“The goal of the parent should not be to try to force all these billions of bits of information into their child’s brain. It should be teaching your child how to learn rather than…cramming your child’s head full of information bits.”
Israel Wayne
Homeschooling offers a unique opportunity for parents to tailor their child’s education to their individual needs and strengths. However, it is not without its challenges. Thankfully, long-time home education leader, author and speaker, Israel Wayne, an early homeschool graduate himself, lays out the key factors in avoiding the pitfalls of homeschooling.
Israel joined Yvette for a session of our 2023 Homegrown Generation Family Expo and shared a ton of practical advice for avoiding the most common traps that homeschooling families fall into. Let’s delve into some of the valuable takeaways from this important conversation.
Embracing Individuality:
Israel emphasizes the importance of recognizing and cultivating the uniqueness of each child. He emphasizes, “Comparing children to others can be detrimental to their growth…we need to encourage them to be the best version of themselves.” It is crucial for parents to understand that not every child is meant to excel in every subject or area. Each child possesses distinct gifts and talents that should be nurtured and celebrated.
Rather than striving for uniformity, homeschooling provides parents with a platform to customize education based on their children’s learning styles. Isreal suggests, “Understanding how your child learns best is essential…whatever their learning style, adjusting their education to suit their needs is vital.”
Avoiding Academic Pressure:
Homeschooling can sometimes fall prey to the pressure to excel academically in every subject. Israel shares a story of two boys with different strengths: one excelling academically and the other in athletics. He emphasizes the importance of encouraging each child in their respective areas of excellence. Israel states, “Teaching children to praise and encourage their siblings when they succeed is crucial in building an environment of support and collaboration.”
In addition to this, he identifies the need for parents to prioritize relationship-building over strict academic focus. “Academics are not the end goal; they are just a means to an end. When we prioritize relationship building, we create an environment for successful homeschooling.”
Avoiding the Replication Trap:
The conversation delved into the misconception that homeschooling should mimic the traditional classroom model. Israel shared his perspective that replicating public school practices is often not the best approach. Instead, homeschooling provides unparalleled flexibility and the ability to create a dynamic learning environment unique to each family.
Relationship over Academics:
Israel challenged the notion that standardized education and knowledge guarantee success in life. Instead, he advocated for placing the focus on teaching children how to learn rather than simply filling their minds with information. Prioritizing relationship and parental guidance in homeschooling is crucial for long-term success, with academics playing a supporting role.
Adapting to High School Challenges:
The transition to high school can pose unique challenges in homeschooling. Israel raises the question of how to challenge high school students without standardizing them. He suggests that focusing on teaching children how to learn – for life, rather than just cramming information into their heads, is key. This fosters critical thinking skills, preparing them for higher education and beyond.
The College Dilemma and Alternatives:
Israel Wayne expresses a bias against the traditional path of college for homeschooling families. While acknowledging that certain careers may necessitate college education, he highlights the current pitfalls and challenges associated with it. Rising costs, ideological influences, and the devaluation of traditional academic standards all contribute to reexamining the default assumption that every child must attend college.
He recommends reading the book Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett for a comprehensive exploration of the college option. He suggests resetting parental assumptions and being prepared for alternative paths if college is not the right choice for their child.
Tune in to the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast to access the full interview with Israel Wayne, delve further into these topics, and discover additional valuable insights into navigating the homeschooling journey.
📚📖 Ready to start homeschooling? Download your free Homeschool Survival Kit today!
Recommended Resources:
Answers for Homeschooling: Top 25 Questions Critics Ask, by Israel Wayne
Education: Does God Have an Opinion, Israel Wayne
Demystifying Learning Styles – Tyler Hogan on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast
Is College Worth It, by William J. Bennett – https://amzn.to/48y0ntl
Getting Started in Homeschooling – Israel Wayne on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast
🍿🍿🍿 Stream Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution for FREE today!
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ Are you in need of a fresh vision for your homeschool? Join us for 4 days of Homeschool Encouragement at the Homegrown Generation Family Expo. Use the coupon code HG25 to save 25% on registration today!
Connect with Israel Wayne:
Israel Wayne is an author and conference speaker who has a passion for defending the Christian faith and promoting a Biblical worldview. He is the author of the books Questions God Asks, Questions Jesus Asks, Pitchin’ a Fit: Overcoming Angry and Stressed-Out Parenting, Raising Them Up – Parenting for Christians,Education: Does God Have an Opinion?, Answers for Homeschooling: Top 25 Questions Critics Ask, and Foundations in Faith. He has been a regular columnist for Home School Digest, Home School Enrichment and The Old Schoolhouse magazines. He is the founder of Family Renewal, LLC and the site editor for ChristianWorldview.net.
Since 1995, Israel has traveled the nation speaking on family, homeschooling, revival, discipleship, and cultural issues. Aiming for both the head and the heart, Israel’s goal is to challenge audiences to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. In his words, “God’s Word applies to all areas of life. There is not one facet of our existence which does not fall under the direct claim of Lordship by Jesus Christ. This includes how we spend our money, what entertainment we consume, how we educate our children, how we use our time, etc. All of life must be understood from within a Biblical worldview.”
Israel and his wife Brook were joined in marriage in 1999 without dating and share their testimony of God’s faithfulness on an audiobook titled, What God Has Joined Together. Israel and Brook, both homeschool graduates themselves, are home educating their eleven children.
Watch Israel Wayne’s 2023 session, “Avoiding and Recovering from Homeschool Mistakes.”
Watch Israel Wayne’s 2020 session, “Family-Based Discipleship”.
Listen to Israel Wayne on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast.
Watch Israel Wayne in Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution.
Connect with Israel Wayne:
ChristianWorldview.net
Israel’s apologetics website
ChristianWorldview.net/blog
Israel’s blog
Facebook.com/FamilyRenewal
Family Renewal Facebook Page
Facebook.com/IsraelWayneAuthor
Israel’s Facebook Page
LinkedIn.com/in/israelwayne
Connect with Israel on LinkedIn
Twitter.com/israelwayne
Follow @israelwayne on Twitter
UltimateRadioShow.com/family-renewal
Israel & Brook Wayne’s Podcast
Discussion Questions:
1. How can parents avoid the pressure to make their homeschooled children excel in every subject?
2. Do you agree with Israel’s idea that not every child is meant to master every subject? Why or why not?
3. How can homeschooling parents avoid the trap of replicating the traditional classroom model?
4. What are some ways that homeschooling can be customized and flexible to meet the individual needs of children?
5. How do you feel about the speaker’s bias against college? Do you agree or disagree, and why?
6. How can parents prepare their homeschooled children for life beyond high school, even if they choose not to pursue college?
