When Mona Lisa Harding sent her oldest child, Hannah, to school, homeschooling was not even on her radar. But by the time Hannah was in third grade, a friend convinced Harding to give it a try.
“We saw that maybe we could do better and we totally missed (Hannah) being gone,” husband Kip Harding said. “There was a lot of homework in the evenings, and we just decided to pull her out. It was a scary time at first, but we started and it was working out great and we just never looked back.”
Mona Lisa first ordered workbooks by each subject and grade level that her friend recommended.
“But that got a little tedious and a little boring,” Mona Lisa said. “We started to get away from boxed curriculum and went into just reading for pleasure and reading what the kids wanted to read.”
Out of the Harding’s homeschool experiment, their kids started to blossom, learning math, reading and science at a much faster rate than their peers. They would find a subject their child excelled in and really hone in his or her skills in that field of study.
“Hannah was whizzing through the math and saying, ‘Mom, do I really have to do the rest of this chapter? It’s so repetitive,’” Mona Lisa said. “And we’d say no just do the odd (questions) or the even ones or just skip the rest of that chapter because we know that you know that… and next thing you know, she’s ready for some advanced math.”
When Hannah was 12, the Hardings looked into having her take a junior college class. She took one, did really well, and wanted to try it again. By her third semester, she wanted to do a full load, Kip said, and they enrolled Hannah in college full-time.
Mona Lisa said all the kids started following Hannah’s example. Kip and Mona Lisa didn’t make their kids do all the problems, questions and chapters but let them move at their own pace. Their kids’ impressive resume stands as a testament to their unconventional education methods.
Their results haven’t been bad:
- Hannah, 26, engineer: MS in math at 19
- Rosannah, 24, architect: BA at 18, working on masters
- Serennah, 22, doctor: resident at the Naval hospital at Bethesda
- Heath, 17, entrepreneur: MS in Computer Science
- Keith, 15, composer: BA in music at 15, will start masters in fall
- Seth, 13, wants to be professor: sophomore, history major
- Katrinnah, 10, wants to be lawyer: in classes at Faulkner University
- Mariannah, 8, wants to be surgeon
- Lorennah, 5, wants to be actress
- Thunder, 3, wants to be race car driver
I don’t want to utterly dismiss their accomplishment, indeed, may God bless them for what they have done for their children.
But this speaks at least as strongly to the falling standards of education, which have resulted in Universities becoming an extension of grade school. Any father who pulled his kids out of public school and provided a basic level of discipline for working through the “three Rs,” will lead his children to become smarter than most (recent) college graduates by the time they are 14.