I often say the thing that got me started on the idea of homeschooling was attending public school and knowing kids at private schools. But I am not sure if that is totally true. I think it was watching my younger siblings starting school while I was still in high school. I started seeing all the negative things that started as early as kindergarten and paralleled that with my corrupting high school experience and it got me thinking about why we were in school. My brother was a severe asthmatic so at one point early in his school career my mother pulled him out to do a long term, parent directed schooling through the district. With just this change I saw amazing differences in both his intellect and personality. Then we he went back to school I saw him go from very advanced back to normal.

That was it for me. Then looking at my own schooling I realized how the herding mentality held me back as a student and I already knew the social issues that were bad (obviously I was and am a nerd). Then I was blessed to meet someone likeminded. NerdDad had seen the negatives in his own schooling career and decided he wouldn’t want to put his children in it either.

We both wanted 4 kids, the wife to stay home and to homeschool. That is part of what got me interested in him;). Now I don’t want you to think we were the kids left behind and we are bitter we couldn’t read. We were kind of the opposite. Self teachers who never felt nurtured. It was obvious that we weren’t in an environment that loved learning (except for a few teachers and their classes) and the school wasn’t really caring on developing our character. We were the kids who would have been better left alone in the library for a few years. Now we do know the kids left behind and the schools didn’t serve them either. So we decided the schools don’t serve anyone other than the government, for the most part.

Once we got married we began educating ourselves on homeschooling. Then obviously we had kids. I loved the classical theory and The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. So here we are just a couple years in but completely committed to homeschooling!