7. Do you think standardized education and standardized testing are necessary for success in life? Why or why not?
8. How can parents prioritize relationship and connection with their children over academics while still ensuring their education?
9. What are some practical strategies for individualizing education based on children’s different learning styles?
10. How do you think homeschooling can provide opportunities for children to explore and excel in their unique areas of strength and talent?
Read the full transcript:
Yvette Hampton:
Israel. Welcome to the Homegrown Generation Family Expo. Tell our listeners who you are. Tell us a little bit about you and your family.
Israel Wayne:
Well, it’s great to be back with you. I am a homeschooled graduate and a homeschooling father. My family started homeschooling in 1978, which was about five years before the modern day homeschool movement began. I graduated from Homeschooling in 1991, which was a year before homeschooling became legal in the state in which I lived. So my entire experience being homeschooled was when it was against the law. So whole story there. My mom in 1988 started publishing a national homeschool magazine and it became one of the nation’s longest running Christian homeschool publications. So I grew up sort of in the leadership side of the homeschooling movement. My mom was an author and conference speaker and spoke at conferences back in the so on. And so because I was one of the first homeschool graduates in the United States, I actually started getting invited as a teenager to speak at conferences in the 1990s. I was keynoting homeschool conferences and wrote my first book on homeschooling in 2000. Actually. My wife is also a homeschool graduate. Her family started homeschooling in Arizona in 1983 and we’ve been married 24 years. We have eleven children, all of whom have been homeschooled from birth. So my professional career, I guess I started working for my mother’s homeschool publishing company in 1993 January, so I just finished 30 years.
Yvette Hampton:
Wow.
Israel Wayne:
Full time working in homeschool publishing as well as conference speaking and advocacy for home education. So it’s been quite a fun ride. My whole adult life has been professionally involved in promoting homeschooling, so something I’m very passionate about. And then also working as marketing director for the Homeschool magazine that we published for 20 years. My day job was interfacing with curriculum publishers and homeschool speakers, authors, vendors, that kind of thing. So I’m pretty familiar with all things homeschool from my experience being homeschool, working professionally in it, and then homeschooling our eleven children.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. So you are a professional homeschooler, really, is what you’re saying, through and through.
Israel Wayne:
Between chronically and terminally homeschooled.
Yvette Hampton:
I think that’s what it is. I love it. Well, you are so much fun to listen to. You and you are full of wisdom, advice and experience, all of those three things. And so when we were trying to figure out what session would be best for you to talk about, I saw this one avoiding and Recovering from Homeschool mistakes. And I was like, well, that’s Israel. Because if anyone could talk on this topic, it is you. I know that you’ve been in the world for such a long time and I think as a homeschool mom, that’s one of my fears. And I know all the other moms as well. One of our greatest fears is can we actually do this? Can we do it well? Are we going to screw up our kids? Are we going to mess up our family? And how do we get through this with the least amount of mistakes? My desire always is that when my kids leave my house, that I will have as few regrets as possible and I will have regrets. I mean, all of us are sinful people, so there’s always going to be things that we’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wouldn’t have done that. I wish I wouldn’t have said that. I wish we would have made a different decision. But if we have people to go before us who can help us navigate these sometimes really muddy waters, then that’s what I want. I need the wisdom from people like you who have gone before us and you’re just a little ahead of us, more ahead of us with your kids. Your kids. You have some who are a little older than my oldest, but because you’ve been doing this for so long. So share with us what the Lord has taught you over your 30 plus years of being in the homeschool world. And maybe I guess we’ll start however you want, but do we want to talk about avoiding some of the mistakes that we sometimes make and then we can talk about recovering from them once we’ve made them?
Israel Wayne:
Well, I think the first one that I’ll start with is one that probably any veteran homeschooler will recognize. But if you’re brand new to homeschooling, it’s not necessarily self evident. And the first mistake is assuming that homeschooling is synonymous with schooling at home.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Israel Wayne:
And I know that sounds like I’m playing semantics games, but literally the mentality that people bring to homeschooling often is they take their experience, which is fair enough, about what education is supposed to look like, which was largely them sitting in a brick and mortar school for twelve years at a desk in a classroom, looking at a chalkboard. And they try to bring that home and replicate that model within the home and that’s counterproductive. That is really not what we want to be going for in homeschooling. Homeschooling is not picking up your child’s desk, carrying it down the street, plonking it on your kitchen floor and saying, okay, now we’re going to just do everything that the public school does at home. And I know families I remembered, especially in the 1980s because homeschooling was so new and nobody had done it, and there was nobody to kind of go ahead of you and teach you or mentor you. You were figuring it out on your own. So almost all homeschooling families that I knew did this. I mean, they would literally have school desks in the house with a chalkboard and an American flag and pledge allegiance to the flag. And you’d have to raise your hand, ask a question, and you have to get permission to go use the restroom and recess. It was ridiculous. And eventually parents figured out that oh, this is not the best way to home school. So I would say that that’s really one of the first mistakes. And my perspective I have a little bit of a radical perspective on some things because I was homeschool. I didn’t grow up in an institutional government school. So I don’t have so many things to unlearn. So some things seem really obvious to me. But just on that point about avoiding the mistake of trying to replicate the public school in your home, if you say, well, how do I recover from that? Or how do I avoid that? My best advice to you would be to say, think about pretty much everything that the government school does and how they do it and why they do it, and then do the complete opposite of all of the and that’s going to give you the best chance of being successful as a homeschooler.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, that’s a tough thing because I did grow up in school. I went to a Christian school most of my life and I had a good experience. But of course I came into homeschooling with that same idea that I don’t think we had desks ever, but I had my whiteboard, which we still have a whiteboard. I love having my whiteboard and there are benefits to some of that. But I definitely came into it with, okay, Brooklyn, here’s your worksheet, fill out all the blanks and then we’ll do the next worksheet. And we did the Pledge of Allegiance, we did all that. And not that any of that stuff is wrong. We’re not shaming any families who do that. For some people that works great, but it’s the pressure that is put on moms feeling like they have to, like you said, replicate what the classroom looks like and then you have to be a mom on top of all of that and you have to deal with life and that’s where it’s like, that’s just insanity. You can’t possibly do that. And then moms feel like they’re inadequate and they’re not doing it right, they’re doing it all wrong because it doesn’t look like what it looked like for most of us growing up, except for Israel, who never sat in a classroom.
