Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #055 – Why Muslim Parents In North America Should Consider Homeschooling

			homeschooling is an extremely, extremely important freedom that we have in the United States of
America. And it's one that Muslims need to take advantage of more, you know, we homeschool our kids,
and people see, like my oldest son with me in the office or whatever. And then they're like, Well,
shouldn't he be in schools? No, he is in school right now. And then like, you can do that. Yeah,
like people have no idea, especially people who have more recently come to this country. And
obviously, you know, one of the hard things and to be in the United States right now is that
education has become very politicized. And that means that both from the right and the left, we have
		

			incursions into public education, where people are trying to push their ideology, we get the gender
and sexual ideology from the left, we get certain sort of racist, you know, ideologies from the
right, and each side wants to control the narrative. So that puts Muslim kids in the crosshairs, it
makes it very, very, very difficult. And when education isn't about education anymore, and actually
homeschool is easier than you think what I think every community needs is every community needs like
one or two families that have already done it to help people with the administrative side of it, you
know, especially sometimes there's language barriers, you know, it depends state by state, I, you
		

			know, registered for homeschooling in a couple different states. Some states, it's as easy as you
just announced your intention to the school board. And then they say, okay, and then you take a
standardized test, you know, either once a year or once every other year, other states like New York
make you jump through a lot more hoops, and make you prepare some sort of curriculum plan and things
like that, it looks super intimidating. It's not, you know, they're not very strict when it comes to
it. But every community needs to have like one or two families that have been through that process
to facilitate and show people the paperwork, they need to figure out on what they need to do and the
		

			deadlines they need to make and things like that, how you actually homeschool, once you've gone
through that there's a lot of different ways. And that's kind of the beauty of it is that it's fully
customizable. The United States public education system is built off of the Prussian like military
schools, historically, and it's kind of this idea of instilling kind of homogenized, you know,
homogenizing, the student population making them all very the same, and having them respond to
discipline and bells and these sorts of things. It's not really necessarily geared or built for
education. So I think the biggest mistake that homeschooling parents make is they try to recreate
		

			school at home, okay, 45 minute periods, and then breaks and then you know, he just like we have
everything throughout the day, the whole point of homeschool is that you get to customize it to your
child, instead of taking one lockstep curriculum, and one sort of one size fits all and trying to
force the student with all of their particularities for how to learn forcing them into this model of
education and structuring the day. Now you can take who the student is, and you can suit the
education to that child, you know, children have different strengths and weaknesses, some are
verbal, very early summer verbal much later, some are, you know, their learning style is much more
		

			visually visual, some are more creative, right? So that's the beauty of homeschool actually, is that
you get to be more intimately involved in your child's education and you potentially strengthen your
relationship with them through knowing about them. You know, if you send your kid off on the bus
every day in the morning, you don't need to know what type of learner they are, you don't need to
know the situations under which they thrive, what motivates them, what discourages them, you know,
what their their fears are, what their hopes are, but when you homeschool, you get to learn all that
stuff. So it has the potential to bring you much, much closer to your child. That being said, if
		

			your child is somebody who can learn in sort of a cookie cutter model, and you are somebody who
doesn't have the time, or the ability to invest that much into you know, the management aspect of
homeschool, then there's things like Khan Academy, and whatever that you can and online homeschool
is that you can basically recreate a very, very like school like atmosphere in the home if you want
to, but you don't have to. And actually, I would encourage people to not doesn't mean that everybody
has to be a genius in every parent, you can't be a homeschooling parent, unless you have a PhD and,
you know, child psychology or whatever. No, that's not what it is. But when you're homeschooling
		

			your children, you're embarking on a journey together, right? Your relationship is the primary thing
and you're trying to facilitate right your child is going to have certain interests and certain
dislikes certain things that they are very passionate about certain certain things that they can't
stand. So your job is to now learn to be a leader and learn to facilitate for your child, how can
they take their interests and maximize them and fully kind of explore them? What sort of resources
what sort of learning tools? What sort of experiences are they going to need to kind of maximize
what they can do in that area? And then how do you learn sort of the meta skills so that you can
		

			pull them along and help them in the areas that they wouldn't naturally take to write so it's a
beautiful thing and homeschooling gives the possibility that you're going to know your child very,
very, very well that you have a very, very loving bond with each other and it's going to bring you a
lot closer together. That being said, I think that the long term or the
		

			ie maybe a more long term goal for Muslim homeschoolers is to try to link up and create
homeschooling networks. And in fact, this is a really, really promising thing when it comes to
starting Islamic schools or starting sort of, you know, other sort of more formal and centralized
educational institutions. Is that starting a homeschool network, right? You, okay? You're a person
and I'm a person, you have strengths, and I have strengths, you have weaknesses, and I have
weaknesses, right? So maybe you're able to teach math, and maybe I'm able to teach history, right.
And so if you're able to pool resources and opportunities, then you provide that sort of also the
		

			social element, which everybody's afraid of, which is not really a big deal, in my opinion. It's
it's much overstated. You tell someone you're homeschooling, and they're like, oh, but how are they
going to get socialized? actually had somebody in the mess, you know, bring this up last year. And I
said, Okay, first of all, socialization is not an inherent Good, okay? Like, there's good
socialization and bad socialization. And when I deal with kids in the masjid, and kids come to me,
especially when they become teenagers, I don't think I can probably count on one hand, the amount of
times I've seen a Muslim child suffer from not being socialized enough to the mainstream culture.
		

			Usually, the problem is the opposite, that they're too socialized to the mainstream culture, they're
socialized in a bad way with negative outcomes, you know, repeating everything that they see at
school, on social media, online, etc. So I don't think it's a problem, the social aspect, there's
other ways to take care of the social aspects such as the machines such as extracurricular
activities, such as, you know, martial arts, and sports and things like that. Lots of different
clubs that you can join. But if you're very concerned about it, then I think that it is also a thing
that should be done to have homeschooling families linked up and collaborate in sort of ways where
		

			they're not just taking the burden off of each other. Yes, but also amplifying the work that they
can do with the children and building those both intergenerational bonds right your child to another
adult mentor, and then also the children in between themselves. So homeschooling is a really
exciting thing. I think it's a really positive thing. And it's true that it doesn't work for
everybody, maybe in every situation, but I think that where we're at right now, it could work for a
lot more people than people realize. And so I would encourage Muslim parents to give it some
thought.