I have been remiss in keeping our Home Education Magazine readers and supporters updated, but there is good news to share on several fronts.

Regarding the lawsuit which has created problems for us for many months now: We are awaiting the plaintiff’s signatures on the settlement agreement arrived at on October 13th. There has been some back-and-forth about wording, but we have no reason to believe the statement won’t be signed sometime during next week or so, and thus bring a long-awaited end to the lawsuit.

The Sept-Oct issue should have arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes by now; if you’re a subscriber and have not received your issue please give it another couple of days, but then don’t hesitate to contact me personally at helenhegener@homeedmag.com and let me know you haven’t received it. If you do write, please include your current mailing address so I can double-check our database, and include an email address or phone number, whichever you prefer, so we can contact you.

The November-December issue will, alas, be late, but we’re hoping to have it out before Thanksgiving. It will be a very special issue – you won’t want to miss this one!

Our digital edition is almost ready to release, and it’s beautiful! Just before I left Alaska (more on that later), I was surprised by one of my sons and his fiance, who presented me with a new iPad! The back is inscribed “We love you Mom!” and it brought tears to my eyes to know that these kids had done this for me, to make my work while traveling a little easier. It is a magical machine, and I take it everywhere with me! One of the most delightful things it does is download all my favorite reading material, and that has been a lifesaver! I can keep up with what I want and need to without lugging either a computer or issues of magazines and newspapers – it’s all right there in a little gadget I can hold in one hand, and the new digital HEM looks amazing on it!

About my travels: I’m back in Washington (state), where the HEM office was located for many years, with our oldest son, John, who’s helping me with chores, maintenance, and getting this place ready for the changes ahead. For those who haven’t followed our family over the years, or for those who haven’t kept track, a bit of backstory:

My parents built this home in north central Washington, and we bought it from them when they moved back to Alaska in the mid-1980′s. We raised our five kids here, all unschooled of course, and it was a delightful time filled with family and friends, horses, dogs, explorations, travels, and seemingly endless adventures. But like all good things, it did end. Our kids grew up, had kids of their own, and moved away. Our four sons moved to Alaska, our daughter moved to another part of this state. All are doing wonderfully, and we all remain close, even as the miles separate us.

But no one wants to live here any more. Alaska is our home now. My son John and I flew down from Alaska a week ago to move the last of the family’s things out of this place, and we’ve had help from my daughter and my sister, who both traveled here to help. It’s not a sad time, by any means, because so much love and so many good times happened here, and we know leaving here paves the way to building new memories, new adventures and new good times. We are grateful to have had this beautiful place to be, and we are equally grateful to be moving on with our lives.

We are also moving on with Home Education Magazine. The November-December issue will see some significant changes, but the heart and soul of the magazine are intact and as steady as ever. There have been some rough patches with this atrociously harassing lawsuit, to be sure, but that’s behind us now, and we see a bright future, and many more years of helping homeschooling families find joy and strength and peace in living and learning together.

To that end, I’d like to leave you with this excerpt from an editorial I wrote 21 years ago, which ran in our Nov-Dec, 1990 issue:

“Our great American public education system has raised a generation that is uncertain of itself, a generation in which those who have the heart to strike out confidently on their own are the exceptions to the rule: business entrepreneurs, home birthing families, breastfeeding mothers, owner homebuilders, and backyard gardeners. These people are not considered the mainstream of our society, rather they are those who’ve taken a different path, they’ve heard the beat of a different drummer, and they’ve answered the call. Of course they and their notions are gaining ground within the society-at-large. Plain old common sense always seems to win out in the end.

“But that sense of uncertainty, of ‘are we sure we’re doing the right thing,’ of wanting to ask the advice of the ‘experts,’ is a very pervasive thing. The conventional institutional wisdom plays on this uncertainty. They play it up. They point it out to those who have the audacity to try a few faltering steps on their own. It takes a strong conviction to go ahead on one’s own in our present society.

“The very success of homeschooling is putting it in greater danger with each passing year. Knowing that today’s parents have lost their self-confidence and have been instilled with a need for official approval, it will be easy for the institutions to ‘lend a helping hand’ with homeschooling. The freedom and flexibility that we now enjoy, that ability to meet our childrens’ needs that the schools so envy, is going to be a prime target for the educational establishment. In order to maintain our autonomy we must first recognize the danger, and then act together in developing effective networks and alliances, both within and outside of the homeschooling movement.

