By Sarah Buchwalder
What do you say when someone says that education should be left to the professionals?
Loving parents are the first and best teachers of their children. You know more about your child than anyone else. You care more about their success than anyone else.
Furthermore, educational professionals are very new on the scene of human history. In the middle of the 20th century, degrees in education as its own field of study became available and then increasingly required. But before then, a teacher was a master of a subject or subjects. Think about it: college professors teaching the highest levels of a discipline do NOT have a degree in education, only their discipline.
By all means, if you're feeling weak in a particular subject (particularly as children enter high school level courses), feel free to outsource some of your child's education to a master in that subject (which might also be a spouse, grandparent, or family friend; it doesn't necessarily need to be someone with a degree in education or whose profession is teaching). That's the beauty of home education: YOU get to choose your child's teacher.