Schooling and Homeschooling in Luxembourg

We have been homeschooling our girls in the States since our youngest was 5. She's 12 now, so we are on our 8th year of homeschooling. I have been working full-time, and my husband teaches them at home. I help with some subjects in the evenings, and I'm in charge of scheduling and shopping for schools/curriculum.

We've been told by many Luxembourgers about the very high quality of the schools in Luxembourg. One person in particular, a graduate of the system herself, told us that the public schools in Luxembourg are the "toughest" in the world, and that when the kids finish school here, they can go to "universities in the States and skip the first two years" since US high schools are so terrible.

I've talked to lots of kids in this country, both in the Luxembourg schools and in the European schools about what they are studying in math -- my personal yardstick to measure against what my kids are doing. Kids at the European school are behind my kids by more than a year, and the kids at the Luxembourg schools are even farther behind in math. So maybe a student from Luxembourg could skip two years of foreign language requirements, but they couldn't skip any math, and they probably would need remedial English classes.

Luxembourg children in the public school system learn first Luxembourgish and then German. I've been told by Germans living here that the German they learn still isn't "hoch Deutsch", meaning they can't communicate in formal German. When they are about 10 years old, they start learning French, and eventually they will learn English as their fourth language. Most Luxembourgers, if they can speak English, do not speak it well enough to go to a university in the States.

I went to the UNESCO web site, after talking to some people at church, to compare the scores from Luxembourg to the rest of Europe. The trend in Luxembourg is for more and more kids to drop out of school as soon as they are allowed, and for fewer and fewer to go on to a university. Test scores are dropping. The Luxembourg schools are designed to produce ployglots, but not necessarily even good linguists.

Several of the British families I know at church have kids who are grown or at universities in England, and their kids did very well in the Luxembourgish school system. Their kids did very well in the universities and the work force, but partly because they were speaking English at home, and I know of several who took extra classes in math and computers outside of school when they were young.

So when someone tells me that the Luxembourg schools are "tough," in a way they are correct. It's very difficult to learn four different languages before you are allowed to graduate. But tough in this way doesn't translate into good, and it doesn't translate into skills that someone would need to get into a good university or to get a good job.

We thought briefly about putting the girls in public schools here. There are fewer religious issues here (with Luxembourg being officially Catholic), and fewer safety issues. Most people's advice was to put them in and let them "drown" for a while because in a couple of years they would be speaking all the languages you need to survive in Luxembourg schools, and then they will be doing really well. The problem with that is that we'll be moving back to the States in a few years, and the girls would be behind in everything except Luxembourgish, German, and French. We decided we needed to keep them on the American system. And since the American school here would cost us more than my salary, homeschooling was our only option.

My girls also wanted very much to continue in their Missionettes Bible clubs, clubs for girls sponsored by the Assemblies of God. They have been in the clubs since they were tiny (our oldest started at five, the youngest at three). They have made the "Honor" distinction in all the clubs they have been in so far. I got permission from our church in Virginia and the Potomac District to start Missionette clubs in Luxembourg -- homeschooling for Missionettes.

I had tried for ages to email the AG missionaries/pastors here with no luck, to tell them about our Missionettes clubs in English (their church is in French). Then one evening I was talking on the phone to an American who lives up the road, and she said I needed to call her friend Debbie because Debbie is an American with two girls and she homeschools. I asked Melanie Debbie's last name, and it was Reynolds, the AG missionary. So I called Debbie Reynolds, and I got all the scoop on how to homeschool in Luxembourg.

The entire key to homeschooling is to never use the word "home."

In Luxembourg, they allow "home" school for kids that have some kind of disease or handicap that won't let them be around other people. So they bring the list of things to teach the kids to your house, and then you teach them from the manual for that grade. Then at the end of the year, or maybe more often than that, they test the kids, and the entire thing has to be done in the languages here. No English.

So the key to being able to homeschool the American way is to explain that you want the kids on an American system because you're going back to America someday, so you're using the curriculum from a school in the States. Use the word "correspondence" frequently because it's a word they understand.

It will be a bit strange for us because the younger girls are in a transition from one school's curriculum to another school/curriculum. Also, we are about three months behind because they weren't doing school back in March-May when I was here in Luxembourg and they were with their father. (I didn't understand how completely dependent my husband was on my scheduling and organizing abilities.)

Our next step is to find a way to get letters from the schools and have them explain what we are doing. I have some hope that we can make it work.

There will be no summer vacation this year. We still need to make up those three months. And no living apart again either, because it's clear we need all of us together to make homeschooling work.