Starting a New Trend!

When we started homeschooling our children joined the estimated 220,000 African American children currently being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families and families of color have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in homeschooling, with black students and student of color making up an estimated 19 percent of the homeschooling population. (For comparison’s sake, they make up 24 percent of all public-school students nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.)

Whenever there are mentions of African American of families of colors that have homeschoolers, it’s assumed that we homeschool for the same reasons as European-American homeschoolers, but this isn’t really the case. I home school because of the unique circumstances of people of color in this country, there is really a new story to be told.

We have all heard that the American education system is not the best and is falling behind in terms of international standards. But this is compounded for black children, who are treated as though they are not as intelligent and cannot perform as well, and therefore the standards for them should be lower. I find that the schools are not equipped to handle children that perform above the standard levels. For example when my oldest was in third grade and was so unchallenged, and after meeting after meeting with the school, we pulled her and started our journey.

As Hebrew descendants we understood that our children would not be getting any of their true culture in school which helped with our decision. But we also understood that schools also rob all black children of the opportunity to learn about their own culture because of a "Euro-centric" world-history curriculum. Typically, the curriculum begins our African American history with slavery and ends it with the Civil Rights Movement, and as we all know there is so much to our history and our culture. Our children need to understand that they come from strong stock, having them being talked about as simply being a descendant of slaves, which is not empowering or is it building. There is more to African history than that schools show about our history. As parents of color and other African American parents who choose to homeschool we have the chance teach a comprehensive view of African history by incorporating more detailed descriptions of ancient African civilizations and accounts of successful African people throughout history. This allows children to build their sense of racial pride and self esteem.

When we started homeschooling our children what we really wanted most was for our children to be a free thinker's and to know it is okay question everything. I wish that it had been that way for me when I was growing up.