You Do Not Need a Teaching Degree to Educate Your Children
Why Hannah walked away from a steady government job and a hard-won teaching license.
One of us has a teaching license. Hannah spent thirteen years in the classroom, teaching high school students Spanish and history. She earned her credentials, served her time under fluorescent lights, sat through the professional development seminars, filed the lesson plans in the approved format, and graded more Spanish writing assignments than the average person does in a lifetime.
She walked away from all of it to teach our children at home.
She saw an alarming trend. Students openly did not care about classes that did not have a standardized test attached to them. She saw the desire and joy of learning being co-opted by test scores. As the love of learning drained out of her students, she began looking for a better way, and the way seemed to be leading out the door. Ultimately, that is where she went.
But before she left the public school for teaching at the kitchen table, she and Josh made a shocking and radical decision. When their oldest son reached school age, they decided to homeschool him. Hannah was still a state employed teacher, and she and Josh were homeschooling their child.
That decision surprised people. Her colleagues, many of whom she considered close friends, began to treat her with skepticism. In the back of her mind, though, this question arose. If anyone is qualified to teach, surely it is the person with the degrees and the experience.
Then she decided to leave the profession entirely. Shocked friends and family members asked her repeatedly why she was leaving. The answer is simple, though it takes some explaining: A teaching degree prepares you to manage a classroom. It does not prepare you to educate a child. These are not the same thing.
What a Teaching Degree Actually Teaches
We do not say this to disparage teachers. We have friends and family in public and private schools who work heroically under difficult conditions. But we can speak honestly about what the credentialing process involves because one of us lived it.
Hannah went through a non-traditional route to the classroom. Her undergraduate degrees are in strictly History and Spanish. She worked her way through master’s level education courses while teaching to obtain her official licensure with the state. The classes she took during this time and her daily experiences in the classroom seemed to be from two different planets, despite her professors’ assurances that what they were teaching would be how it was in the classroom.
The bulk of a teaching degree concerns classroom management, institutional compliance, and pedagogical theory as filtered through whatever framework the education department currently favors. You learn how to write objectives in Bloom’s Taxonomy language. You learn about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how to meet those for your students. You learn how to differentiate instruction for a room of thirty students who are all at different levels. You learn how to document accommodations, administer standardized assessments, and navigate the bureaucratic machinery of a school district.
What you spend remarkably little time on is the actual substance of what you are teaching. A high school English teacher may take a handful of literature courses, but the bulk of her credit hours go toward education classes, not English classes. The assumption built into the system is that how you teach matters more than what you know. We think this is exactly backwards.
Consider the one-room schoolhouse teacher of the nineteenth century. She had no degree in education. In most cases she had completed an eighth-grade education herself, perhaps supplemented by a term or two at a normal school. Yet her students, upon leaving her care, could read Milton and parse Latin sentences. They could compose a coherent letter, calculate compound interest, and recite long passages of Scripture and poetry from memory.
We know this because their examinations survive. An 1895 final exam from Saline County, Kansas, held in the archives of the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society, has circulated widely online. Whether it was intended for eighth graders or for teacher applicants is debated, but the rigor of its questions in grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history is not. Go read it. Then ask yourself how many college graduates you know who could pass it today.
What did that teacher have that today’s credentialed professionals often lack? She had a deep familiarity with the material itself. She had read the books. She knew the arithmetic not as a set of pedagogical strategies but as a body of knowledge she possessed and could transmit directly. The content was hers. She did not need a curriculum guide to tell her what came next.
The Myth of Professional Necessity
There is a persistent myth in modern culture that education requires professionals. This myth serves the interests of credentialing institutions and teachers’ unions, but it does not hold up under historical scrutiny. For most of recorded history, parents educated their own children, sometimes with the help of tutors, sometimes within religious communities, and often simply by reading aloud, by conversation, and by apprenticeship. The professional educator, as a concept, is barely two centuries old. The parent as educator is as old as the family itself.
Abraham Lincoln had perhaps eighteen months of formal schooling in his entire life. His education came from borrowed books, read by firelight. Patrick Henry was educated at home by his father, a Scottish-born planter who had attended King’s College in Aberdeen. The Brontë children, after their two eldest sisters died at a wretched boarding school, were largely educated at home by their father, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, and by each other and their aunt. Their parsonage produced some of the greatest novels in the English language.
We could multiply examples, but you already know where this is going. The point is not that schools are useless or that teachers serve no purpose. The point is that the professionalization of education is a very recent phenomenon, and the results of that professionalization are, at best, mixed. We spend more per pupil than nearly any nation on earth. We have more certified teachers, more administrators, and more specialists than at any point in American history. And yet.
What You Actually Need
If a teaching degree is not the prerequisite, then what is? What does a parent actually need to educate a child well?
You need books. Good books. Not textbooks designed by committee, but living books written by authors who loved their subjects and wrote about them with passion and clarity. Charlotte Mason (1842-1923), the British educator whose philosophy informs much of what we do at Chapter House, understood this better than anyone. She insisted that children deserved to encounter ideas directly, through well-written books, rather than through the pre-digested summaries of a textbook. “Education is the science of relations,” she wrote, meaning that a child learns by forming living connections with the people, ideas, and things he encounters in his reading and his life.1
You need consistency. Not perfection. Not a rigid schedule that collapses at the first sick day or the first warm afternoon that begs you to go outside instead. You need the discipline to show up day after day and do the work. Read aloud. Narrate. Discuss. Copy passages in good handwriting. Study nature. Do the arithmetic. The method is not complicated. The challenge is in the faithfulness, and that challenge is real. We will not pretend otherwise.
