Another perspective on homeschooling

It is no secret that I am a vocal advocate for home education. Homeschooling is an issue for me that needs to be trumpeted on a regular basis among God’s people. I make no apology for that. Among God’s people we need to understand how we should live now that we are redeemed. A very small section of that is the church meeting on Sunday morning. The family is where most Christians spend most of their time, and I think few things are more vital than Christian parents using every possible waking moment with their kids to pass on God’s teaching

I read a very witty and interesting piece on homeschooling by Andrew O'Hehir in Salon magazine, Confessions of a home-schooler. I don’t frequent Salon very often but I saw a link for this article and had to check it out. What is interesting is that this family is not a prototypical homeschool family, i.e. not Midwestern, religious, a bunch of kids, etc. They are a New York City family, his wife is described as a leftist feminist with anarchist leanings. At least among homeschoolers who are conservative Christians, there are lots of us. If you are on the secular Left, there isn’t much of a support system. I am pretty sure that we are not having a “Neo-Anarchist Home Education Convention” in Michigan next year.

Being a homeschooling family in secular society is a difficult task. When you tell people you homeschool, you are almost immediately put on the defensive as if you have to explain to someone else why you choose to educate your kids in the place and manner of y our choosing. As Mr. O’Hehir boldly points out, this is especially true among mothers who don’t homeschool.

At the risk of gross generalization, there's a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don't much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don't experience the subject as a personal affront. Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.

I have found that to be true as well. Granted, in our circles we bring some of that on ourselves. It can be pretty easy to make Christians mothers who don’t homeschool feel like they are betraying their faith. On the other hand, in our community the pressure to be a typical American mom, working or otherwise, and also be a Christian mother can be overwhelming to the point of being impossible. I am not sure how a mother juggles the constant pressure to be super working mom and also be a faithful Christian mother and wife.

This was excellent stuff through and through, even from a guy who somewhat derisively describes fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers as Bible thumpers wearing denim jumpers. Frankly, there are an inordinate number of denim jumpers among my homeschooling sisters which is OK! As part of his article, he relives a conversation he had with a woman taken aback by his homeschooling of their kids and the questions he is asked, the answers he gave and the real answers he should have given. I think many homeschoolers tend to give short, quasi-apologetic answers. My wife is like that because she is a genuinely nice person and not confrontational (I am perhaps hyper-confrontational). How we choose to educate and raise our kids is not something to apologize for but too often that is how we respond.

I really liked the way he approached the idea of public education as an irrevocable social contract that we enter into by way of being American citizens and having children. If you have a baby in America you better plan on turning her over to the government to educate in short order and if you don’t, you better have a really good reason to explain yourself!

Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it -- more formal, more "academic," reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year -- is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it's also one that's debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

Another quote, this time on the underlying philosophy of public education.

Both Leslie and I went to public school and had the usual assortment of excellent, mediocre and bad teachers. We're not zealots with some animus against public education. We're glad it exists and relatively happy to pay taxes to sustain it. As I said earlier, though, we feel dubious about the ideology that seems dominant in public education these days, and especially about the idea that sending kids to school virtually all day for 10 months a year, beginning at age 3 or 4, is the healthiest mode of delivering it.

That is a great way of putting it. Homeschoolers by and large are not “anti-education”. But many of us do question whether this increasing grip that the state has on our kids from progressively earlier ages is the best way of delivering an education. I also think he really gets past the rhetoric and gets into the reality of what the system is all about.

The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units. If you break down the impressive-sounding, bureaucratically adumbrated federal list of kindergarten standards, a whole lot of it amounts to learning to count from 1 to 20, learning the alphabet and the months of the year, and learning to tell time.

All-day kindergarten is clearly a boon -- or more like a necessity -- for working families who have few other options, and where the alternative is likely to mean parking the kids on the sofa all day with Nintendo and Noggin.

Ding, ding, ding give the man a cigar! Besides being tax payer funded daycare, all day kindergarten is little more than a training ground to teach kids to conform to going to school. They learn mostly how to be in a school environment where they will spend the next dozen years. You go to school to learn how to go to school. Potential trouble makers are identified, “gifted” kids are likewise identified, little boys who squirm in their seats like little boys have for millennia are referred to a physician to be sedated with medication to make them compliant.

The article is an interesting one, and gives you a different perspective on homeschool and public school from someone who is not educating their kids at home for religious reasons.