Israel Wayne:
Right. I think part of that too is just even the definition of what we mean by homeschooling. So again, I think most people, when the homeschool, and they use that term, what they think of is we’re doing academics at home rather than learning academics at school, we’re learning academics at home. That’s not how I think about homeschooling at all. My paradigm is completely, totally different than that. So my definition of homeschooling is that homeschooling is parenting and relationship and that we use academics as one of the tools in the parenting toolbox to prepare our child for life. So this is, I think, another mistake that homeschooling parents sometimes make is that they focus so much on academics. And their definition of homeschooling is that I have to give my child this huge information download because there are a billion data bits out there in the universe that my child has to have downloaded into their little brain before they graduate high school. And of course, who determines what those billion data bits are? Some expert somewhere that we’ve never met. We don’t know their name, but somebody set a standard somewhere, government school committee, somebody somewhere said, these are the things you have to learn at this age and this grade, and these are the things that you have to know to be successful in life. The problem with that is that everybody’s life is different, right? So not all people actually need to know all the same information. Not everybody has to have a standardized education, which I’ll cycle back to because I think that’s a whole nother mistake that we make is the mistake of standardization. But the goal of the parent should not be to try to force all these billions of bits of information into their child’s brain. It should be teaching your child how to learn rather than because the thing is, you will forget almost everything you learned in school, even in home school. You just will. It’s the nature of it. The only things that we retain or that we remember from our formal schooling years is pretty much the things that we use on an ongoing basis and everything else we completely forget. That’s why it’s so hard. And parents feel like, oh, I don’t know that I can homeschool my child because I don’t know any of this information that I’m trying to teach my child. It’s like, well, you went through school. Why do you not know any of it? Well, it’s because most of it’s completely irrelevant to everyday life and you don’t use it. And so therefore, you don’t remember it because you, for the most part, don’t even need it. Rather than focusing on cramming your child’s head full of information bits, rather you should look at your goal as a parent is, how do I parent this child and guide them and lead them to prepare them for life and to prepare them for God’s call on their life and what God wants them to do? How do I do that effectively and successfully as a parent? And you’re going to need some academics for that.
Yvette Hampton:
Sure.
Israel Wayne:
And the academics have a place, for sure. But I think more importantly than focusing on the academics is to focus on relationship. And the relationship piece is one that a lot of people run away from. I hear it all the time. We just had a conversation a couple of days ago with a mom who said we were homeschooling, but my daughter and I didn’t get along, and so I put her in public school. And so the problem in my view with that scenario is we have a relationship conflict, and so we’re going to solve the relationship conflict by simply avoiding each other.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Israel Wayne:
And avoidance ends up being really a thing that kills the opportunity for influence and relationship. And so rather than running away from relationship, it’s kind of like saying, well, my husband and I or My wife and I are having a conflict. We’re not getting along. So what we need to do is just avoid each other as much as possible. Well, yeah, it makes the conflict go down, but it also almost completely removes the possibility of relationship. So God created this scenario or this paradigm that he talks about in Deuteronomy Six where he says we’re supposed to teach our children from the time we wake up in the morning till the time we go to bed. We’re supposed to teach them whether we’re sitting at home inside of our house or whether we’re walking outside of our house. He says, Teach your children diligently. Yeah, I mean, that’s a comprehensive, like, all day, every opportunity, every lesson you teach your children. And yeah, you’ll use academics. But academics are not an end goal. They’re just a means to an end. And most of the time, what I find is that the academics actually just brings out a lot of press and conflict and sometimes character flaws and sin in us, where our children are lazy, where they don’t want to do their studies, where they become rebellious, where they have attitudes and they push back against their parents. And then we’re trying to teach them. And then what do we do? We get attitudes and we push back, and we have sin problems and character problems. And the academics actually kind of just brings to the surface a lot of relationship issues that we have to deal with. And we have a choice in that moment, do we run away from that, or do we press into it? And my view, of course, is that God wants us to press into that. Prioritizing relationship over academics is essential because if the relationship doesn’t work, the homeschooling won’t work, and if the relationship part is working, you can figure out the academic.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, yeah, I think Christy Clover hit on this last night a little bit where we were talking about character over know, and that’s basically what, you’re know, the character of our child matters so much more than the curriculum, but the curriculum sometimes helps to bring out what character traits we need to work on. I appreciate that you talked about that not everything matters that they’re going to learn because they’re not going to remember a lot of it, and some of it just is irrelevant to their lives. But those things teach our kids how to learn, and they teach them how to expand their brain. So there is so much benefit to teaching the academics. So we’re not saying, like, don’t teach your kids academics at all. Just play all day long, which play is just as important as academics as well. We’ll talk about that. But yes, there’s definitely some, I think, burdens that need to be lifted from moms who feel like they have to do it all. They have to check every single box. And by the time their kids graduate school, they have had to pour all of these details, like you said, all of this information into their child’s brain, and their kid has to remember it all. Some kids are crazy smart, and they’re going to remember the things that they’re learning, but they’ll remember the things that the Lord wants them to learn, and God will equip them with what they need to know to be Jesus loving, successful adults. And that’s what matters. Yeah, I love that. Are you going to talk about because you talked about the system and living up to these standards, are you going to talk about being behind? I’m assuming you’re going to get to that, because I know that’s a big thing where moms are like, but my kids are behind, what do I do?
