Homeschooling is becoming more and more popular in the recent years according to The COlorado Springs Gazette. The amount of District 11’s 2022 homeschooled students more than doubled the 2019 tally, increasing from 135 to 371. The same trend can be seen all over the Colorado Springs. Academy School District 20 had 433 homeschooled students in 2022, compared with 382 in 2019, Colorado Department of Education data shows. District 49 had 662 homeschooled students in 2022, versus 507 in 2019.
The huge jump in number of parents who chose to homeschool their kids is usually associated with COVID-19, since during 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years many parents took the roles of educators.
However, the difficulty of educating their own children mostly depends on the level of difficulty a student is willing to have, since high school education might differ from elementary school education.
As Mr. Wade, a physics and math teacher at Coronado, said “the amount of ‘learning’ that takes place and the actual level of understanding that a student will have on a given topic, is highly dependent on the conditions,” such as the student’s age and willingness to learn a certain science class. Moreover, a student’s internal motivation and desire to learn more decides a lot of things about the learning process and the result.
When it comes to homeschooling, a lot depends on the kind of subject that student is interested in. Ms. Lewis, a history teacher at Coronado, believes that the situation with humanities is very different from science classes since “the root word for humanities is human—you need other humans to compare and contrast ideas with, otherwise you get stuck in your own little world,” therefore one would need to have other people around them who come from different backgrounds and can share their knowledge with each other in order to learn more about the world around them.
Regardless of all the potential challenges that one might face, homeschooling is a unique journey that requires a lot of commitment and helps students become more responsible and independent learners; however, homeschooling is not a reliable and reasonable way of learning for everyone, since only those students who can summon enough motivation in order to learn on the same level as their peers in the in-person classroom settings.
