MTheads

A Life Lived Differently and Its Enemies

When young, I was greatly intrigued by the lives of children whose parents chose to live in unusual ways:

- Children who accompanied their scientist parents rather than attend school. What's not to love about growing up on a yacht?

- Children of missionaries who grew up in Africa, running wild with the natives, and doing school through mail-ordered texts.

- Children whose parents raised them on communes. Again, little formal schooling and lots of running around in nature.

- Children who were sent overseas to boarding schools.  Sounded like heaven to me, cavorting in the Alps.

- Children of diplomats who travelled the world.  Some children have all the luck.

- Parents who dragged their children around in an old RV in the search of good surfing and odd jobs. While this may not have suited every child, I highly suspect I'd have embraced it.  Surfing and no school....If I get a second life...

I love the idea of shaping life to suit oneself rather than conforming to society's norms. 

Many of us love the idea of a bohemian or unusual lifestyle.  NPR and the New York Times constantly highlight unusual people and jobs and lifestyles.  Children's television loves to use that sing-songy voice to slowly explain that not all children live in a brownstone town home in New York City like little Noah or Emily.  Some children actually live on ranches or in arctic villages and they are just as good as you and me.  Didn't have to convince child me of this!  They had it made!

I hold that, for some of us, this attraction to the uncommon is part of the reason we home school.  We don't see why we have to do things the way everybody else does.  Sending kids off to school while both parents commute to dull jobs where they complain to each other how stressed out they are doesn't hold much appeal to me.  If I can avoid living like this, I will.

Even if.  Even if every other person in America thinks we should all conform to one kind of life in order to create societal cohesion through shared experience.  Even if my peers think my children will be at a disadvantage because we have opted out of the college bound rat race.  Even if people who embrace just about any edgy lifestyle think home schooling goes too far. Thank God we live in a free society.

 

 

 

Now That I Home-School, I Support It

While I was composing my last post on various arguments against homeschooling, I came across this article, Liberals,  Don't Homeschool Your Kids: Why teaching children at home violates progressive values at Slate.com.  Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs for bringing the article to my attention.  While the actual arguments made by the author aren't particularly new or clever, the responses are very enlightening.

Not so long ago, leftists, liberals, progressives, democrats, or whatever people on the center to left of the political spectrum call themselves, were fairly consistent in their disapproval of home schooling.  They wanted to outlaw it, regulate it, test it, restrict it.  When homeschoolers proved too legally savvy to defeat in court, liberal types instead mocked it.  "Conform!" was their rallying cry.

But things have changed.  Despite the author's appeal to progressives' innate sense of duty to enlighten and improve the rest of us by setting good examples, most of the responses to her article were in favor of home schooling! Self-declared liberal after liberal skewered her arguments and defended the rights of parents to do what they consider is best for their children, not what some ideologically driven members of society think is best.

And best of all, they recognize the totalitarian nature of assuming society, or anybody, has a right to demand we give over our children for the good of society. We do not have a moral obligation to support public schools by turning our children over to them.  Public schools serve us, not the other way around.  Let's not mix up educating our children with social engineering and redemption. 

Anyway, it's great to see a greater swath of our society accept home-schooling. 

 

Home-Schoolers are too Cool

Unfortunately for those who hate the kind of people they imagine are homeschooling, the truth is quite different.  Home-schoolers come in all sorts of flavors, to include hippy, secular, progressive, and free-thinking.  And many of these iconoclasts are well educated and able to write.  And don't forget the lawyers.  Home-schooling is legal and mostly unregulated in all 50 states because of constant vigilance and judicial activism, not because we're a country which values educational choice.

Home-schooled students also do as well as or better than, depending on which set of figures you check out, traditionally schooled students.  So, if home-schoolers aren't all aesthetically unappealing bible thumpers, how can self-appointed, authoritarian types crush homeschooling's sexy non-conformity while pretending it's all in the name of diversity?  Why, charge sexy edgy homeschooling families with letting down the team! Call us privileged and selfish!

We're privileged because some one in the couple has to be making a selfishly large salary to allow the other one the luxury of staying home and lavishing huge amounts of effort on their spoilt children's education.  That's not fair for those who do not have that option or who prefer to put their money elsewhere.  In fairness, all of our children ought to meet on a level school yard.  Well, unless, of course, one can afford to live in a good school zone or pay for private school.  Let's not talk crazy here! 

We're selfish because we are not meeting our social obligations to be shining examples for all the less enlightened parents and students.  We're also stunting our children's ability to empathize with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds by not having them mix it up in public schools.

Here are my counter arguments:

1) Homeschooling families are economically diverse.  Many of us make material and career sacrifices to keep one of us home.  The statistics bear this out.  Critics ought to let us know where they live and how much in property tax they pay, so we can determine whether they are being socially responsible citizens or not.

