Holistically healthy means balanced, with a conscious awareness of the equivalent importance of their spiritual, intellectual and physical selves. And yes, that goal was a critical component of our decision to home school. Our sons had never attended a bad school, but they had also never attended a school that expressed any conscious awareness of holistic health, as we understood it. They had attended schools with a strong emphasis on academic growth and competitive athletics and that’s good. We were aware of some good religious and parochial schools with a strong focus on religious growth, and that’s good. What we hadn’t been able to find, quite possibly because we hadn’t actually articulated our search, was a school focused on spiritual rather than religious, intellectual rather than academic and physical well-being rather than competitive athletics.

It depends. There are commercially produced curricula/ae (sorry, my Latin is rusty). However, Charles and I created our own curriculum. We used our experiences at Dartmouth and Wellesley to establish a baseline for secondary academic preparation. One of the advantages of attending extremely competitive colleges is the awareness of how the admission process is supposed to work and what prospective students and their parental units should expect.