Israel Wayne:
Yeah, I hear that all the time. My child’s behind. And I’m like, behind who.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Israel Wayne:
Who are they racing? Right? Is this a race? And your child is not catching up to the child in front of them. And so I would say another one of the mistakes that parents make is the myth of the necessity of standardization. The government school is predicated on that. And there are reasons why the government school has to have standardization for them to be who they are, do what they do, and accomplish their purposes and their agenda. But for us as parents, this concept of standardization is very fallacious and not helpful. I have eleven children, and not one of my children so far is standardized. They are all completely unique, completely different from each other. They have different learning styles, they have different interests, different personalities, and so God didn’t make them all the same. And yet the government school says that you have a ten year old, and so they are in fifth grade, and so they need to learn these things at this age. It’s a very arbitrary type program. And then we test the of course, to make sure that all the children are standardized, and then we grade them on that. And the biggest problem that I have, like, with standardized testing, for example, is whether parents and educators mean to do this or not. It is the net result of it. But a child’s entire sense of self worth is predicated on their performance on the standardized test. If they score high on the test, then they are a valuable human being, and if they don’t, then they’re a failure and that they will never amount to anything in life. And even the issue of grades, fifth grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, I believe are completely arbitrary and really unnecessary. So, like the example I use for people who still have the public school mindset, they can’t get their mind around that idea is I have a son who is 13 years old. He’s doing like 11th grade math. He’s doing like 9th grade science. I think he’s doing fifth grade English, probably like 6th grade history. So what grade is he?
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
And of course, what people do immediately is they think, oh, he’s this age. Well, that corresponds to maybe 7th grade. Well, he’s not doing 7th grade anything, basically. So what grade is he in? So it’s really very arbitrary. And sometimes I’ll also say, let’s say that you and I got hired to work for a company and we’re computer programmers, and somebody says, okay, you need to take this class. What level should we start you in? I would be in the preschool level.
Yvette Hampton:
Me too.
Israel Wayne:
Computer programming. So we’re sitting here in preschool, kindergarten class, right. Does that make us preschoolers? Does that make us kindergartners? No, it just means we haven’t learned that yet. Right. So in one sense, the concept of levels kind of makes sense to me. Not so much grades, but levels. And some of the homeschool, curriculum publishers who actually create curriculum for homeschoolers, they don’t use the term grades. They actually do use levels because it builds sequentially as a knowledge base. So a year from now, if you and I work at this company, we might be in fourth grade programming, right? Yeah, but that doesn’t define who we are. We’re not fourth graders. We just don’t know the next material yet.
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
So there can be value in us having levels. So we know what stage or what level we’re moving into. But in terms of this, you’re in 6th grade, almost no student learns that way, right? Almost no student is always at grade level in all of these subjects. Nor should they be.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Israel Wayne:
Because we’re all different and we learn differently. And then back to standardized testing. Standardized testing? Well, let me just say this. Testing a child can be helpful in that as parents, we want to know, did the learn the material? Did they comprehend it? Did they retain it? And do they have the ability and capacity to be able to repeat it or communicate it to somebody else?
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
And so testing can be helpful in that respect. So let’s say we’ve studied something on the Middle Ages, and we test them to find out, did you learn the material that you studied? Do you know the material? Can you communicate effectively what you learned? Testing can be helpful in that respect, but I think this concept of them measuring themselves among their peers and deriving their self worth from that or parents assigning or ascribing their self worth to the child based on that, I think is hugely detrimental. And the scripture even speaks to it, where the apostle Paul says, comparing ourselves among ourselves, we are unwise. And that’s really what standardized testing does, is it compares us among ourselves and then says, well, your worth or your value? Is this based on where you score and what percentage points you got and even taking tests? I use this illustration a lot when I talk to people about this. That Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill and C. S. Lewis and some of the most brilliant people of all time were horrible students. And some people said that, like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison had the inability to learn. They believed that teachers believed that they couldn’t be taught, and it wasn’t because they were stupid. It was because they were genius. And sometimes geniuses just don’t do well on tests.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Israel Wayne:
And the are other people who are great test takers, but practically, if you hired them, you would fire them because the can’t apply that to something productive in the real world. Yeah, the fact that somebody has good grades and somebody has bad grades doesn’t really even tell us a lot about intelligence. It doesn’t even really tell us a lot about whether somebody’s smart or not, capable or not. What it tells us what it teaches us is that some people are really good at taking tests and some people are not good at taking tests. And maybe that’s helpful information in the real world, but for the most part, it’s not. And I think as parents, we have to just, again, kind of deconstruct our government school paradigm and realize that education and schooling are completely and totally different from each other.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, let me take that one step further, though, and say we have this idea that kids need to ace everything, right? You see the bumper stickers, my kid is an honor student. And it’s always this competition of my kid got straight A’s. My kid has a 4.0 GPA. Well, not every child is made to master every subject. I mean, you look at a mathematician. A mathematician is probably not going to be a historian and a scientist as well. Their specialty, the way that God created them, is to be excellent at math. And a scientist is created by God to be excellent at science, and a historian is created by God to be excellent at history. And that’s the world. That’s how the body of Christ works together. That’s how we reveal his goodness, right? And his creativity is that he created us all so differently and so uniquely, and we all have different gifts and talents and abilities. And so why do we put so much pressure on our kids to have to ace everything? You have to be an expert at every single one of these subjects, and you have to be an athlete, and you have to be an artist, and you have to be able to play music, and you have to do all these things. And we put pressure on our kids even in the homeschool world. I’m not talking about just traditional schooled kids. I’m saying in the homeschool world, we do this same thing where we feel like we’re somehow messing it up if our kids are not experts at all of the things. And that’s such wrong thinking. We have to look at our kids through the lens of scripture and through the eyes of God, their Creator, and see how he created them. And that’s one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that we get to be students of our children and we don’t put them in this perfect box when they’re around peg trying to fit into this and going oh, they don’t fit. Why am I frustrated? Why is this homeschooling thing not working? Let’s put them back in school into a different box and it just doesn’t make any sense. And so I’m so grateful for the blessings and the benefits of homeschooling because we get to look at our kids, we get to study them and as they grow we get to see who God created them to be so that they can fit into the perfect box that God created them to fit into. I know for myself has taken so much weight off just realizing my kids are who they are. They’re going to do what God created them to do and I don’t have to put all that pressure on them or on myself.
