHOOLING ACCOMPLISHED!

For over fifteen years, David and Micki Colfax educated their children at home. They don’t think of themselves as pioneers, though that’s what they became. Unhappy with the public schools, the Colfaxes wanted the best education possible for their four sons: a program for learning that met the evolving needs of each child and gave them complete control of how and what their children learned. The results? A prescription for excellence-Harvard educations for their sons Grant, Drew, and Reed. (Their fourth son is still too young for college.)

Now the Colfaxes tell how all parents can become involved in homeschooling. In a straight-talking book that reads like a frank conversation among friends, they tell what they did and how they did it: their educational approaches, the lessons they learned, and what materials-books, equipment, educational aids-proved most useful over the years. Best of all, they show you how you can take charge of your children’s education-in an invaluable sourcebook that will help you find a rewarding and successful alternative to our failing schools.

Excerpt




SHOULD YOU TEACH
YOUR CHILDREN AT HOME?

Some readers may conclude that despite our disclaimers, we do in fact have an educational philosophy. If so, it is only that children will learn, will aspire to excellence, if we recognize and respect their different interests and abilities and give them a chance to develop them. In our view, every child is gifted one way or another. The tragedy is that this is denied every day, in word and in action, in our schools.

Homeschooling is not a panacea. But for increasing numbers of families it offers a degree of hope and opportunity. Homeschooling for Excellence is intended to provide a picture of one family's part in what has emerged as perhaps the most dynamic and creative educational movement in decades. We hope that our account will be of interest and helpful to parents of school-aged children and those who are charged with the task of educating them.

—David and Micki Colfax




To the Memory of Raj Sookdeosingh
1946-1982




THE SCHOOLBOY

I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the sky-lark sings with me.

O! what sweet company.

But to go to school in a summer morn,

O! it drives all joy away;

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day,

In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour,

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learnings bower,

Worn thro' with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy,

Sit in a cage and sing.

How can a child when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring.

O! father & mother, if buds are nip'd,

And blossoms blown away,

And if the tender plants are strip'd

Of their joy in the springing day,

By sorrow and cares dismay,

How shall the summer arise in joy

Or the summer fruits appear.

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy

Or bless the mellowing year,

When the blasts of winter appear.

—William Blake,

from SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, 1794




Acknowledgments

Many friends have contributed to the development of our home-schooling ideas and activities over the years. We are especially grateful to the following, who, contrary to usual practice, we hold collectively responsible for our failures as well as our successes: Bruce and Ling Anderson, Terry Anderson, Bob and Karen Altaras, Angel Arzan, Lew and Janet Baer, Peggy Bates, Jennifer Bice, Chris Bing, Ann Bullwinkel, Norman and JoAnn Charles, Manning and Irene Davis, Jan Dizard, Toby Egeth, Lelia Filiatrault, Jim Gibbons, Rob and Barbara Goodell, Bob and Roxanne Hedges, Bruce Hering, Diane Hering, Lucile Herreid, Eric and Pat Larson, Don and Patti Lipmanson, Kurt Lorenz, Mary Luther, Steve McKay, Virginia Nash, Grace Neill, Nancy Nonnencamp, Joseph Petelle, Judy Pierce, Chuck Ream, Vernon and Charlene Rollins, Robert Salisbury, Steven Schack, Gerd Schroeter, Morris Shepard, Don Sheckler, Will Siegel, Margaret K. Simmons, Ed and Janet Stockwell, Alice Walker, David Walker, Jan Wax, and Michael Winfree.




Introduction

For the last fifteen years we have educated our children at home. Our oldest son, Grant, graduated with high honors from Harvard, and was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship. His brothers Drew and Reed are presently undergraduates there. Our youngest son, Garth, thirteen, has a few more homeschooling years ahead of him.

When Grant was admitted to Harvard in 1983, his educational experience received widespread attention, and we found ourselves being cast in the role of homeschooling "experts." It was a role we did our best to avoid, in part because we felt that parents did not need yet another set of authorities telling how they should raise their children, and in part because we believed that our experiences—as teachers-turned-ranchers—were so different from those of most parents as to make them of little real value to those who hoped to learn from us.

However, as we talked with hundreds of parents over the next few years, we came to the realization that there was, and continues to be, a need for the exploration of possibilities and a sharing of experiences among parents who want to see their children obtain the best education possible. And when Drew and Reed were admitted to Harvard in 1986 and 1988, we found ourselves increasingly being called upon to tell our story.

Doing that turned out to be a more difficult task than we had envisioned. Our homeschooling program was not derived from a set of neatly-organized principles that guided our day-to-day activities. We did not attempt to implement a particular educational philosophy, but, rather, attempted to respond to the evolving needs of the children more or less in an ad hoc fashion. Because of this, our subsequent efforts to reconstruct and rationalize what was largely a trial-and-error process proved to be a rather complex undertaking. We discovered that our deep-seated aversion to educational ideologies in general, and pop ideologies in particular, made it impossible for us to condense a decade and a half of experience into a few easily-apprehended directives which, if followed, would ensure homeschooling success. The educational experience is simply much too complex, too varied, and too rich to be reduced to a neat formula or two, or a set of pat and trendy phrases.

Rather, it is our intent in the pages that follow to be as concrete as possible and to provide the reader with an account of what we did and how we did it, an abbreviated critique of public education, our assessment of the advantages of homeschooling, and a basic inventory of materials that we found useful over the years.

