How Homeschooling Shaped Me

Do you ever wonder how your life might have been different if something major had happened or not happened? I sometimes wonder how I would be if I had not been homeschooled. We'll never know, but I do have a few thoughts on what may have happened. I'm not intending this to be a bashing of public and private school but I do want to show some of the tremendous benefits of homeschooling.

I don't think I'd be a reader.
    Most of my public school friends don't read for fun, if they like reading at all, because they had too much assigned reading. When they had free time, they didn't want to do more reading. Sadly, many of them grew to actually dislike reading books. I think over the course of my whole schooling I was assigned two books to read. Otherwise, I had the freedom to read and learn what I was interested in.
    Now, I did have things I needed to learn about, but within that guideline, I could pick the books I wanted to read. One benefit of homeschooling is that you can let the students learn the material in the way they want. For example, in my research class, we were allowed to pick the topic we wanted, and present it in whatever format we desired, as long as we had a bibliography and list of sources in the proper structure and I believe at least one source could not be from the internet. I picked to research the Vietnam War and I made a scrapbook for my presentation.

I probably would not have started this business.
    My schooling encouraged me to think outside the box as often as possible. While I do know people who started businesses in high school or after graduation, I am such a rule follower that I probably would have been too focused on the "traditional path" of college. I also had the opportunity in high school to start earning college credit and was able to realize that there was not a degree I wanted to pursue that would be beneficial to my life. (There were things I was interested in but that is another blog post).
    From a young age, I have been exposed to entrepreneurship and the idea of kids having their own businesses. Over the course of my life I watched friends start various businesses and I even made and sold things at an event specifically designed for kids! Creativity and entrepreneurship were woven into the fabric of my education and encouraged at every step.

I would probably not be close friends with people older and younger than me.
    For better or worse, the education system in our country is not set up to encourage multi-generational relationships. Almost by necessity, homeschooling does. My two best friends growing up were a grade above and below me. I was good friends with boys as well as girls. I learned how to play with younger kids and interact with adults.
    Today, one of my closest friends is five years younger than me and I'm becoming friends with some ladies in their 30s.

I might not have as good of relationships with my brothers.
    I'm a little more skeptical of this one, because I actually know a lot of people who are pretty close to their siblings who did do all the stuff that is involved with public school, but my thought is that, if we had not been homeschooled, we would have all had our own activities and been too busy to learn to like to do things together. We did so many classes and activities together that it is natural to still do things with each other. Now, we did also do our own things ( I had art class and one brother played baseball) but we did co-op as a family and I had many classes with my brothers and we did a sports class that we did together.
    I don't want to make it sound like we were joined at the hip. I had my friends and activities that were just mine, but we also had shared friends and we loved to do things as a group. To this day, there is a group of seven of us, guys and girls, in a ten year age span, who love to be together. It's something I've not observed outside of homeschool families.


If I had not been homeschooled, I have to think that I would probably still have a lot of the core things that make me "me", but I would be a very different person. The opportunities would have been different and led me on a different path. I'm extremely grateful for the life that I led and how many things I got exposed to and was able to try out as I grew up. Homeschooling shaped me and I'm glad of it.

Have you ever thought of how your schooling experienced shaped you? What would be different if your schooling journey had not been what it was?