Israel Wayne:
One of the first things that I remember as a child that kind of gave me this idea that you can be smart in different ways is one of my best friends when I was a kid. And I don’t know why we end up having the friends that we do when we’re children but we would ride bikes around the neighborhood. Just neighbor kid that I grew up with and he went to public school and his parents always had the bumper sticker my kid is on the honor roll at such and such elementary school and so forth. Always a top student, always top grades. And I was not a good academic student. I was homeschool but I struggled. I was dyslexic, I was ADHD. I actually didn’t learn how to read. I don’t like brag about this, but I didn’t learn how to read till I was like eleven. I struggled as a student and yet this kid was one of the smartest kids in his class and I could never figure that out because I knew him. We would go out and do stuff together and I was always thinking to myself, how could he be the top student in his class? He is as dumb as a bag of rocked. The one time when we were outside in the wintertime he decided to go stick his tongue to the flag in the wintertime just to see what would happen. Another time he peed on the electric fence to see what would happen. Not bright. And yet he did really good on tests and he got really good grades and here I was, this totally stupid kid from the world’s viewpoint, right? Because I couldn’t read and it wasn’t that I was stupid. I was just dyslexic and it didn’t get identified well early on because I was good at faking it. Anyway, long story there, but as you grow up, you start to see that there’s just different kinds of intelligences. And some people can be super smart in an area. I have a friend who is a PhD and that guy can’t find anything, just loses his keys constantly. He’ll walk out of a store and he doesn’t know where his car is. Brilliant in one area, but not in another. That’s why I’m saying this comparison that we have to have, like you were saying, know, our child has to be like other children. No, they don’t. They have to be the best version of themselves that they can be really quickly.
Yvette Hampton:
I know this is a little bit of a sidetrail, but I remember in the movie in Schoolhouse Rock, so Israel is part of our movie Schoolhouse Rock to the Homeschool Revolution. He’s one of our cast members and has a really important part in that film. And you talk in there about how your mom never even graduated high school and raised you as a single mom, and I find that to be remarkable.
Israel Wayne:
Yeah. Dropped out of high school in 9th grade homeschooled, six kids, started her own business. Pretty amazing story. But yeah, she was a hippie. It’s kind of interesting because there’s kind of a new awakened awareness of the hippie movement with this Jesus revolution. Jesus revolution, yeah. But my mom was a hippie and she didn’t become a Christian until I was twelve. So she homeschooled us initially, but not for religious reasons. And then when she became a Christian, then she was a Jesus freak. Right. And so that was a whole new experience for us. But yeah, my mom taught us. Let me just jump on that real quick. I remember when I was twelve years old, I was getting ready to start doing high school classes and she said, you probably wonder how it is that you’re going to be able to do high school with me as your teacher when I didn’t even go to high school.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah.
Israel Wayne:
I said, yeah, that’s kind of a good question. How is that going to work? And she said, Well, I’ve made a few commitments to you and I just want to tell you what they are. She said, I’ve made a commitment to teach you how to read. And she said, that’s been really painful, but we’re making progress on that. I mean, by this time I’d been, I would say, kind of functionally reading for about a year, right when I’m twelve. And she said, So you’re starting to read? But she said, My view is I don’t have to teach you everything that there is to know in the universe because I don’t know it all and you’ll forget most of it anyway. But I’ve made a few commitments. I’m going to teach you how. To read. I’m going to teach you how to think. I’m going to teach you how to reason. I’m going to teach you how to study and how to learn. And she said, if you know how to read and you know how to reason and you know how to study, where to get the information that you need to get in life, you can teach yourself anything that you want to learn in life. And so I’m going to give you the tools of education that enable you to teach yourself, and you can learn anything you want to learn. And she said, and what you do with that is up to you. If you want to squander that and waste your time and waste your life and not apply yourself, that’s on you. Because all I can do is give you an opportunity. Opportunity. I can’t force you to learn. I can’t make you learn, but I can give you an opportunity. And I’ve done that, and I will do that. But she said, it’s ultimately going to be what you make of it. And it was kind of like the Chinese proverb of you can give a man a fish or you can teach him how to fish. My mom taught me how to think and how to learn and how to be a lifelong learner. And so if my single parent high school dropout mom can do that with a Dyslexic ADHD student, I think anybody can. Homeschool. You just have to teach your child how to learn, as opposed to, again, trying to cram their head full of all this information.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, let’s park there for just a second. Now we’re going off just a little bit. But talk to the mom who has a child who really has no interest in learning. They literally have no desire whatsoever. They just want to play video games all day, or they want to play outside all day, or they just want to curl up in bed all day. I mean, they just don’t care. And this mom is frustrated, and she’s pulling her hair out, and she’s like, I don’t know what to do with this kid. They’re lazy. They have no desire. How would you encourage that mom? What would you encourage her to do?
