By Wisdom is a Schoolhouse Built

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May came—the green, bright end to the school year—and we’d shut our math books before noon, eat on the porch, then run to the swings or grab bats from the garage. The apple tree would blossom, the mowers would hum, and it would have been a shame to sit at our desks and miss it.

Mom homeschooled us, which meant school was at home, sure, but also that home—and the woods and pond around it—was our school. There weren’t lockers or cafeterias or offices or labs. There was a bookshelf and a table and a swingset and a creek where we collected samples of lichen for biology class.

Like the one-room schoolhouses that marked the Great Plains, our school was a gathering place for kids of every age and interest. It wasn’t a place where we left our personalities at the door to put on a uniform. I remember wearing everything from a ballerina leotard to Mossy Oak pants to school. Joel wore his cowboy hat. You might say we were dressed for the jobs we wanted when we grew up, and Mom welcomed it. After all, isn’t school about kids growing into what God made them to be? 

Lunch break lasted from noon to 1, and if the weather was right (and it most always was), we were not allowed to come inside any sooner. One hour to spend as we liked—to build an amusement park or hunt a squirrel. All that mattered was that we took the recess and used it up. Of course, Mom took our reading, writing, and arithmetic seriously. But when it came to recess, Mom locked the back door with a new kind of seriousness that laid down an unspoken rule: Play hard.

It wasn’t that she shirked the kind of knowledge you get from books. We read reams. But Mom also understood there’s a wisdom that runs deeper than words on a page—wisdom as old as the Bible itself. It’s what the Proverbs praised, as a knowledge that works itself out in the world. One spring, Mom let Joel use his school hours to help a man from church build our shed, and I believe that kind of education is what makes a boy a man. 

“By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
by knowledge the rooms are filled
with all precious and pleasant riches.”

~ Proverbs 24:3-4

In Proverbs 31, wisdom marks a woman who can be a wife and do business and sew a bedsheet. Mom was a teacher, but she was also a cook, caretaker, counselor, and coach, and that is biblical wisdom if I’ve ever seen it. Women who taught in the clapboard schoolhouses out West knew how to do many things besides teaching, like hauling coals and starting a fire, or playing ball. Mom could work through a long Algebra equation with Leanna, then turn around and change a diaper. She’d cook lunch, then use the same stovetop to help us perform chemistry experiments. That’s because wisdom can’t be holed up inside a windowless classroom. It wields many tools. Sometimes, it wears an apron.  

I heard someone the other day talking about all the things she missed out on by being homeschooled: the honor roll and proms and such. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, but I couldn’t help but think about all the things I’d have missed if home hadn’t been my school. I’d have never seen that baby robin hatch beneath the apple tree one spring, or caught that turtle we kept for a day. I might not have sat for hours hunkered over my typewriter, working toward the career I really wanted. Truth is, I’d have missed Mom, and more than anything, the wisdom of God himself she channeled to me. She wasn’t just a teacher, she was a mother, and those two traits are like honey on bread. They were meant to mingle with a kind of warmth you just don’t find anywhere else but at home. 

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Author’s Note: This essay was written upon Mom completing nearly 30 years of her homeschooling career this May. Herein is my humble attempt at saying: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”