“In their new book, ‘Taking Charge Through Homeschooling,’ Larry and Susan Kaseman also refer to Dr. Pat Montgomery’s writing: ‘When Pat Montgomery says, ‘I encourage homeschoolers to realize how what they’re doing fits in the broad scheme of resurrecting the family as a pillar of society,’ she is framing an issue, empowering homeschoolers, attracting the attention of potential allies, and giving life, energy, and focus to the homeschooling movement.’

“Homeschooling parents are now being hailed as having a good idea. We must find ways to share this good idea without compromising the very freedom that makes it possible.”

Thanks for reading, and thank you for your continuing support of Home Education Magazine. Here’s to a bright future for HEM, and more importantly, for homeschooling!

Helen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Helen Hegener, publisher
Home Education Magazine

The feature article writers and regularly scheduled columnists who’ve written for HEM over the years provide a very broad perspective on homeschooling issues, and they’ve tackled some tough subjects for our readers, such as the openly questioning article by Ruthe Matilsky titled On Unschooling and Life from our March/April, 2001 issue:

How unsettling it is sometimes when I think that we have scoffed at the script and now we have to take responsibility for how it all turns out. If we’d done what was expected of us, nothing would ever be our fault. Right? Of course my husband and I don’t believe that, but I can’t help worrying. The standard good-parent line is, “All I want is for my child to be happy.” That’s easy to say when the kids are little, but what about a twenty-one-year-old daughter who is not on the college track?

Then there was Dropping the Bombshell by LauraJean Downs in March-April, 1998:

Those of us who homeschool are the experts in in-law relationships, right? We simply get on the phone and say something like,”Hi Mom! I just wanted to let you know that we are going to homeschool all of the kids next year. Have a great day!” The relationship just continues as smoothly as it always did, right? Wrong!

Another complicated subject was tackled by M. S. Beltran in Homeschooled Teens Can Rest Easier from March/April, 2004:

My daughter’s late rising has brought about a great deal of eye rolling and gaping disbelief from those who cannot imagine life outside the pre-set hours of institutionalized education, even though they are aware our child is not a part of that institution. Is it stubborn adherence to tradition that keeps people holding the early bird in such high regard, while the night owl is chastised for being lazy?

And there was the delightful Reflections of a Homeschooled Homeschooler by Rebecca Bangs Amos, Nov/Dec, 1999:

When my parents shared their plans of moving to a 500-acre farm in Northern Vermont where they would educate their children themselves, their friends responded with, “Are you crazy?” My friends wondered how I could even consider having my mother and father for teachers.

Issue after issue, year after year, Home Education Magazine’s feature article writers captured the essence and the excitement of homeschooling, the concerns and the questions of homeschooling families. Visit the HEM archives – it’s all free – and learn why HEM is “More than just a magazine…”

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

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.

There was a popular saying many years ago, which advised something along the lines of: “If you institutionalize your children when they’re young, they’ll institutionalize you when they’re your age.” An entire generation turned away from institutionalizing their children, and now that generation is facing the “other end” of homeschooling, and some of life’s most difficult lessons. What we learned by homeschooling our children – patience, acceptance, how to learn what we needed to know – is being brought into play as we face the challenges of our aging parents.

In Internet chat rooms and on email discussion lists the conversation often turns from helping our toddlers learn to helping our parents survive. One typical exchange highlights the similarities: A long-time list member explained that she hadn’t been active on the list for several weeks because she’d been helping her parents after her father suffered a debilitating stroke: “I never imagined that there would be so much to learn about how to deal with this situation; I feel like I’m a little kid again trying to understand confusing concepts that are just beyond my grasp. Is this what it was like when my eight-year-old was trying to learn to read? Just a jumble of nonsensical words and strange symbols and even when someone patiently explained what they all meant I’d just stare at the papers in my hand and nothing would come together for me and make sense? That’s such a helpless feeling!”

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 so much easier dealing with the younger generation. The snuggly babies, the cute toddlers, the inquisitive youngsters and even the teenagers who are blossoming into young men and women and struggling to figure out their place in the world. Their perspective is endless, unbounded, unencumbered by the finite realities of life. It’s joyous and inspiring to be in their company, to share in their plans and dreams and schemes and limitless expectations.

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.