Israel Wayne:
Well, let me jump in real quick here with a plug for a book, if I can. This book is called Answers for Homeschooling the Top 25 Questions critic. And this book literally answers almost every conceivable question that’s ever been asked about homeschooling. And so I deal with so many of these things in this book. So you can find it at our website, familyrenewal.org, but look for Answers for Homeschooling Top 25 Questions. But on this particular one, I hit that stage when I was about nine years old, and my mom realized that I had really only one interest, and that was baseball. And so this was before I had ever heard of unit studies or anybody had ever used that term. I don’t even know if it was a coined term at the time, but my mom basically invented this concept of unit studies for me. I’m not saying she invented unit studies, but, I mean, that’s what it was. And she basically made my whole year, that year be all about baseball. So for math, for example, I learned how to do percentages by studying batting averages and earned run averages on baseball cards. I was learning history by studying about the history of baseball and then how it fit into the timeline of everything else that was happening. So we studied about Jackie Robinson and integration and how there had been segregated leagues, and so we learned about that, but we also learned about what happened during World War II and that Ted Williams was actually in the military and got drafted, all these different things. I think he volunteered, actually. But how there was all these other things that were going on in the world while still following the baseball track. Right. And one of the assignments that she gave me, which now seems kind of crazy for a nine year old, but she told me she wanted me to make a proposal to an imaginary city that I want to build a baseball stadium and to calculate, somehow had to research it. How much would this cost? So if it was going to cost $70 million to build the stadium, how long would it take me to recoup that money based on ticket sales? And so that was awesome to me because I knew so much about baseball. I could tell you every fact there was to know about baseball, but I knew that the Bleacher seats were this much and the mezzanine seats were this much, and the seats over the dugout were this much. And so I had to calculate how many seats the stadium had, how much potential if you filled all the seats, how much you could make per game. There’s 162 games a year, how much you’d make annually, but then you have player salaries. I was so obsessed with baseball at that time that I just wanted to learn. And so then she had me study, like, what makes a curveball curve. Physics and science was on learning about the physics of a curveball, and I was obsessed for the whole year and just couldn’t get enough of it. I’m sure it was really hard on my mom because there’s no written curriculum for this. Right. She’s just having to kind of use the library, and there’s no Internet. Right. But what an amazing opportunity for me to just hone in and do a deep dive on my interest for a whole year now, in one sense, that’s very difficult to sustain. I get that. And that may not be terribly practical if you’re trying to homeschool four children and you got this one child, but I think that’s what I’m trying to show with that is just that homeschooling can give you a completely different paradigm where you don’t have to do things like the public school. You can create your own path, you can make a completely different approach and hone in on your child’s one interest if that’s all they have. Another thing I would say there is if possible, and this isn’t always possible. In my case it wasn’t possible. But in those cases you often have to get dad involved as well. Because when mom’s trying to pull the whole cart up the hill by herself, it’s really unfair and unreasonable. But oftentimes dads can come along if they’re willing and if they are agreeable to it, they can come along and just be a humongous help in sometimes teaching it in a different way, spending a little time working with the homework, tutoring, whatever. And sometimes you’ll see that they can connect or communicate in a way that sometimes mom doesn’t. And the finally there are some things that we just have to do even though it’s not fun and we don’t like it.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah.
Israel Wayne:
And so there’s a certain amount of just dedication because we all have in our jobs things that we like and things we don’t like and we have to do all of it. And so you can’t just say, oh, my child doesn’t like this, so we’re not going to do it.
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
There is a point where you have to teach your child to be diligent as well.
Yvette Hampton:
Sure. And for mom and dad they have to be diligent too. It takes intentionality for us as moms to figure out what works best for our kids. And it would be nice if all of our kids fit perfectly into that box. They all learned the same, they all wanted to learn the same thing, had the same interests, had the same giftings, but it doesn’t work that way. Praise God, it doesn’t work that way. We’d live in a very boring world if we all thought and learned exactly the same way. But as parents, we have to be intentional in the way that we teach our kids, right? And it takes work for a mom to be able to do that. So we also can’t be lazy. I think sometimes moms come into homeschooling thinking know, I’ll just throw this curriculum at them and they’ll be fine. And there are lots of resources and we outsource lots of stuff. CTC, Math, BJU Press has amazing online courses. So some of our subjects for our girls during some of the years we’ve outsourced things. I’m not a math person. I cannot teach my kids math because remember, algebra doesn’t really matter for me, so I can’t teach that to my kids. But there are sources that I can use to teach those. And so you can outsource some of this stuff, but we still have to be intentional about teaching them and being flexible and able and willing to change things when they’re not working and realizing, like you said, every kid is so different and really honing in on their strengths. Some kids are super academic, some are not, but they have other strengths. And so helping our kids to realize what strengths they have is so.
Israel Wayne:
So I’d like to jump in on that too, real quick if I can. Yeah, I should say I did video high school, so I had traditional textbooks, but video classroom supplements at the same time. I know BJU offers that. That’s the kind of thing that I did in high school. And that was helpful because basically I had teachers who were able to teach me these classes even though I’m still at home. My mom would still do the grading and all of that because she had a teacher guide with an answer key. Right. But that was helpful for me. So at a time where she’s working with younger children that she’s having to give her one on one attention, it was a lot like sitting in class for me in high school because I’m watching the video, doing the text. It was a lot like a classroom experience, but that was helpful for me, and that still is an option for some people. So I wanted to mention that that worked very well for me in high school.
Yvette Hampton:
Absolutely. And co ops as well. Both of our girls do co ops this year and it’s fun. They love being able to learn from other people who we trust. They don’t learn everything from them, but they are learning how to cook and they’re learning creation science and different things. And it’s amazing. So many great resources out there for us. Moms, you don’t have to do it all alone. All right, what’s your next point? We have a few minutes, and again, if you guys have questions, please pop those in. We would love to answer them, but I’ll let you continue on with some.
Israel Wayne:
Of the the one is what I call the myth of the magic curriculum. And so I was at a home school conference, I was talking to a mom, and she came up to me at the booth, and after she’d heard me speak and she said, what math curriculum do you recommend? And I said, well, tell me about your situation. She said, Well, I have this daughter who’s eleven years old, and she said, we just have not found a math program that works for her. And I said, okay, so what have you used? And she went down through this whole list. I’ll just throw out some names, but I’m not endorsing or condemning anybody, I’m just throwing out names. But she said, well, we’ve tried teaching textbooks, we’ve tried Saxon, we’ve tried Matthew C, we’ve tried Abeka, we’ve tried, you know, she just goes through this whole list. Right. And so I’m going, wow. And she had bought like nine different math curriculum programs. And so what she says, we’re trying to find a good math program. And I didn’t mean to laugh, but I just did. And I said, well, can I just throw an idea at you? And she’s like, okay. And I said, I’m just going to suggest the problem is probably not that there’s something mortally wrong with any of those math programs, although they are different from each other, and some of them have different approaches and so forth. The problem is very likely that your daughter doesn’t like math. That’s a real possibility here. And that you could spend another $3,000 on math programs, and it may just be that she just doesn’t like math, and that’s how it works. Sometimes I don’t particularly like lima beans. People say, oh, you just haven’t had them. Right. I can fix them in a way that you’ll let well, probably not, actually. You can make the best lima beans on the planet.
Yvette Hampton:
What if you put bacon on them?
