Congratulations to the Class of 2025

My commencement address for homeschool graduates everywhere!

Noah, after high school graduation, in Cinque Terre, Italy

If you have a graduating student this year, my heartfelt congratulations! That is no small feat! In your honor, I offer your family this commencement address.

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Noah, my oldest, said to me once when I tried to shoehorn him into my fear-based vision of what his future ought to be:

“Mom, you raised me in an unconventional way—now you want me to be a conventional person?”

Zinged by my own values! My own kid!

Homeschooling, whether you realize it yet or not, is the radical unconventional status-quo defying choice your parents made on your behalf when you were too young to know better. Instead of yellow school buses, apples for the teacher, and lunch boxes, you stayed home.

Your mom read Charlotte's Web from a rocking chair while you assembled LEGO. A big brown UPS box delivered brand new workbooks, still shiny and blank. You didn’t have due dates or grades until your mother panicked (around age 13) and suddenly went wild grading and assigning and making you sit in a straight backed chair to write papers...until you slowly both got comfortable again and moved back to the couch.

You did math with a tutor or videos or apple pies. You learned to write with Brave Writer, or through tears, or on computers with social media status updates. Foreign languages were dead or silent even though so many of you have gone on fabulous trips to Mexico or Europe or southeast Asia.

In other words, homeschool is the unconventional distinct identity you will always have—the “two truths and a lie” trump card—the one thing that makes you different from others. And that’s a big deal.

In fact, even more than the homeschooling itself, the choice to homeschool by your parents formed a part of your character that will accompany and guide you for the rest of your lives.

Your moms and dads made a brave choice back in 2013 when they decided to turn their backs to the culture to keep you home. It probably didn't always look brave to you when they monitored your computer activity and supervised your reading and music choices! Still, they were pioneers in their own right, hippies of the 21^st century!

Most of your parents weren’t homeschooled. They blundered forward armed with a few books and a couple of models of what it might look like. At least one of your parents gave up career opportunities to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with you.

You know what happened at the soccer games you played? Other parents would find out that you were homeschooled and they’d say: “Oh I could NEVER do that. My kids would drive me crazy.”

But your parents thought, “That’s so sad. I love being with my kids.”

And they meant it. Even when you did drive them a little crazy!

As you go off to college or the military or a career, forging a path for yourself, I want you to remember that the legacy of homeschooling has less to do with text books and literature. Rather, it's a model for how you might courageously live your own life. It taught you how to learn because you want to know. That’s not a given in today’s world of artificial intelligence. You know your own mind! That matters.

Ask yourself these kinds of questions that your parents asked themselves:

• Will you be content to perpetuate the status quo as you understand it?

• Or will you, like your parents, challenge the system and be willing to adopt a standard, a philosophy, a set of beliefs or practices that make the world a better place? That ensure that the children you raise will be as nurtured, valued, and adventurous?

There are two words that characterize the life you've led so far:

Risk and Adventure

Your parents, the ones who may have said no to R-rated movies or who monitored your cell phone, who required you to finish math classes even when you thought they were pointless—those parents are the original risk-takers and adventurers in your family. They've modeled for you how to stand up to the culture and say, “I'm willing to risk my reputation for my kids, for the sake of the future.”

You were their grand experiment. They asked, “Can we educate our kids at home, without the support and props of school and culture?”

The ghosts of public school past haunted them—they had to fight to keep those worries at bay. You may be different. You get to decide whether or not to homeschool your kids and if you do, you'll finally be able to answer the decades old question:

“Just how much grammar instruction really is necessary in home education?”

We still don't know.

The truth is, because you’ve already lived as a counter-cultural person, I hope that spirit, that energy, that chutzpah will govern your future choices. Be as daring as your parents have been to challenge “what’s normal,” to be the risk-takers who put their ideals into action.

Be deliberate about your choices (researching, discussing, conscientiously thinking through the consequences of your decisions, not just for your own life, but for the lives of others, too).

Discover other ways of living, other worldviews (so many of you are already on your way to doing just that). Let yourselves become the people your parents dreamed you would be, even if that means choosing differently than your parents. Because, after all, many of your parents chose differently than theirs did.

You were given:

• A quality, personalized education

• A home environment that nurtured values, individuality, and close family ties

• A context that developed critical thinking with a commitment to making a difference

These are the core values of home educators. They are your core values too. How you take them into your future and nurture them now, on your own, is up to you!

• Will you dig wells in central Africa to provide clean water to impoverished communities?

• Will you become a lawyer who defends the rights of the under privileged?

• Will you cultivate the arts and make your home a place where music and paintings are a natural part of the atmosphere?

• Will you build community with others where you live and work?

• Will you earn degrees and contribute your knowledge to your field of choice in that Great Conversation that spans the centuries?

• Will you inspect railroads or start technology companies or become a teacher?

• Will you bear children and raise them to be the best individuals they can be?

No matter what you do... No matter where you go... Challenge yourself to explore alternate ways of thinking and living. Who knows what new form of education or family bonding will present itself in your generation!?

Don’t assume that what everyone does is what everyone ought to do. Take the risks that lead you to an adventurous future, that contribute to a new way of seeing and being.

You are homeschool graduates: members of an exclusive club—the prototypes of what it means to put personal values ahead of cultural expectations.

What will you do with that legacy!?

What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

Congratulations to the class of 2025!

©Julie Bogart