Home Schooling VS Home Cooking

Beverly Hernandez at homeschooling.about.com has fielded a variety of queries from parents looking to sign up their children for a homeschool and wondering which homeschool to send them to. It is sort of funny, but then many of us remember wondering where we might get text books for our homeschool or how we would know what to teach and how. And many commercial and public school offerings have sprung up over the years to provide this guidance (at varying costs in cash or independence). So then Beverly asks if alternate methods should be considered homeschooling. I can't wait to see what some of the other answers are in a week or so.

For me, food analogies seem to work best as a parallel for homeschooling. If I cook a meal, selecting the menu, choosing ingredients and using my own kitchen, everyone would agree that this is home cooking. And if the family sits down at a table in a restaurant to eat a meal prepared by the paid staff of the restaurant, everyone would agree that this is not home cooking.

But what about a family eating a meal planned by the mom but cooked by a housekeeper or cook? Or a takeout meal served at home on one's own dishes? Or a frozen lasagna baked in your own oven with bakery bread and your own salad? Or a make ahead meal prepped in a commercial dinners-to-go kitchen by the mom from their menu card and then cooked up weeks later at home? Which of these is home cooking and which isn't? Is there a difference between home cooking and eating at home (and does the difference matter)?

The failing of this comparison is that most families would still hold up the ideal of a lovingly home cooked meal as at least the equal if not the better of most restaurant meals. Visions of holiday meals involve generations cooking family favorites, not making reservations. And when we go to a restaurant, we still get to pick the one that suits our tastes and pocketbooks. We don't just go to one of the three closest restaurants and hope that we like what is set before us by a panel of government trained and approved chefs.

Nor is my cooking endangered by my neighbors' choices. I've yet to hear someone tell me that my cooking steak at home was reducing the ability of the local steakhouse to provide quality steak and potatoes meals to those who didn't have the skills or time to cook at home. Nor do I have to fear that my neighbors bringing home Chinese takeout and calling it eating at home is going to result in legislation that requires all home meals to be prepped in a professional kitchen.