![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Rural-800x800.jpg\")
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Latter-day Saint homeschooling families living outside the Mormon belt face a conundrum. For the uninitiated, many if not most homeschoolers actually do quite a bit of organized educational activities with other homeschoolers in what are called \u201chomeschool co-ops.\u201d Sometimes this is limited to activities while in other cases one of the parents will volunteer to teach. (So yes, contrary to popular stereotypes, homeschool kids do actually get quite a bit of socialization.)<\/span><\/p>\n However, again outside of the Mormon Belt it seems that homeschool families basically fall into two camps: purple haired, hippie, atheist types or super religious, often fundamentalist protestant types who don\u2019t want their kids to learn about evolution. (And yes, there are others, but I\u2019m slightly exaggerating for effect here).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In some areas there aren\u2019t enough homeschoolers to allow differentiation, and people simply can\u2019t afford to be picky; this was the case when we lived in Texas, and it leads to some fun circumstances where the purple haired atheist kids play with the fundamentalists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, in places where there is a critical mass of homeschoolers they tend to differentiate.\u00a0 And in these cases the Latter-day Saint families tend to join the secular homeschoolers, because the religious ones often require one of those faith statements that we Latter-day Saints are adept at legalistically parsing to see if we can in fact sign them in good faith. Of course, often the faith statement has some kind of trinitarian, creedal formula, which means we\u2019re out.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On one hand I get where they are coming from. I fully respect and affirm the right of parents to be somewhat proactive in shaping their children\u2019s early environment to support one\u2019s chosen faith community or ideology. However, a little leavening of diversity can also be good if it doesn\u2019t threaten to overwhelm the environment. For example, at BYU I think it\u2019s great that non-member students and the occasional non-member faculty are included, but I also see the point in overwhelmingly emphasizing member-candidates and students in order to maintain the Mormon-ness of the institution.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On that note, the past little while we actually succeeded into getting into the kind of conservative Christian homeschool community that typically requires a deal breaking faith statement. My oldest had a great experience, and it was a fine education with a very grounded, wholesome group that shared many of our same values. However, early on in the process my kid got into a fight with the teachers about evolution. (Yes, as conservative protestant educations often go, it was an excellent education about everything except for that<\/em>). In case you aren\u2019t familiar with the conservative protestant worldview, this is basically the equivalent of a non-member kid shouting out \u201cconman\u201d when a BYU religious education class brings up Joseph Smith. It\u2019s a pretty big deal to them, and it got awkward really fast, so we had a great opportunity to discuss context-specific appropriateness with our oldest. While in colleges and other places talking about evolution was not only permitted but encouraged, as guests in their education system we had to respect their belief system even if we disagreed about some of the particulars.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some may disagree, but frankly the benefits of that co-op outweighed the drawbacks, and I wasn\u2019t terribly worried that my son was going to come home and tell us that if we didn\u2019t change our non-trinitarian theology we were going to hell. The co-op respected our beliefs and we respected theirs, and it was a great experience overall. Of course, not all Latter-day Saint families have such a positive outcome, but more than anything I wanted to draw attention to the LDS \u00a0homeschooling situation, where in the homeschooling landscape we actually end up hanging out with the secular liberals more than the religious conservatives.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Latter-day Saint homeschooling families living outside the Mormon belt face a conundrum. For the uninitiated, many if not most homeschoolers actually do quite a bit of organized educational activities with other homeschoolers in what are called \u201chomeschool co-ops.\u201d Sometimes this is limited to activities while in other cases one of the parents will volunteer to teach. (So yes, contrary to popular stereotypes, homeschool kids do actually get quite a bit of socialization.) However, again outside of the Mormon Belt it seems that homeschool families basically fall into two camps: purple haired, hippie, atheist types or super religious, often fundamentalist protestant types who don\u2019t want their kids to learn about evolution. (And yes, there are others, but I\u2019m slightly exaggerating for effect here).\u00a0 In some areas there aren\u2019t enough homeschoolers to allow differentiation, and people simply can\u2019t afford to be picky; this was the case when we lived in Texas, and it leads to some fun circumstances where the purple haired atheist kids play with the fundamentalists.\u00a0 However, in places where there is a critical mass of homeschoolers they tend to differentiate.\u00a0 And in these cases the Latter-day Saint families tend to join the secular homeschoolers, because the religious ones often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mormon-life","category-parenting"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Rural.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50254,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316\/revisions\/50254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}