I was talking with a friend the other day, and he said ‘secular homeschoolers? Isn’t that an oxymoron?’
I didn’t know what to say. We don’t homeschool for religious reasons, and many of the homeschoolers we hang out with don’t, so to me it’s the normal situation to be secular.
The numbers sort of bear this out. In a survey by Trinity University in 2000 (one of those ‘check all that apply’ surveys), 38.4 percent of homeschooling families cite religious reasons as a reason they are homeschooling. According to the National Educational and Home Research Institute, most people homeschool for more than one reason. In 2012, 91 percent said they homeschooled because of school environment (that’d include us as well), according to the Institute of Education Sciences. The US Department of Education found that 16% of parents in 2012 homeschooled for religious reasons primarily, although far more cite religion as a second reason.
Our local secular homeschooling group has about 200 members, and is a great resource for those of us looking for non-religious materials and courses. And while we do all bump into very very vocal religious homeschoolers, most of the time everyone is very polite and understanding of our different choices. We get enough negativity from family, friends and the society at large; we don’t need to add it to each other. And those instances where fellow homeschoolers are abusive are a wonderful teaching experience for our children to learn real socialization skills. Chatting with our local secular group, it seems that it’s generally agreed that any weirdness felt from being a secular homeschooler is more felt from outside the homeschool community, rather than from within. We generally teach our children about religions as part of our schooling as well.
A concern for the secular homeschooler is finding secular curricula. While they are not as common as religious curricula, more resources are being added to the market as producers are figuring out that we exist. Places like Global Village School and Time4Learning provide complete curricula, while ALEKS and Saxon provide math, and science can be found at places like Connect the Thoughts and Khan Academy. For support, there is the closed facebook group Secular Homeschool Families, and http://www.secularhomeschool.com/.
Our personal journey includes multiple reasons for homeschooling. While we always thought we could do ‘a better job’ than the schools (one on one teacher student ratio will always be the best), a primary reason was that our son was simply not suited to the school environment. As social as he is, he gets ‘peopled out’ very quickly, and he did not react well to being forced to continue to socialize after he hit his limit. No flexibility was allowed him in school to put himself into a ‘time out’ when he needed one, so he would be very stressed. That and a school refusal to make his work more challenging were our primary reasons. If we did that Trinity survey above, though, I probably would also have checked the ‘religious reasons’ because there were multiple times our son came home loaded with Bible stories because another child had brought a comic book ‘Action Bible’ to school to read with the other kids.