As I check my feedreaders for information and news about homeschooling, I’m surprised by the number of articles and blog essays which appear these days; it seem as though the annual back-to-school parade now necessitates an almost parallel reporting on the cutely-tagged ‘not-back-to-school’ crowd. As a result, homeschooling seems to have become a media buzzword, and I ponder that development for a moment…
Searching the term buzzword, I find an interesting definition at Wikipedia:
A buzzword… is a term of art or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context by nonspecialists who use the term vaguely or imprecisely. Labelling a term a “buzzword” pejoratively implies that it is now used pretentiously and inappropriately by individuals with little understanding of its actual meaning who are most interested in impressing others by making their discourse sound more esoteric, obscure, and technical than it otherwise would be.
I do believe that definition fits the description of what we’re seeing. The term homeschooling is being utilized to describe everything from the tutoring of Hollywood starchildren to public-school-in-the-home. Bona fide homeschooling is slip-sliding away.
Somewhere along the line in this country families were sold a bill of goods by the powers that be. Parents were led to believe that children couldn’t be trusted to learn; they needed to be tricked, coerced, or forced into it. Families certainly couldn’t be trusted to see that their kids were learning, therefore, schools would do it. For anyone interested in learning more, John Taylor Gatto, Larry and Susan Kaseman, Patrick Farenga, Grace Llewellyn, Ron Miller and many others have all written extensively about how and why it all works. This pervasive and wrongheaded approach didn’t leave room for children to dawdle, to daydream, to explore options and chase dead ends until they were satisfied with the results. This system demanded that children choose, on its timetable, what they would be and what they would do with their lives, or it would be chosen for them.
Then, more or less beginning in the mid-1970’s, parents started saying “Enough! No More! We can trust our children to learn, and we can be trusted to help them determine what’s worth learning.” Homeschooling blossomed and grew into a dynamic national movement which is still growing rapidly over 35 years later.
But there’s been change in the air for a long time now. With homeschooling more of a comfortable option, no longer such a fringe element, the parents coming to homeschooling now are keying on very different factors than their pioneering predecessors, and are focusing on simply using whatever form of education works in preparing their kids for the economic merry-go-round, the proverbial rat race. One can’t help wondering how these parents will deal with increasing standardization through national education goals, school-to-work programs, and a renewed emphasis on testing and assessment. The parental reaction today seems to be toward buying back into the system – changing the face of homeschooling in the process.
A look at the educational reforms of the 1980’s shows that homeschoolers were clearly at cross-purposes to the vision policy-makers had for the lives of our youth. While the experts and professionals were scrambling to convince the public that they had the answers to all of our social problems, we stood fast, loudly and clearly proclaiming “No thanks, homeschooling works for us.”
In stark contrast, many of today’s homeschoolers want to be part of the public education reform movement. In the past few years they have worked to help the public schools embrace homeschoolers, to lure them back into the fold with their own language, with a smoothly orchestrated series of steps. First offer access to the educational resources, then create the hybrid public school/homeschool programs, then simply segue back into business as usual.
When parents start asking questions about homeschooling, among the first concerns we hear are “How will my homeschooled children get into college, or how will my unschooled kids find a good job?” These are the overriding concerns today. We rarely hear people ask “Will homeschooling make my kids nice people?”
Nice people. What a concept. But isn’t that what this tired old world really needs more than anything else? Nice people? We live with a mind-numbing combination of social confusion and cynicism. Movies and television, mirrors of our society, reinforce all the mindless stereotypes. Generations poke fun at each other, each insisting that the other just doesn’t understand. But how can they understand? The underlying basis for mutual understanding – simply spending time with each other – has been schooled right out of this society.
Homeschooling offers a way to hold the center, by encouraging families to simply spend time together. Agemates, social peers, fellow workers and just plain friends are important, of course, but central to everything we do is our family, the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas who love us, no matter what we do, no matter where we go, no matter how long between visits or phone calls. If we can’t hold our families together, what makes us think we can hold a viable society together?
As homeschoolers we need to defend and protect the right to nurture and educate our children as we see fit, and not as social engineers dictate. We need to resist increasing overtures from the experts and professionals who would assure us that they can do it all much more effectively, much more efficiently. We need to hold the center for the homeschooling families who follow.
© 2010 Helen Hegener
Tags: Grace Llewellyn, Helen Hegener, Home Education Magazine, Homeschooled Kids, homeschooling, homeschooling families, homeschooling works, John Taylor Gatto, Larry and Susan Kaseman, national education goals, Patrick Farenga, reasons to homeschool, Ron Miller, school-to-work programs, success of homeschooling, testing and assessment
Love is perhaps the strongest of human emotions. It transcends barriers of language and culture, leaps through time and space, affects everyone from the youngest and most helpless babies to the oldest and most careworn cynics. Love is magical and mysterious and all-powerful; it has the power to transform lives.
