bbcovert@juno.com

My daughter is sprawled on the floor, intently coloring butterflies and princesses. She carries her crayons and coloring books everywhere she goes. She also snags construction paper wherever she finds it, in order to cut vast numbers of paper hearts. It sounds like typical five-year-old behavior, doesn’t it? However, my little girl is not five years old; she’s ten. She neither knows nor cares that most children her age have moved beyond such simple art projects. And I’m glad! 

Do you remember your early years in school? You and your classmates were labeling each other: the artist, the speller, the athlete, the brain, the musician, the troublemaker. In art class you learned who had talent and who didn’t. In gym class you learned who was agile and who was clumsy. Whatever label you received, you probably believed that it was a permanent part of who you were. Whenever a teacher or a classmate pointed out a weakness, chances are good that you lost interest in that subject or activity – perhaps to the point of dreading it. If you were a stick-figure-drawer, you hated art class; if you were considered clumsy, you hated gym class. If you couldn’t spell most of the words on the vocabulary list, you hated language arts. You allowed your weakness to define and confine you! 

Homeschoolers don’t have to endure labeling! Unless a parent or sibling is incredibly cruel, a homeschooled child may be unaware of his or her own weakness. Guess what! That lack of knowledge allows them to develop at their own pace, and that’s one of the benefits of homeschooling! Instead of getting a preconceived notion of their talents and weaknesses, a homeschooled child may continue trying out new skills without fearing failure. 

Take my daughter, for instance. At age five, crayons made her cry. Because I had heard that children need a “well-rounded” education that included art lessons, I bought a drawing book and began to “teach” drawing. Because her fine motor skills hadn’t quite developed yet, my daughter disliked anything to do with art. I stopped trying to teach her to draw and urged her to color “inside-the-lines” instead. Frustrated, she would grab a pink crayon and scribble over the entire page of her coloring book, finishing with a loud, “There! I colored!” You could almost hear the unspoken “Are you happy now?!” being screamed in her mind. 

She was not learning to draw, nor was she learning to love art, so I dropped the art lessons. Four years later, with the best fine motor skills around, my daughter picked up a box of 96 crayons and a stack of coloring books and has devoted a lot of time to art ever since. She has also begun drawing pictures and cartoons. Do you realize that her creative impulses would have been nipped in the bud (as Barney Fife would say) if she were in a traditional school? Had she heard at age five that she “couldn’t” draw, she would have avoided art like most kids avoid vegetables. She would also “know” that she is too big for coloring books and not only miss out on an enjoyable and satisfying pastime, but also the opportunity to develop color coordination. 

Carry that idea beyond art and into academics. A homeschooled child who has a weakness in the area of language arts or math but does not realize it is likely to master it eventually; a traditionally-schooled child who “knows” that everyone but him or her “gets it,” that child feels hopeless, anxious, and doomed to failure.

When you remove the classroom full of same-age kids, no one is left for the homeschooled child to compare him or herself to; you have a child who is free to be the unique individual God created them to be. They are free to develop their talents and skills at their own pace. So they miss out on some teasing from their peers; so they don’t experience the stresses of schoolroom comparisons; so they lack a self-perception based on the opinions of classmates – is that a bad thing? I don’t think so!

Copyright 2003 by Brenda B. Covert