Yes, You’re Smart Enough to Homeschool Your Kids

Last month, Kuyper College Professor Anthony Bradley took to X to argue that “most parents are not able or equipped to homeschool their children.” This oft-repeated criticism of homeschooling is also a real insecurity that many parents feel when they consider taking responsibility for their own child’s education. But is it true?

Well, I’ve taught every grade level from 6 to 12, was an elementary school assistant principal, and attended one of the top-ranked graduate schools of education in the country, and I’m here to tell you quite simply: The haters are wrong; you are indeed smart enough to homeschool your own children.

In theory, there are two bodies of knowledge that an educator needs: content knowledge about history, math, science, and English, and pedagogical knowledge about how best to teach. Neither one creates a prohibitive barrier to homeschooling.

Regarding pedagogical knowledge, there is no abstruse, higher truths of instruction that one can only gain through formal training on a faraway mountain top. Teaching is not medicine. There are no advanced techniques that require technical practice or knowledge of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biology, and neurology.

Quite the contrary, teaching is quite natural and intuitive: Explicitly teach kids to sound out letters and ask them to repeat it; Explain concepts to them clearly and use analogies that they can understand; Model procedures and have them practice; Read a book and ask them a few questions to see if they comprehended the material.

Ironically, attendees of teachers’ colleges are often worse off for their degree. At best, they encounter discredited theories of instruction. At worst, schools of education function as re-education camps, hawking the latest left-wing academic theories. For example, the “science of reading” is arguably the most widely studied and confirmed theory in education research. Put simply, the theory posits that children learn best to read when explicitly taught letter sounds. Quite literally not rocket science.

Attendees of teachers’ colleges are often worse off for their degree. At best, they encounter discredited theories of instruction. At worst, schools of education function as re-education camps.

How many schools of education teach all components of the science of reading? According to a report from the National Council of Teacher Quality, only a quarter of teacher-prep programs teach all components of the science of reading. Instead, they either omit the topic altogether or hawk pseudoscientific theories such as balanced literacy, whole language, or three cueing.

But the reality of teacher prep gets wilder. There aren’t many comprehensive reviews of what teachers actually learn in their training, but those that exist are alarming. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, for example, solicited syllabi from every school of education in the Badger State. They found that teachers were not reading manuals of instruction of classroom management but instead things like “Anti-Racist Baby,” “White Fragility,” and “Just Another Gay Day in the Campus Three-Year Old Room.” 

In my own program, I sat through lectures on self-care through acupuncture and transgender literacy, made Black Lives Matter bracelets in friendship circles, and learned to read classic literature through Marxist and feminist lenses. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that teachers who graduate from such programs are no more effective that their unlicensed or alternatively licensed counterparts.

The second body of knowledge required for teaching bolsters a stronger contention against homeschoolers. Balancing equations, geometric proofs, the Napoleonic codes, The Grapes of Wrath, mitosis—there’s just so much to know, and a parent cannot teach what they do not know. But for grades K-8, this argument is simply invalid. Can you read? Can you perform multiplication and division with fractions and do basic algebra? Congratulations, you’ve got the majority of the elementary and middle school curriculum covered!

Science and history require more specialized knowledge, but at the elementary level, most teachers are themselves content generalists, and that’s sufficient. The content covered in most science and history classes in elementary school are cursory in nature, giving students the outlines of the founding or the basics of mammalian biology. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. for an adult to learn these subjects well-enough to teach to a child.

The argument carries more force when it comes to high school. Advanced calculus? Physics? Molecular chemistry? You need to know a topic in order to teach a topic. Aside from the most talented auto-didacts among us, re-learning the subject matter of advanced high school classes poses a greater, albeit still surmountable, barrier to homeschooling.

Parents are the most important, best-qualified teacher any child will ever have.

However, at that level, homeschooling parents have been working with their children through curricula for years, so are typically more fluent in high school subject matter than the average student. Moreover, higher level homeschool curricula is often designed to be self-taught with the parent as a guide, not necessarily the expert. That being said, homeschool co-ops—where several families come together to pool their time, resources, and expertise—online classes, and even YouTube provide access to instruction that a homeschooler simply would not have had even 10 years ago.

On the flip side, there are endless benefits inherent to homeschooling. Your children receive more individualized attention. You, their parent, know and care more about them than even the most well-meaning teacher ever could. You can more readily respond to their academic needs, be it a challenge or review. You can do it all within the value system that you hope to instill.

And all of these arguments must be framed with the question “compared to what?” in mind. What exactly are the results that teacher public schools achieve? According to the latest round of NAEP scores, it’s roughly 30% proficiency in math and reading, with even fewer scoring advanced. 

Now, in no way do I intend this article to be a blanket call to “homeschool your kids.” There are countless tradeoffs to consider. I will likely send my own children to a charter or private school. But let’s call these insinuations that “you’re not smart enough” exactly what they are: ill-advised attacks from over-credentialed dilletantes without the faintest understanding that parents are the most important, best-qualified teacher any child will ever have.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.

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