Madison Avenue copywriters have created award-winning commercials capitalizing on the familiar scene of a teary-eyed toddler being urged aboard a big yellow bus by his obviously loving and equally teary-eyed mother. It’s become a seasonal rite of passage, accepted as the norm, encouraged without regard to how this wrenching separation at a tender age might actually affect a young child – or his mother.
Experts who’ve made a profession of child development and education relentlessly warn us that parents need to break the ties that bind, that children need socialization through the company of their peers, that trained teachers are necessary to develop a child’s skills in the proper order. Do these experts base their claims on living with young children for years and observing what they need first hand? Of course not. Their mandates are based on questionable research findings and unquestioned allegiance to their alma maters and the educational bureaucracy. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: Encourage parents to send their children to school so they can become experts with credentials and eventually author research which will encourage other parents to send their children to school. A neatly closed circle ensuring the continuation of the bureaucracy; the children merely cogs in the wheel.
Love seems like the best of all reasons for homeschooling. Not the only reason, of course – there are as many different reasons as there are children to be homeschooled – but the love a parent feels for his children ensures a desire to keep those children from harm’s way, to protect and defend them from any perceived dangers, whether physical, emotional, or bureaucratic. The experts might not understand it, and might in fact even disagree, but parents have the right – indeed, they have the responsibility – to intervene when their children need help, protection, or assistance in finding another way.
Babies grow so quickly into toddlers, and toddlers grow into young children, who will be stretching into teenagers before you know it. The hours and days and years we’re given to spend with them are so few, so very small a piece of one’s lifetime. And yet schooling easily consumes the bulk of childhood: Five to six hours per day or more, five days a week, for three-quarters of each year, for twelve long years. So much of a child’s time; so much of a parent’s rightful joy.
Homeschooling. The word brings to mind images of colorful books piled on a table, a well-used collection of pencils and paper and scissors and glue, the waxy-sweet smell of a freshly-opened box of crayons, an assortment of kitchen-science ingredients in boxes and bottles of different shapes and sizes. Fall days collecting leaves, spring mornings examining pond life, long lazy summer days at the beach learning about everything – and nothing at all. Homeschooling is a warm and cozy word, evoking images of parent and child engaged in sharing, exploring, learning about life.
Homeschooling is not often associated with prescription drugs and hypodermic needles. We don’t often equate it with learning medical terminology and care-giving procedures, or learning how to administer life-saving techniques or determining when to call 911. We don’t often think of hospital visits or figuring out the intricacies of insurance paperwork as educational. But if homeschooling is about learning what we need to know to get along in life, then the lessons awaiting us at the other end of the spectrum, when our parents grow old and we who were once children become learners all over again, are as important as those we teach and learn at the beginning.
Somehow, somewhere in the development of our present-day social structure, it was decided that separating and specializing the stages and phases of life would be beneficial. And to a certain extent, I suppose it is. Young children often have a kind of energy and sheer unbridled enthusiasm that would tax the patience of an elderly person, and the mellow interests of an octogenarian would scarcely keep a toddler entertained for long. There are obvious 
benefits to having particular spaces and special times for each, and yet so much is lost in the process of keeping them separate, distinct, apart. As homeschooling families have relearned how to live with various ages of development, and so too have many of us relearned how to live with various stages of ability and disability.
A message board member described her mother’s passing away: “Even while we were getting her things ready for the funeral home I kept thinking this couldn’t be happening, this wasn’t true, there’s been some kind of mistake, because it wasn’t long enough ago that she and I were snuggled on the couch reading Each Peach Pear Plum and Where the Wild Things Are. And now I feel like a wild thing myself, and I want to stomp off to my room and have an imaginary adventure and when I get back I want to find a nice warm plate of something she’s fixed just for me. I want to be a little kid again, and I want her to be my mom again.”
It’s harder when we come up against the realization that there are indeed limits, that there are plans which won’t be achieved, dreams which won’t be fulfilled. We learn to deal with disappointment, frustration, heartache and heartbreak. And yet what we’re really seeing, what we’re becoming a part of, is just the full circle of life. This is how it’s meant to be. If we can hold onto perspective, if we can accept the bad as just part of the larger good, these difficult lessons can do for us what the less complex lessons in reading and writing can do for our children: make us stronger, wiser, more capable, and more prepared for whatever lies ahead.
Every so often someone will ask Mark and I when we’re going to write our book on homeschooling, as though it were a given and the only question is a matter of when. When one works with the written word for a living, as we have for 20 years, and being so deeply involved with a movement as vibrant and exceptional as homeschooling, it naturally follows that we would eventually put our experiences between the covers of a book. Seeing the reasonableness of this assumption, we’ve usually answered the question with a vague “Oh, we dunno, maybe someday…”
Ann Lahrson-Fisher is a homeschooling mother turned book author who recognizes the stark realities of being an author. In response to my recent questions on this she wrote: “With my latest book, Fundamentals of Homeschooling: Notes on Successful Family Living, almost ready to greet the world, I get to enjoy one of my favorite things about writing: having written. The fun of having written balances the love/hate relationship I have with the early stages of my writing process when I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to get there. Those are hard times for me and my poor family and friends; I quit almost daily, I whine and complain. In time, I push deeper and deeper into the problem until my point reveals itself.”
