My Honest Thoughts about Tech in Schooling

And what I wish for today's homeschool parents

Back in the early days of homeschooling, the zeitgeist of what it meant to bring education home went something like this:

• Choose what your children learn because you know best

• Bake bread from scratch because you’re home and you can!

• Be your child’s mentor by allowing them to shadow all the skills you have, whether gardening or wallpapering or building a bird feeder or knitting or learning Excel!

• Stay home as much as you can so that your children have leisurely days with each other and you, schooling in the mornings and playing in the afternoons

• Make learning cozy and natural

• Volunteer, participate in your family’s cultural heritage or faith (if you had one)

• Add in out of the house classes for art, music, play dates, dance, and/or sports

• Go to places where learning happens naturally: museums, theater, movies, nature centers, forests and beaches, botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums, observatories

• Read, read, read to your children

• Enjoy each other’s company

Honestly, despite there being hard days where kids woke up with the flu or someone cried over how hard the phonics lesson felt, these goals were achievable and common.

Two new trends

Today—that model is being challenged by two new trends.

One trend is “group schooling.” Instead of homeschooling alone at home, lots of parents are putting their kids into groups in “homeschool class programs” of some kind—whether micro-schools, hybrid schools, or co-ops.

The second trend is “online schooling.” Big and little tech are on the move. They’re creating slick platforms where kids login to follow prerecorded content or live classes to learn. Some of these platforms are all-encompassing. They require hours online each day. Others act as supplementary—an hour a day for one subject or a semester of one class to supplement the rest of the homeschool program.

I want to talk about the second trend in this article.

The “good old days”

Listen, it’s tempting to have a reaction like, “In the good old days, we did it better!”

I hate that. I’m a technological optimist—I’ve always believed that the problems technology creates, technology can solve. I have lived with that perspective for 45 years. I like to be forward thinking.

Today, I’m rethinking some stuff.

Back in 1999, I was the first person I know in the homeschooling space to offer an online class. I conducted it over email. Parents were eager to connect to a professional writer who could help them effectively teach writing to their struggling students.

I wasn’t interested in “direct-to-student” teaching because I knew that the real transformation came when a parent understood how to support their young writers.

If the parents off-loaded their kids to me and the kids improved in writing by finding a new groove, but went back to parents who still held the same misguided school-style expectations, those kids had no hope of retaining the transformational practices I had taught them! (Long sentence, but worth reading!)

It felt clear to me then: the parent is the leader of the child’s education. My role was to help those parents carry out their job more effectively, with more compassion for the individual student.

Our entire online writing class program is built from this premise: short bursts of writing instruction that start by teaching the parents and kids together.

The idea of teaching the parent the skills in order to be effective is rare today. Parents often don’t want to learn—they worry they can’t do it, or they prefer to hire someone who can.

I developed an entire membership site around the idea that parents, as career-educators, would want to keep their skills sharp to have wonderful homeschool experiences with their kids.

Lots of those parents say they don’t have time to to keep up with those trainings.

I keep wondering: why.

What’s changed?

Today, many parents tell me that their goal is to have the fruit of homeschooling (they love the promises of delight-led learning, kids going at their own pace, opting out of public school dysfunction and peer bullying), but they don’t have time to actually do it. They are overwhelmed by options and feel pressure to demonstrate their children’s academic growth.

Many want an all-inclusive program online—homeschooling, without the hard work of creating it yourself. It’s like going on a Danube river cruise instead of backpacking through Europe.

I understand this feeling. Homeschooling as the primary teacher takes dedication and effort. It feels scary to do it alone. Online platforms design the education. Your job is simply to ensure your kids follow through on their lessons.

Rather than being a home educator, a lot of parents today are opting to be “homeschool managers.”

Tech solutions address pain points like these:

• I want my child to work independently.

• I want my child on a computer doing work I didn’t have to think of or plan.

• I want a computer to collect the data that tells me my child is completing their lessons.

• I want to create a flexible schedule for those classes.

• I want an all-in-one program with a monthly fee.

• I want classes that my kid finds interesting that I didn’t create or build.

• I want to know that my kids are getting the right education.

• I want to be able to work during the day while my child is doing their lessons.

• I want to cover all the subjects—even ones I won’t think of, like geology.

• I want the right levels taught for each child.

