Did you read the article in the paper?" asked a friend at church. Since I had not read it, she added, "It said that homeschoolers are well-meaning amateurs who ought to leave the education of children to the professionals."

I was stunned. After 24 years of home educating my children, after all the derogatory comments I have heard, I thought that I was immune to this pain. The insult disturbed me, however, and I meditated on it for days before I arrived at some insight that helped me cope with yet another assault on our home. What I discovered helped me relax and shed the annoyance of it. Perhaps these thoughts can do the same for you.

FIRST, SOME DEFINITIONS

I began by defining terms, an exercise I always recommend to those who face name-calling. Sometimes it is possible to see that the person swinging the sword at you is handling the wrong end of it.

The root of amateur is the word amare, meaning love. An amateur is someone who works for love. "That defines us," I mused. Of course, we would expect that an amateur at almost any activity would perform according to a different mindset than a professional. Is it a lower mindset, though, as the news article implied? Do we not expect an amateur to produce higher excellence, in his own way, because of his greater dedication to a higher goal—that Godly thing called love?

A professional, on the other hand, is someone who "professes" to be something. He has studied, has passed proficiency tests, and has hung out a shingle announcing to the world, "If you want to hire someone reliably skillful, call me, because I am a professional." We expect that his stockpile of education and accreditation automatically confers upon him the ability to deliver a better product or service. But is that always true?

An example from our family might be my mother's cake decorating business. She attended training classes, opened a bakeshop, and made and sold hundreds of amazingly beautiful and expensive cakes during her career. I, on the other hand, although I had received hours of training from the time I was old enough to see over the edge of her work table and have decorated many cakes in my lifetime, did not charge for one of them. I gave the service, the ingredients, and even lessons of my own to family and friends, just for love. Professional decorators have agreed that my efforts were very good. No one ever said that I should stop. In fact, because they liked the results, folks often asked me to do more. My guess is that we all know stories like this.

ABOUT MONEY

So, although we homeschoolers know what we are doing and how to do it, because we work for the sheer love of it and love of our children, we are amateurs. There is no pay.

Or is there? Who receives the payback when our children grow up sane and safe? Who receives the pay when our children escape being burdens to society? Could we say that there is pay, but that it is not in money? Could we also say that the intangible benefits, such as lower crime rates or a higher lifestyle, are enjoyed by society at large?