Jean Reed, author of the landmark Home School Source Book, shared the satisfaction she and her late husband Donn found in being authors: “Writing, revising, and updating The Home School Source Book is our way of sharing a lifestyle that has been immensely rewarding for us. The most rewarding things about writing about homeschooling is seeing someone’s face light up with the understanding that they really can do this.”
David Albert, author of And the Skylark Sings with Me, cautions in his new book: “Don’t take anything I write for granted. Test it against the light of your own experience, experimentally. We are all big kids here, and we’ve earned the right by shouldering the responsibility.”
David’s words are echoed by another well-known homeschooling writer, Mary Griffith, author of The Homeschooling Handbook and The Unschooling Handbook. Mary wrote to me about her experiences as an author: “What startled me most–and still does–is the extent to which some people began to view me as some sort of reliable authority. I’d expected that from the general press, but not so much from homeschooling parents. Here I was writing books that essentially said (I thought) that we all get to figure out for ourselves what works best with our own families, and that that’s half the fun of the whole process, and still I get questions like, ‘How many math problems should I make my daughter do?’ and ‘Which TV programs should I forbid my son from watching?’ Maybe it’s just that having written books means that I’m always supposed to be sure about what we’re doing homeschooling, that Famous Homeschool Authors (that’s my daughter Kate’s official terminology for my author persona) never suffer doubts or 
Linda Dobson, author and editor of almost a dozen homeschooling books, recognized this trend toward wanting answers from experts and professionals, and she writes about her acclaimed Homeschooling Book of Answers: “I think I was very lucky that one of my first books was to be called a ‘book of answers.’ I was invited to write it myself, but with a title like that? As a homeschool insider, I knew I didn’t have all the answers! It seemed only right to get answers from others who also realized they didn’t personally have all the answers, either, just their own experiences to share to hopefully help families new to homeschooling. I worked hard to keep the word the publisher naturally wanted to use (‘experts’) out of the title. It was important that readers view these folks as simply other homeschooling families who experimented and found something that worked, rather than folks who were giving ‘the final word’ on how others should go about the act.”
This – and Linda’s insight – makes sense to me, and it’s what we try to do in every issue of Home Education Magazine. We try to “short-circuit the learning process,” as we bring our readers articles from “other homeschooling families who experimented and found something that worked.”
Not long ago I received an email letter from a mother expressing doubts about her ability to homeschool her children. That in itself is nothing unusual, but the letter had a slightly different quality about it; I’d like to share a paragraph with you:
what the Magna Carta was, or who wrote Moby Dick, or how to multiply fractions? As you can see I have some grave doubts about my ability to be a good teacher, especially because even with two years of college under my belt I still don’t know what the Magna Carta was, I never read Moby Dick and have no desire to, and multiplying fractions is still a terrible mystery to me. I seem to be getting along just fine in life without these particular bits of knowledge, but who knows if my life might have been different, somehow richer, if I’d learned those things? How can I not want the very best for my children, and how can I not worry about the potential for doing them educational harm by taking them from school?”
This letter struck a chord with me because I clearly remember worrying about the same concerns, and, truth be told, I still do. When one of my adult kids asks me how to spell a word I wonder, ever so briefly, if we shouldn’t have done a little more in the language arts department. When I watch my youngest son sounding out words to himself I have to resist the urge to ask him if he wants me to help him with reading skills; he’s told me many times that he doesn’t need any help. With over twenty years of unschooling under my belt I still worry about their learning, so I can easily understand this young mother’s concerns.
“I’m currently having fears about how his ‘education’ will be perceived by others. This is totally about how it looks from the outside — something I normally try to not let be a decisive factor. If someone should talk to my son, they’d find that he still counts on his fingers to add and subtract, and gets a blank look on his face when the subject of multiplication comes up, has never “studied” history or grammar. Inside, I’m confident about what he knows and how he’s learning, but when I think about how it looks to other people… I get nervous. Anyone else ever experience that?”
I had doubts about this approach until my children grew up and went off to work at various jobs where math was a necessary skill. They all did just fine, and rose to positions of responsibility, even in fields in which traditional math was of primary importance. Either their freestyle math served them well or when they needed to learn a more traditional approach to math they simply did so.
For example, the young mother who wrote to me asked “How can I not want the very best for my children, and how can I not worry about the potential for doing them educational harm by taking them from school?” Her perspective is obviously that school offers a safe educational experience, and that not sending her children to school might somehow be educationally harmful to them, a concept clearly supported by the education bureaucracy, political leaders, big business and the neighbors down the street.
My perspective, on the other hand, would be to view school as the potentially harmful situation and removing children from it’s influences – not just the school building but the schoolish approaches and attitudes toward learning – as the safest approach to their education.
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