Israel Wayne:
Israel chef there is and I probably personally, I probably still are not really going to connect to those lima beans. And so there is a sense sometimes where I think parents often throw way too much money at curriculum thinking that the curriculum is the problem or that the curriculum Is going to solve the problem that their student is having. And oftentimes it’s just as very simple as your child does not like math, and they won’t. And it’s one of those things that they don’t necessarily have to enjoy it. They do need to learn it. And there’s probably not going to be a perfect magic curriculum that they just think is fun. And I think sometimes we do fall into too much of a trap of trying to make everything fun for our child. And I know I sound like I’m contradicting myself after what I said of a year of learning baseball. Right. So there’s a balance there. I think homeschooling does give you the capacity, if you can, to make something more enjoyable rather than less, and that’s always A desirable goal. If you can make something Less painful for your child, that’s great. But at the end of the day, you will always have a child who doesn’t like writing or doesn’t like english or doesn’t like history or whatever it is, and they’re all going to be different. But sometimes you just have to learn how to slog through some things, and we can’t always just blame it on the curriculum, and it’s not always wise. Sometimes it is. It’s not always wise to just throw money at curriculum and think, well, if I just spend A few more $1,000, then that’s going to fix the problem.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, absolutely. Agreed. Do you have others to go through? I mean, I know there’s lots of mistakes that people can make with homeschooling. I think you’ve hit on the really important ones.
Israel Wayne:
Sure. I think another thing to consider is I mentioned this sometimes about when you buy a curriculum that’s made for a school classroom, and that was all that was available when I was growing up. And most of the curriculum that’s still out there that people buy for homeschooling was originally designed for a school classroom. One thing to keep in mind with that is the school. Even like a private Christian school, their school day is kind of patterned after the public school. So for the most part, they’re trying to keep those students there for an hour of class. So I remember when I was being home schooled in fifth grade, I was diagramming 42 sentences a day.
Yvette Hampton:
Oh, good. Golly.
Israel Wayne:
In fifth grade, using a curriculum you would all know because they were basically just having to keep you busy for an hour in English class. And so it was really super painful, especially for me as a Dyslexic kid, and I just hated every minute of it. And so my mom finally started to wise up to the fact that homeschooling doesn’t mean we have to sit there for 7 hours a day. We’re not a classroom. We don’t have to do that. We’re not on the clock. Right?
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
So the idea is teach the concept, learn the concept, test the concept, drill the concept a little bit, and then move on to another concept and then eventually kind of cycle back to that concept later to make sure you still remember it. But this concept of I call it drill and Kill, where we’re just going to go through 42 sentences a day, diagramming what it does is it frustrates the student, and it makes them hate learning, and you don’t have to do that. So in a situation like that, either look for a curriculum that’s published specifically for homeschoolers that cuts out a lot of the busy work, or if you found a good quality textbook company that creates for the classroom. Just realize you don’t have to do every single drill or every single question on the test if it’s just repetitive drill information. So you can skip a lot of that. You can say, look, if there’s 42 of those, do five, and then let’s move on to the next thing.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, love that. We do that with our girls. Specifically with math, if you know how to do the problem, don’t waste your time for the mom who makes their child sit there and complete every single 42 sentences. And if it’s causing frustration for your student, that is breaking the relationship between you and your child because then they’re going to be frustrated actually probably more with you than they are with the actual parsing of the sentences. And so again, that goes back to the relationship part and build that relationship. And again, I mean, make them do things sometimes that they don’t want to do, but if it’s unnecessary, it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
Israel Wayne:
Sure.
Yvette Hampton:
All right, let’s answer a couple of questions. So Leah asked this. She said, I have twin 14 year olds and I’ve homeschooled the since birth, but still struggle with how to individualize their education, and they struggle with comparison with each other.
Israel Wayne:
That’s where we have to, as parents, put the parenting hat on and make sure that our children recognize their identity is who they are in Christ and that they know that the are loved for who they are as individuals and that we do do what we can as parents to help them establish their own personhood in life. Right. And I think the more secure they become with that as a macro concept just in the relationship and parenting and family dynamic side. And then what 14 year old doesn’t feel awkward, right?
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah.
Israel Wayne:
I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but we were all 14 year olds, and that’s like, if you look up the definition of awkward in the dictionary, it says 14 year old.
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Israel Wayne:
So I think there is a sense in which we’re all still trying to find our way at that point in our life. But I think as they begin to find those interests, feed into that and cultivate that and encourage that and be willing to press into them finding those little things that is their identity. Whenever I see my child, if my child shows a little bit of interest in music or shows a little bit of interest in outdoor stuff or whatever it is, I try to feed that, fuel it, finance it to get behind that. And sometimes it’s a fad. They’ll go through a few months of it and drop it. But sometimes those things really help you to figure out who you want to be in life. So, yeah, feed into that and support it when you see a spark of interest, feed into that.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. And I’ll say, too, as far as the comparison between the two of them, help teach them to praise their brother or sister. I don’t know if you have boys or girls, help teach them to praise their sibling when they succeed at something. We have a friend who has two boys. They’re not twins, but they’re very close in age. And one of them is just crazy smart academically, and the other one is very gifted athletically. And the one who’s gifted athletically is not gifted academically and vice versa. And so teaching them like, okay, when your brother hits that ball all the way across the field, praise him for it. You’re not as good at that as he is, but encourage him and praise him for it. And when your brother, the baseball player, sees his brother excelling at the academics, praise him for it. Hey, brother, I am so proud of you. You did such a good job on that test. And teach them to encourage one another that way, because that takes away the battle and the comparison that they have and praise them in front of each other, too, man, you did such a good job on that in that baseball game, or you did such a great job on that project that you were working on, whatever. And so that again goes back to you being intentional, but also helping them to individualize their education is knowing what their learning style is, because they’re both very different. I’m sure they have very different learning styles. And so you have to pinpoint what their learning style is. Maybe one of them is an auditory learner and one of them is a visual learner. And so if you haven’t figured that out yet, try to figure out how they learn. And then you might have to use different things for both of them. And that’s okay. You do what you have to do in order for them to learn. You do as much as you can together, use as much curriculum as you can with both of them together, but some things you might have to use different methods for teaching them. And so that really comes down to knowing what their learning style is. And we actually on the Schoolhouse Rocked podcast. We did a whole series on learning styles, and Kit was excellent. But study them and know what their learning style is. So let’s move to another question. This is also from Leah. She said, any encouragement for that as we move into high school years. Also, speaking of high school, if they want to go to college, how do you challenge them without standardizing them?
