The Southwest Voice

By: Nancy Lerma

Twelve years ago, when our eldest son Jake was approaching school age, I began to dream of the glamorous life quickly approaching: tennis, lunch with the girls, afternoons to prepare gourmet dinners. One down and, at the time, only two more kids to launch into the full-time system of American education. School days for our children represented my freedom. Most things in life don’t turn out exactly like we plan.  About six months before Jake’s first day of school, I was hit right between the eyes with another educational choice: home schooling.

Good grief, this idea was nuts and a big clash with my plans of toddler retirement days. My first introduction to home schooling was while listening to a popular radio program in which a teenager and his parents were discussing the ridiculous topic of home schooling. My skeptical ears began to listen to their plight of educational madness that I was sure had created a socially-inept individual. As the program went on, a very modest kid told about how he had started a computer consulting company before going to Harvard — my perception began to expand. In fact I really couldn’t stop contemplating how normal yet accomplished this young man came across as.

An interesting point of the interview was that peer education and peer pressure can be an obstacle rather than a social necessity. Children could be socialized through daily interactions with their world not only through a formal classroom setting. Peer socialization may even stimulate antisocial behavior. This new idea permeated my previous paradigm of thinking.

The next encounter that had a profound influence on my view of traditional education took place while living in Orange County. In that society of movers and shakers, competition began at only five weeks of age as a baby began to roll over — or not. My peers began to put their names on waiting lists for prestigious private school where kindergarteners would be able to identify classical music composers before they reach first grade. The children I saw were not so light-hearted after entering into this rigorous educational process.

In the late ‘70s Dr. David Elkind wrote a book currently in its third edition called “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.” Dr. Elkind suggests that today’s children are the unintentional victims of a rushed society. He asserts that as we try to mature our children to act like mini-adults we are actually harming their natural development. Another educational consideration brought up in Elkind’s detailed account of child development is biological maturity and reading. If you visit a kindergarten classroom today you will discover that some of the children cannot read while others read quite well. Could it be that not all young children have reached the stage of biological development necessary to begin a formal education?

These ideas led my husband and I to seriously analyze choices for our eldest son’s early education. Ultimately, with strong support from my husband Ron, we took the giant leap and began to home-school Jake in 1996. Today Jake is a junior at Bakersfield High School and is academically very successful. More than that, he is a great person. Now with four children, we take each child’s development and natural inclination to determine his or her educational course for the year. We have developed our educationally philosophy with the goal of teaching our children to love learning.

Twelve years later, and with a seventh and third grader still at home, I haven’t begun my tennis game — but with no regrets I am getting closer to that day.

— Nancy Lerma has a bachelor’s degree in communications from CSU Long Beach, has been married to Ron  for 19 years, has four kids and has home-schooled for 13 years.