Some readers may conclude that despite our disclaimers we do in fact have an educational philosophy. If so, it is only that children will learn, will aspire to excellence, if we recognize and respect their different interests and abilities and give them a chance to develop them. In our view, every child is gifted in one way or another. The tragedy is that this is denied every day, in word and in action, in our schools.

Homeschooling is not a panacea. But for increasing numbers of families it offers a degree of hope and opportunity. Homeschooling for Excellence is intended to provide a picture of one family's part in what has emerged as perhaps the most dynamic and creative educational movement in decades. We hope that our account will be of interest and helpful to parents of school-aged children and those who are charged with the task of educating them.




CHAPTER 1

Teaching Our Own

Winter, 1985. It is a dark, rainy morning. David is at his desk in the loft and Drew, seventeen, is busy helping fifteen-year-old Reed with his algebra. Micki is in the kitchen helping Garth, nine, with his writing as she rolls out bread dough.

If the weather clears, the books will be put aside and Reed and Drew will spend the afternoon hauling and stacking firewood while Garth works on the goat pen fence. After dinner Drew will bury himself in a pile of Sky and Telescope magazines he borrowed from the county library, and Reed will try to finish that Victor Hugo novel that none of the rest of us has ever gotten through.

It is another typical school day at our rural homestead where, for a dozen years, we have educated our children at home.

Shortly after moving to our 47 acres on a remote, logged-over mountainside in northern California in 1973, we met a number of parents who were teaching or planning to teach their children at home. For some of us located in the hills, homeschooling was almost unavoidable: distances, snow, landslides, muddy roads, and swollen rivers made it all but impossible to transport children back and forth to the public schools in winter. Distances between neighbors with school-aged children precluded the formation of alternative backwoods schools. And then there were political, religious, and philosophical objections to the local schools: they were too conservative or too liberal, too rigid or too informal, too academic or not academic enough, too fundamentalist or not fundamentalist enough.

For most of us, however, a mixture of philosophy and geography impelled us toward homeschooling. We had moved to the country without giving much thought to how our children would be educated, or where, or by whom, but we were imbued with a spirit of self-reliance, and it was all but inevitable that we would begin thinking and talking about "teaching our own." Educational theory and practice, like other orthodoxies of the late sixties and early seventies, were in a state of flux, with critics of public education such as John Holt, Ivan Illich, and Jonathan Kozol providing the ideological underpinnings for educational innovation. A little paperback by Hal Bennett, No More Public School (Random House, 1972), had become something of an underground best seller. More inspirational than informational, and disarmingly low-keyed, it suggested strategies for meeting curriculum requirements, dealing with hostile school boards, and teaching children at home "legally or otherwise."

Once we decided to teach our children at home, we tried to avoid any confrontation with state or local authorities. We called ourselves The Mountain School, registered with the state as a private school, established a Mountain School checking account, ordered a ream of letterhead stationery, and, as required by law, assembled a file containing daily attendance records, teacher résumés, and course outlines. Perhaps because our children had never been enrolled in the local schools, or because we asked nobody for permission to teach them ourselves (in dealing with the bureaucracies we proceeded in a matter-of-fact way) we encountered no opposition whatsoever. And of course it worked to our advantage that the local school system, which ranked as one of the worst in the state, was having problems enough with unhappy parents: its administrators were not inclined to create additional problems for themselves by challenging homeschoolers.

* * *

And so we began. In retrospect, we seem to have been almost oblivious to the magnitude of the task we were taking on. Chemistry, trigonometry, and foreign languages were years in the future. The job at hand was to teach the boys—then eight, five, and three—to read and do simple arithmetic, and to get a homestead together. We wrote to a dozen publishers for catalogues and ordered sample copies of books, and after several false starts came across a workbook series of readers that captivated the boys and allowed them to work alone and at their own pace to about a sixth-grade level. Grant, the oldest, finished them in less than two years, as did Drew. Reed, our three-year-old, was well into them at four—he had his older brothers as models—and was an accomplished reader before he was five.

Unfortunately, the reading series, we soon discovered, was unique among texts. Most grade-school-level texts we found badly organized, wooden, and insipid—at best—and after trying several math books, abandoned them all and developed our daily exercise sheets.

Elementary sciences were more easily managed, as we were able to locate a wide variety of non-textbook materials on zoology, botany, astronomy, and physics. On our trips to the city we made it a point to check out the offerings in museum bookstores, as well as the two or three shops which specialized in nature books and materials. At home, our efforts to restore the land, to plant gardens, and to improve our livestock, stimulated interest in biology, chemistry, and, eventually, embryology and genetics. Clearing the badly damaged land provided lessons in ecology, and the construction of a house and outbuildings showed the boys the relevance of seemingly arcane subjects such as geometry. Drew, at seven, understood that the Pythagorean theorem was invaluable in squaring up his sheep shed foundation. Grant, at nine, discovered a Pomo Indian campsite on the ridge and was inspired to delve into North American archaeology, an interest which later broadened into studies of Mayan and Aztec cultures.

Genre:

  • "THE CALIFORNIA COLFAXES TEACH THEIR CHILDREN WELL."—Newsweek
  • "THEIR EFFORTS TO TEACH THEIR CHILDREN THEMSELVES HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL BEYOND MOST PARENTS' DREAMS....Lively and clearly written, Homeschooling for Excellence provides a step-by-step guide...and will make most parents think harder about encouraging their children's interest in learning."—Chicago Tribune

On Sale
Oct 1, 1988
Page Count
176 pages
ISBN-13
9780446389860