Israel Wayne:
Well, I mean, again, the whole system of college is predicated on standardization. So if you plan to have your child have a college track, then you kind of have to fit into the standardization mold, particularly in high school, because you are preparing them for the entrance exams and the classes and all that that they’re going to be taking. So it is difficult, I think honestly, in some ways it’s going to be more difficult as time goes forward in the future for homeschoolers to do well. This is my hunch on college entrance exams and things like that, because I just expect that increasingly the standards for getting into college are going to be increasingly woke. And if you haven’t taught to the test, if you haven’t taught their standards, your child may grow up and really may not do well on those tests because you haven’t trained them in revisionist history, you haven’t trained them in Cultural Marxism, you haven’t trained them in critical race theory. And so when they get to a lot of these tests that they’re supposed to be standardized in, your child probably won’t be standardized and may not do real well on those tests. And it doesn’t mean that your child isn’t smart, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not educated. It just means they were educated differently by different standards. And so there are concerns I actually have moving forward that I think college increasingly is just going to be a place that’s going to be harder for independent minded homeschool who weren’t raised in the lockstep system to get in. I think they’re going to have more of a challenge. They’ll probably have to kind of be educated and coached in. This is what they’re looking for, and these are the answers they want, so to speak. So anyway but, yeah, you basically have to kind of learn how to conform to their standards if you want to enter into that realm. It’s kind of the nature of it.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. Wow. I actually never really thought about that before. Israel, that is a really good point. Demystifying learning styles with Tyler Hogan. That was the episode on the Schoolhouse Rocked podcast. Listen to that. Because if you haven’t figured out your kids learning styles, that episode is fantastic, and it will really help you to figure out how your child learns how your children learn best. Let’s take one last question. This is for Mary, and she says, I’m new to homeschooling and agree that kids don’t need to learn everything or be great test takers, but how do we make sure that they are able to apply for college? I’ll let you jump into that, too.
Israel Wayne:
Again, I have a whole chapter in here on high school. I have a chapter on college. How do you prepare for high school? How do you prepare for college? I’m biased against college. And you say, well, explain that. Well, I don’t have enough time to. That’s why I wrote a whole chapter about it in the book. I think that college should not be the assumed default for homeschooling, families, and their students. I believe college is absolutely necessary for some people to be able to pursue their career that God’s called them to. I want my surgeon to have a whole wall of degrees and not learn it on YouTube. Exactly. Yeah. So it’s not wrong to have some higher education, but increasingly, there’s a book that we sell on our website again, Familyrenewal.org Store, called Is College Worth It? If you really want an in depth look at that question of Is college worth It? Please read that book. It’s written by William J. Bennett. You may remember him, the Book of Virtues guy. I think he worked for Ronald Reagan as education secretary, if I remember correctly, and his book is phenomenal and that it just examines almost every facet and angle of considering the college option. And he basically landed the same place that I do. So I was rather surprised to see someone of his academic pedigree agreeing and saying, really, this should just not be the default for students. Now, we live in a very different world than we did 40 years ago, and there are people who are making a lot of money in the trades right now who didn’t need college for it. And fully three quarters of all people in the workforce in the United States right now are employed in a field completely unrelated to their college degree. Three quarters. So you have the cost of college. You have all of the woke ideology. You have the fact that they continue to dumb down the curriculum. You have the fact that what used to be a bachelor’s degree 40 years ago, now the equivalent is like, you have to get a master’s degree to get the same type of job. Everything’s changed. And I don’t have time to give you the whole thesis there, but you can find out more of my thoughts on that and answers for Homeschooling, but also grab a copy of William J. Bennett’s book, Is College Worth It? And I just think we need to reset from that and assume that our child doesn’t necessarily need college. And then when we find out that they do, then we do what we can to prepare them for that direction. But let me throw this out as well. That basically all Christian young people let me say this, all professing Christian young people who say going into college, I am a Christian, three quarters of them will say, I’m no longer a Christian and I do not believe in Christianity. At the end of their freshman year of one year at a secular college or university, three quarters in their freshman year at a secular college or university. That’s massive. And so as just I think we really need to reconsider yeah, or at.
Yvette Hampton:
Least really reconsider where your child is going to there. There are some really good ones. Bob Jones University I know that there are some colleges that are really excellent and still teaching a very strong biblical worldview to their students. But yeah, definitely be careful where you’re sending your kids. Don’t spend 13 years instructing them at home and giving them a biblical foundation and then think that when you put them into a secular school or a Christian school, that is as bad as a secular school that’s right. That can actually be more dangerous because then they think they’re getting a Christian education and they’re getting the complete opposite of that. So be very cautious of where you’re sending your kids. Israel, tell us again where people can find your books and find out more.
Israel Wayne:
About your ministry, familyrenewal.org. And we’d also love to have you connect with us on social media. Just look up Israel Wayne or familyrenewal, and we would love to connect with you there.
Yvette Hampton:
Sounds great. And they’ve got lots of great resources on there. And Israel, I know you’re speaking all over the place this season. It is now homeschool conference season and so Israel is going to be all over. I think you have a list, if I remember, on your website of where you’re going to be speaking, right?
Israel Wayne:
Yeah. So familyrenewal.org forward slash events. That gets you to quite a few of them. Not all of them, but also if you want to get on our email list, it’s familyrenewal.org subscribe and you’ll always get an email update when we’re in your area.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. Awesome. Israel’s got some great books, not just on education, but on parenting as well. He can be a parenting expert. He’s got eleven kids.
Here’s the reality, once we deposit our money into a commercial bank, we no longer own that money. Wait! What? That’s right, at the moment we deposit our money into a commercial bank we become a creditor to the bank. Our deposit turns into a short-term unsecured loan to the bank. Then, because of fractional lending, every dollar deposited into a bank tends to get loaned out twelve times. What? The only logical definition for that is making money out of nothing.
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