Online schools are popping up like daisies in the snow, everywhere!

Their appeal is strong.

Honest feelings

I feel sad.

I feel sad that parents are trading in the joyful shared learning adventure of homeschooling for an online, one-child, one-screen experience.

It’s not that I think online learning should go away. Selecting a class or two as a turbo boost for your homeschool is delightful! Kids love being in a space designed for them, with new enthusiastic teachers who offer fresh ways to learn or engage subject areas.

It’s the programs that take over the entire homeschool day that I find troubling.

Do we want our kids online for several hours a day—associating the act of learning with logging onto a screen and working through digital tests or powerpoint slides?

Parents are worried about screen time generally: video games, social media, texting apps, cell phones with internet access.

Yet many seem fine with online classrooms—where a child may spend hours on the computer in a single day.

Part of what I love about the original vision of homeschooling is that there is free time—time to explore, learn, daydream, work at one project for a sustained, undetermined amount of time. There’s space to think, feel, partner, separate, write, reflect, create, and read.

The home becomes a place where learning is a living, breathing activity, not a set of skills that can only be accessed through a login and password before being “mastered.”

When we put kids on a computer to “learn,” they may associate learning with lessons given to them by a machine, rather than seeing learning as their natural state—that thrives in relationship to other human beings and the world around them.

Homeschooling, in its purest form, has been about learning as a lifestyle—something that goes on everywhere, all at once, all the time.

Our kids don’t need to fear the online world, but we also don’t want them to associate it with the primary place where learning occurs.

Learning happens in a kitchen, a horse stable, a basement, a backyard, a creek, an art studio, a hiking trail. It happens at the kitchen table, yes, and it happens on a computer, sure. But it also happens in a reading nook, or treehouse. It happens at Starbucks in a free-wheeling conversation with a parent about a recently read novel. It happens upstairs, lying on a bed with a physical book. It happens while solving a 1000 piece puzzle, listening to an audiobook.

It happens all the time.

Learning in homeschool is first and foremost about the bold notion that learning is not contained by a building or a laptop!

Learning happens inside a self, connected to a subject, in partnership with a living, breathing person. Sometimes that person might be online. But no matter what, the learning is not about chugging through a series of slides and answering quiz questions. If that is the way the system is set up, we may as well put our kids in school so at least they’re with the 3-dimensional people for most of their waking hours!

What I wish today’s parents knew

Homeschooling sounds hard when we think of it as an alternative to public school. We worry about state standards and the traditional classroom activities that we associate with learning (many of us were raised in school so we think learning happens in a building, in a classroom).

Homeschooling is natural and (dare I say?) easy when we think about learning as a lifestyle. The great opportunity of home education is not managing a learning system on behalf of some other entity (think of supervising homework for school as the corollary to supervising online school for lessons completed).

The joy is in going on the adventure of learning together with your kids!

Homeschooling not only educates your children, it changes the entire culture of your family. Learning, living, and loving are united. Family dinners become rollicking conversations about history or literature. A child’s obsession with astronomy means everyone gets to see Saturn through a telescope at 4:00 AM. Another child’s fascination with archery leads to reading The Hunger Games series aloud.

When a parent teaches writing at home, the writing is read by an interested reader—YOU! In fact, you’re the reader your child cares the most about. Your kids want your reactions. They want to be read and valued by the person they value the most.

Today, some programs use AI Agents to teach writing. That means the writing your child does is not being read by a person. What is the point of writing or learning to write if the writing never gets read by a person?

Homeschooling is not so difficult if:

• You partner with your kids in learning together

• You create a simple daily routine

• You follow inspiration when it visits

• You get out of the house and into the big beautiful world regularly

• You learn as a family for as many of the subjects as is practical

• You let go of grades and assessments

• You focus on each child’s individual progress

• You select curriculum that suits your family culture and interests

If you want to toss in an online class for variety, wonderful! But I secretly hope you won’t delegate your entire homeschool to an all-day online program.

You’ll miss the fun and magic of that shared learning experience. I want that for you!

I really do.

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If you need a vision to help you imagine what homeschooling can be for your family, I wrote a book just for you. It’s called The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life

You can purchase it here.

I also offer a weekly podcast with my co-host Melissa Wiley where we give you strategies and tips on how to have this life become yours!

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How can I help you? Please let me know in the comments.