2) I don't care who you think I ought to know or who you think my children ought to mix with.  That's our call, not yours.  We all choose our social groups -- to include all the people who struggle to land a house in a good school zone.  Go after their commitment to a diverse schooling experience.  There are so many more of them.

3) I'm interested in the intellectual development of my children, not in hardening their class consciousness with cliches about the moral importance of sitting in the same room as other children assigned to be there based only on property taxes and location.  Feel free to pretend your children are better people simply by being in proximity of what you label "diversity".  Or that your children enrich the lives of others  because you consider yourself enlightened. 

 

Anti-Homeschooling Types, Part II

Homeschool critics deconstructed, part II

4) Tyranny of the Teachers' Guild:  This critic argues that only people with the proper teaching credentials should be allowed to educate children.  After all, knowledge only comes to those who take education courses in college. That's where teachers learn the secret handshake to unlock the subtle workings of the universe and how to pass it on.

5) School as Social Services:  Without daily interaction with outsiders in an institutional setting, how can we be sure children aren't being abused at home?  This critic fears that home-schoolers have too much freedom to abuse their children.  Not that they would, but without supervision they probably are. 

Perhaps, they suggest, we could at least regulate home-schooling, get an expert inside the home, to look around and make sure these children aren't being abused.  Why not?  Studies show abused children are most likely to be homeschooled...wait, no they don't. 

6) Born-Again Phobics: This anti-homeschooler doesn't like the idea of a child's education being left up to a crazy, born-again woman in a jean jumper maternity dress.  Bible reading, bread baking, home births -- these families are so strange.  And there is no greater danger to civilization than the insidious belief that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Burn the witches for their heresy!

Better these children attend school and be exposed to normal people with their correct embrace of a nihilistic, science-based agnosticism.  Only then will they be free to choose their own path, as long as it isn't homeschooling their children in some crazy religion!

 

Types of Homeschool Critics, Part I

Types of homeschool critics

1) The Worrier:  She is so sad that your children are going to miss out on the best years of her, oops, their lives --  the friends, the clubs, the boys, the dances, the student council, the pep rallies, the school newspaper; all the delights of the self-contained world of the public high school.  She thrived during her school years and assumes everyone else will enjoy them as much as she. 

But there is not a mean bone in her body.  And she is sincere in her concern, just not particularly imaginative.  She'll come around eventually.

2) The Socialization Expert:  This person fears your homeschooled child will become a weirdo, unable to function in society with anyone who is not his mother.  See, she once met someone who knew of a homeschooled child who had trouble working in groups.  Case closed.  Of course, she completely overlooks the obvious, that the vast majority of unpleasant people in our society went to public schools.

3) Homeschoolers are Segregationists:  This person is a bit more mean spirited than the previous two types.  She believes homeschoolers are all racists and misogynists who want to isolate their children from contact with people unlike themselves.  While she has never actually known anyone who homeschools, she and her friends have read about it in various liberal news sources.

While attributing to you the worst of reasons why to homeschool, she and her proper thinking friends send their own children to private schools or buy into good school zones -- the acceptable upper-middle class way of walling off one's child from the masses.

More types later....

If you want to get a good feel for how the squares view homeschooling, read this debate in the NYT. 

Back to Home Schooling, Soon

As we will be heading back to the States this summer, I'm once again becoming preoccupied with homeschooling.  Here in Moscow, our children have been attending a private school for diplomats and pretty much anyone else who can afford the fees.  This school is incredible.  If only every school could be like this one - negligible bullying, international student body and faculty, sushi bar, individualized academics, etc. and so on.  But we'll soon be back to being ordinary, middle-class income earners with no way in hell to afford out-sourcing our children's education to such an institution.

Despite the high quality of this school, it hasn't been a great fit for several of my children.  They don't like the busy work or the trendy classes with six weeks of course work on recycling.  They don't love the posters, group projects, and the power-point presentations.  

They went from reading several books a week to reading one book a quarter, sometimes the same book from the previous year (the third grader is the exception.  She is assigned lots of reading both in and out of class).  Their textbooks are much drier than the material I taught from -- two examples of my material: Big Bang: Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh and The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas.  Good, huh?

Another difference btwn homeschooling and attending an elite private school is the time after school devoted to homework and studying.  Not a bad thing, if you are academically inclined.  But several of my children would just like to get on with it and then go play sports or write computer programs (we're looking into college alternatives for these two...)

I understand these complaints aren't specific to this school.  It's in the nature of educating a crowd.  And my other two children are thriving in this hard-driving, competitive, and slightly conformist environment.   We're going to start enrolling them in college courses when we get back.  

Overall, our school experience has been great.  And my children finally got to go to school and see what it was all about.  They all have enjoyed it, but not one of them regrets going back to homeschooling.  I think they now have a better idea of what a formal education is all about.  They are now better prepared to help guide their education with a goal in mind.

And I use "home-schooling", "home schooling", and "homeschooling" indiscriminately.  Thought you might want to know.