Gel Pen Learning

Last week, I wrote about one of the most common insults aimed at homeschool families: that parents are too dumb to educate their own children.

It’s a strange argument when you think about it. If the public school system is producing graduates who are supposedly incapable of teaching their own kids, that raises some uncomfortable questions about the system itself.

But if we’re going to challenge the claim honestly, we also need to talk about something on our side of the fence. Fair is fair.

Homeschooling gets a bad reputation.

And sometimes, if we are being totally honest, it’s our fault.

Because homeschoolers, in their zeal to talk about what their homeschooling life looks like, describe education in ways that make it sound fundamentally unserious.

You’ve probably heard some variation of this before:

“Grocery shopping is math.”

“Minecraft is history.”

“Baking sourdough bread is chemistry.”

“My kids choose what they want to learn.”

Before anyone gets defensive, let’s acknowledge something important: there is some truth in these statements.

Grocery shopping absolutely involves math. You compare prices, estimate totals, and work within a budget. Baking bread absolutely involves chemical reactions. Games like Minecraft can be great tools for storytelling about civilizations.

Real life absolutely contains learning opportunities. Also true is that the point of education is to be equipped for navigating life. The argument has always been, “What’s the point of algebra if I can’t file my taxes?”

But the crucial distinction that often gets lost in these conversations is that playing a game that involves design is not the same thing as studying physics or structural principles.

Activities reinforce learning by sparking curiosity and making abstract ideas more concrete.

But they don’t replace the underlying subjects. You still have to teach the why and how.

Math still requires practicing math.

Sure, you can learn almost anything from a YouTube video, but if all the information your kid is exposed to comes from short videos, they may never develop the ability to wrestle with complex texts or challenging ideas. If every part of the day is labeled as “learning,” the academic foundation underneath it can quietly disappear.

When homeschoolers loudly describe education as a bunch of child-led hands-on activities, the outside world hears something very different from what we intend.

They hear that homeschooling is just running errands.

They start believing that homeschooled kids are just sitting at home in their pajamas pursuing hobbies instead of knowledge.

So when homeschool families talk about graduation, academic success, or college preparation, people respond with skepticism.

Not necessarily because they hate homeschooling, though some of them do.

But because the description they’ve heard and the homeschoolers they’ve met live in stark contrast with what most people consider to be an education or an educated person.

I see this all the time in comment sections, but also firsthand.

My daughter passed her GED. I didn’t administer the exam. I didn’t write the questions. I didn’t score the test, set the benchmarks, or sit on the board. The GED is created and administered by an external institution with established standards.

I wasn’t even in the testing room. I sat in the waiting room next to the security office, cross-stitching.

But when I say that my daughter graduated well, the response has been: “Oh, at homeschooling? Mommy grades don’t count.”

That reaction doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from years of hearing that non-conformists are stupid and is further reinforced by homeschooling moms describing a trip to the grocery store as math class.

If we want homeschooling to be taken seriously, we have to talk about education seriously. Not, “my kid is taking Latin,” because that’s a whole other side of the spectrum and I can’t talk about that today.

It means that when people ask us what our kids are learning, we tell them the subjects they are learning. Not “kitchen chemistry,” but “chemistry.”

The activity isn’t the subject. Grocery shopping uses math, but it’s not math class. It can reinforce math concepts, but you can’t reinforce a concept you haven’t taught.

It’s not the ’90s anymore. We have to stop pretending that running errands and pursuing hobbies replaces academic learning and start recognizing them as opportunities to apply and explore real subjects.

Real education requires effort and curiosity. It requires reading things that are difficult and practicing skills until they improve.

Homeschooling can provide that kind of education.

But if we want people to take us seriously, we have to describe it seriously.