I homeschooled my daughter right from the beginning - but it had nothing to do with being one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I just thought It was the best way to raise her and would have loved to have grown up that way myself. There was no one else in our local area doing it at the time - this was back in the late 70's into the 80's - but in the metropolitan areas it seemed people were more accepting of doing things differently. When we moved to a very small community out in the sticks - oh my goodness - they nearly wanted to DF me for taking such a course with my child. By that time she was ready for high school work. We suffered quite a bit of verbal backbiting about the matter but did everything per the law of the land so there was nothing they could do about it except deny my daughter the right to pioneer which broke her heart at the time.
We never needed to spend more than a couple hours a day on the school work - used Christian Liberty Academy for the gradeschool years and then American School for the highschool course. They placed her directly in 3rd grade upon their entrance tests and we took two years to complete the third grade. I worked very diligently with her in that time. She was able to pick things up easily but had a terrible time learning to write legibly at first. She breezed thru High School and received her diploma at age 13.
Then I arrived one home the next fall after a grocery shopping excursion and found her in a puddle of tears with her daddy - when I asked why he told me she was devastated she would never get to know what public school was like cause she had already graduated and all her friends at the KH were going to public school - she had seen them signing up that fall day - there were an unusual number her age at our hall - 7 of them all in the same age bracket. So daddy hauled her off to see if she couldn't take a course or two at the public school for the kicks of it - was told "no" - she already had a diploma - no could do. My husband was a character - loved to tease people with a straight face - so he announced "who do I need to get out the gun and shoot" over this - wouldn't have gone over today - this pre 9/11. They told him he would have to get special permission from the Superintendent of Schools.
That was an easy matter to do - he had interviewed us before in order to get the permission to homeschool. And we had a good repoire so he said she could take any thing she wanted in any grade at the high school. I was shocked she decided to sign up for all freshman course subjects but that was because she wanted to be with her buddies from the KH. She got her name on the Marque for Student of the Year type stuff - a no no for KH kids and that brought ostracism too. But one thing that made me feel good they put her through the SAT test in the spring and I of course had wondered if we had done a really good and adequate job with our home schooling efforts. She garnered the top half of the top 1 percent for the nation so I put my fears to rest on that matter. Turns out she has a great IQ - she didn't get it from me. But home schooling was easy for her and gave her time to acquire tons of other talents along the way.
One major mistake we made - not permitting her to go on to college. We moved back to the big city at the end of that year and she could have gone to the University but we were good Jdubs so we didn't do that. Now in her late 30's she is having to pursue that college degree along with working full time and being a mother of five teenagers. But the job promotion opportunities kept passing her by because she didn't have the "degree."
Social skills - she never lacked for those - she was by nature very outgoing and always had lots of friends from the hall to play with after school during the week and weekends. And the ability to approach strangers and present oneself with poise is trained into us with field service work. In fact a funny experience in that regard was with the school superintendent I had mentioned earlier - he saw us in the grocery store and asked if she was our daughter when he saw us together. Yep I replied. And then he told about her coming to his door one early Saturday morning and he gave her "the gruff old man" treatment - later felt so ashamed of himself about it - but he had been irritated about being woken up Saturday morning to talk about religion. Told us she handled it with magnificent poise and a sense of humor - completely won him over. Told us we could be proud of her. What he didn't know is she used to practice her presentation on her daddy who was an old man - he was age 48 and I 37 when we produced her so she had "old" parents - and he always teased her with gruff old men responses giving her the worst of times. So she was perfectly at home with that kind of response and just responded to the superintendent as if he were her father.
