Why Homeschooling
I guess I need to put down in writing the various reasons why I want my children to be homeschooled, so here goes. A lot of my reasons are based on reading the ideas of John Taylor Gatto, so if you really wanted to understand, I’d expect you to also read his books.
What I want most for Jaime is to be happy. I’m not terribly concerned that he be a genius, at the head of his class, a prodigy, rock the world with new scientific discoveries or anything like that. I actually suspect I’d be somewhat less happy with some of those outcomes than a more down-to-earth normal one. The thing about happiness is, you can’t make someone else happy - they have to do it for themselves, and that requires courage - the courage to honestly assess what is important to oneself and not be confused about what one perceives others’ want for you - and space, space and time to explore and discover your own being. No amount of instruction from others will provide adequate exploration of oneself to provide answers to a question like “what will make me happy?”
I don’t want to homeschool because I think I can teach Jaime math or reading or history better than schools. I think I can, but it’s not the point - if the only problem with schools was that they were terrible at teaching these things, I wouldn’t care so much - Jaime will learn these things adequately regardless. And in any case, they aren’t that important. What’s wrong with schools is that they demand passivity. They require it because without passive children, they can’t maintain order, and without order, bad things happen and they get sued. Plus, without order, they can’t teach what they need to teach to get children to pass the required exams, which results in the school losing funding. The most important trait of a child from the school’s perspective is obedience, and therefore, that is what the majority of time is spent teaching.
Right now, Jaime is very self-sufficient in terms of keeping himself occupied. He can play by himself endlessly, it sometimes seems. He also craves company and attention too, of course! When he wants to play with a particular toy, he goes and gets it. Last night, Vivi and I were sitting in the living room, watching TV and Jaime was playing on the floor. Suddenly, he went zooming across the room - walking! Or running more like, because he had stood up behind a wheeled toy that provided support and it rolled out in front of him. So of course, he pumped his little legs to keep up with it and ran across the room. And then fell on his face. He immediately wanted to do it again, and for the next half hour, we helped him walk back and forth around the house behind his “walker”. Right now, he needs no help or prompting in his efforts of self-discovery.
But everyone will tell you - “you need to keep on kids to get them to learn”. They need discipline…it’s hard work sitting them down and getting the to learn, to read, etc. It’s so hard, you’re considered crazy to think you can do it at home. Vivi’s mom’s group tells her she’s crazy to let me make her homeschool Jaime, that’s it’s so much work and so hard. I agree that it is hard work, but I don’t agree with the specifics most people seem to fear. I already know how I will teach Jaime to read, and it will require very little effort on mine or Vivi’s part. Jaime will do all the “work”, and he’ll love it. It will be play to him. When he gets good enough, he’ll continue learning by reading actual books - and I rarely hear about kids that don’t like books and stories. Maybe some find it too hard and don’t want to do it, but I suspect that is a reaction to watching hours and hours of TV (which is way easier to do than read and is great passivity practice which helps them in school) coupled with a lot of pressure from adults. In any case, even such kids would enjoy reading that if were able to succeed at.
The hard work is in the setting up the conditions of success, not in the actual teaching and being a taskmaster. It requires creativity, and a true empathy for what kids are all about, and anyone who argues kids don’t like learning is very far from understanding kids.
I don’t want Jaime wasting time in school. What do kids do all day in school? They spend 6-7 hours there every weekday. Yet, they need to do homework to learn their lessons. How were the 6-7 hours spent? Listening to the teacher discipline other student’s? Listening to lessons that one may or may not already have absorbed? This is a lot of time, and what they seem to learn appears very meager to me. But that’s because what is learned primarily is how to wait for instruction. I don’t want 10 years of schooling to go by to discover my child has turned into an apprehensive, timid, confused and angry child who doesn’t know who he is, and lashes out (almost certainly passive aggressively) at a world that has bottled him up all his life. I want Jaime to spend his days actively - reading books (how many books get read during those 6-7 hours?), exploring the real world, interacting with a large variety of people.
Which brings me to the second main reason for homeschooling - socialization. The other thing everyone will tell you about homeschooling is that kids need school to be socialized and if they stay at home they will lack social outlets. If Jaime did indeed stay home all day every day, he would lack social outlets. But that’s not what homeschooling is about - Jaime should have the freedom to go almost anywhere and interact with all kinds of different people. People in sports programs, at the Y, at stores and places of business, at parks and museums, around the neighborhood, etc. Not just a gaggle of other kids his same exact age in a classroom. That’s abnormal, and just look at what results from it. What kids learn is what is around them, and if what is around them day in and day out are only other kids their same age, well then they learn what’s important to all the other 6-year-olds. And because that’s all they’re exposed to, and that exposure lasts for 6-7 hours a day and you get, what, 3-4 tops? Then what chance do you have competing with the importance of the newest XBox game, or action figure, or whatever else all the other children watched on TV last week?
What I see for Jaime is the opportunity to self-direct his own education, with careful guidance from a lot of different people around him. There should be a lot of input from very different sources - his mom (who can teach him Spanish and Portuguese - what do you think happens to these languages when he spends all day with other children who 1) don’t speak them and 2) make fun of him for speaking them - he stops speaking them, probably actively refuses to speak them, even at home - finds it embarrassing), his dad (will he learn much of anything about music or computers or chess or anthropology or philosophy at school), his grandfather (who can teach him far more about math than school and about how to fix toilets and garage doors and such), his grandmother (who can teach him cooking and about Brazil and Chile and Peru and Yiddish and Hebrew), the dogs (who can teach him how to train dogs, which really teaches some valuable lessons about yourself and what discipline is), the next door neighbor (who can teach him how to respect property and ownership), his little sister (who can teach him how to be gentle). And all the people he’ll be free to meet because he won’t be at school having to stay quiet and listen only to a teacher who is allowed only to teach a rigid curriculum designed only to help him pass a test. Does passing that test help him later in life?
But mostly, what he can learn from himself. If he never loses the joy of learning, there’s no limit to what he can teach himself. It’s his job to do and I wouldn’t absolve him of the responsibility and the power by taking it out of his hands and giving it to the school.