You need humility. You will not know everything. You will encounter a passage in Plutarch that confuses you, or a math concept you have forgotten since your own school days. This is not a failure. This is an opportunity to learn alongside your child, and in doing so, to model the very posture of curiosity and diligence you want him to adopt. Some of the best moments in our homeschool have come when we said, “We do not know. Let us find out together.”
Hannah has been experiencing this firsthand during the current school year at home. The oldest child, James, is in sixth grade, and math has gotten much more complicated. Undaunted, she simply said, “Son, I love you enough to relearn algebra.”
And you need courage. The decision to educate your children at home, especially if you do not have a teaching background, invites skepticism. Relatives will worry. Friends will question. The culture at large will suggest, sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly, that you are unqualified, that you are doing your children a disservice, that you should leave this to the experts.
Ignore them. Or rather, love them, thank them for their concern, and press on.
The Real Qualification
Here is what we have learned after years of homeschooling: The real qualification is not a credential. It is love. Not sentimental love, not the vague warm feeling that our culture confuses with the real thing, but the fierce, sacrificial, daily love that gets up early to prepare a lesson, that reads aloud when you are tired, that corrects gently but firmly, that refuses to settle for mediocrity because you know your child is capable of more.
St. John Chrysostom (347-407), the great Church Father, compared the role of a parent to that of a sculptor shaping a “wondrous statue” for God.2 He did not say this work belonged to professionals. He said it belonged to the father and the mother. The earliest Christians understood that the formation of a child’s soul was too important to outsource. It was the duty and the privilege of the family.
We are not saying that parents must do everything alone. We are great believers in community, in the help of friends and co-ops, in the wisdom passed down through good curriculum and the counsel of experienced families. Chapter House exists precisely to put excellent books into the hands of families who want to give their children the best of the Western tradition. But the foundation is the home. The primary teacher is the parent. No diploma hanging on a wall changes that.
The Evidence Is In
The empirical data supports what history and common sense already suggest. The National Home Education Research Institute has found that homeschooled students typically score fifteen to twenty-five percentile points above public school students on standardized academic achievement tests.3 This holds true regardless of the parents’ level of education. Dr. Brian Ray’s research has shown that whether the teaching parent has a college degree or not, and whether the parent holds a teaching certificate or not, these factors are not notably related to how well homeschooled children perform.4
Read that again: Whether the parent holds a teaching certificate or not.
The credential that our culture treats as essential to the task of education bears no notable relationship to how well homeschooled children learn. None. The data has been consistent on this point for years.
Why? Because the home environment provides something no classroom can replicate. A low student-to-teacher ratio. A teacher who knows the child intimately, who knows that he reads slowly but thinks deeply, who knows that she needs to move her body before she can sit still for a lesson. A flexible schedule that can adapt to the child’s pace and interests. And above all, a learning environment rooted in relationships rather than institutional compliance. A mother reading Fifty Famous Stories Retold to her three children on the couch is doing something fundamentally different from a teacher managing thirty students through a Common Core unit. Both may be teaching, but the nature of the encounter is not the same.
Do Not Let Fear Win
We write this because we know the fear. We felt it ourselves. The nagging voice that says, “Am I enough? Am I smart enough, patient enough, organized enough to do this?” Every homeschooling parent hears that voice, especially in the early days.
We faced this almost immediately with James, our oldest. He was excelling in every subject except reading. Hannah wished she had more time with him during the day, not just after she got home from school. When the COVID pandemic ended the 2020 school year early, she ordered a copy of the Orton-Gillingham manual, read it, and began teaching him herself. It was a years-long journey. There were many times when Hannah felt she was not doing enough, and more than one anxious glance from concerned family members confirmed that she was not the only one wondering. She did not know if she was enough. But slowly, over time, the challenges began to fade. James reads Shakespeare aloud now. Hannah did not do it alone. She had wise counselors throughout those early years, mothers who had already been down that road and who shared what worked for their struggling readers.
Back to the question. Are you enough? The answer is: You are probably not enough, on your own. None of us is. But you are not on your own. You have a tradition stretching back thousands of years, a cloud of witnesses who educated their children without credentials and without apology. You have the books themselves, those faithful companions that do so much of the teaching for you if you will only open them and read. You have a community of families walking the same road. And if you are a person of faith, you have the assurance that this work is a calling, not merely a choice, and that the One who called you to it will sustain you in it.
Do not wait until you feel qualified. You will never feel qualified. Start before you are ready. Open a book. Read it aloud. Ask your child to tell you what he heard. That is education. It has always been education. And you do not need anyone’s permission to begin.
Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1925), Preface.
St. John Chrysostom, An Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children, trans. M.L.W. Laistner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951), §22.
Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” National Home Education Research Institute, updated 2024. https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
Brian D. Ray, Home Educated and Now Adults (Salem, OR: NHERI Publications, 2004).