© 2004 Helen Hegener

As a writer I work with the precise meanings of words. Control and mastery are important when one is trying to convey an idea, an emotion, or an experience. Realizing many years ago that writing was a very controlled activity, and seeking an alternative which might help me loosen up my thinking and perspective, I turned to watercolor painting. I’ve always loved the free and easy look of a good watercolor, the translucent hues and deep layers of color, and I’ve occasionally even wished I’d spent the last 40 years playing with paints instead of words. But taking heart in the knowledge that it’s never to late to start doing something you love, I took up learning to paint with watercolors a few years ago.

While preparing for a recent trip to Alaska I tossed in my watercolor tools and one of my favorite books, Gordon MacKenzie’s The Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook (North Light Books, 1999). While MacKenzie’s work comes close to the kind of painting I’d love to become good at, and his writing style makes everything clear and easy to understand, it’s a larger book than I normally select when traveling. This particular trip was to be a short, fast one; I was traveling light, with only my computer and a small backpack. I’ve read the book dozens of times already, so I was a little puzzled – even as I packed it – as to why I selected it for this trip. The reason was to be found in the book itself. It was intuition at work.

It was several days into the trip before I finally reached for MacKenzie’s book, thinking I’d read what he had to say about capturing the evasive quality of light on water. But as I read I kept making other connections. His writing had me thinking of children and families and learning instead of painting. Confused, I started playing with his writing in my mind, substituting words, translating meanings. What was I seeing here? And why?

In his introduction MacKenzie writes “…Watercolors are not recommended for those who are unwilling to relinquish the role of ‘master.’” He counsels that the would-be artist become, instead, “a partner in the process” of creating a painting. Hmm. That seems true of homeschooling. He goes on: “In this medium you must be willing to play the role of both patient director and alert stagehand, while the pigment and water are free to perform their magic. Try to push this medium around, and it quickly loses its charm, its transparent radiance and its life.”

Hmm again. How often have we advised parents to act as facilitators rather than directors of their childrens’ learning? I know I’ve often written that learning happens best when the learner is encouraged rather than instructed. These were interesting parallels: the comparisons between what MacKenzie was telling me about painting and what we’ve been telling parents about homeschooling for 20 years. MacKenzie explains “…Unlike a book of rules that tend to close our minds, this is a collection of principles, concepts, and general information designed to expand the creative process.” He writes that much of his material is based on “common sense, visual perception, and your own innate sense of design.”

I’ve often written that homeschooling is based on common sense, parental perception, and one’s own innate sense of what one’s children need. MacKenzie goes on: “We all embrace an individual sense of what ‘feels right’ that also seems to reflect an unconscious universal consensus.” This made sense to me when I thought about how new homeschooling parents almost instinctively know how to teach their kids to read, or how little advanced mathematics is really necessary.

MacKenzie advises, “The hardest part about this is believing in your ability to do it. The second hardest part is shutting off that little left-brain voice that says ‘This is stupid. It won’t work.’ It takes courage to step into the unknown and trust what you find…”

How many times have I written those very words to parents worried about whether or not their children will ever learn to read? It takes courage to step into the unknown. And yet just as MacKenzie advises me to let go and trust the process of water and paint and paper, so I’ve often advised parents to let go and trust the process of children and exploring and learning. If letting go of a little paint and water takes courage, how much more courage must be involved when one knows the letting go will affect their child’s future?

MacKenzie says one should listen to their intuitive sense, but cautions “This is a major challenge, because it means trusting and believing in your own good judgment.” This is also something I’ve written about many times in relation to homeschooling. In fact trusting their own judgment is often the first major hurdle many new homeschoolers face. In How Children Learn, John Holt wrote: “All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

In painting, as in homeschooling, there’s no reason to set off unprepared, and MacKenzie advises planning ahead, having a general idea where you want to go, and wisely counsels that you must “accept destinations that are not quite the way the brochure describes them but nevertheless quite acceptable.” In other words, be aware that your darling daughter might decide to become the captain of a charter fishing boat!

Gordon MacKenzie writes that it always amazes him how people will travel great distances to his workshops and pay hard-earned money for materials and instruction “…just so they can study the effects of drying water.” He continues, “Along with a little pigment and manipulation, that’s about all that’s happening with watercolor. Think about it.”

I did think about it, and I came to the realization that it has always amazed me that people will travel to homeschooling conferences and workshops and pay out hard-earned money for materials and instruction just so they can study how to live with their children. Along with helping them learn about the world around them, seeking understanding, and building a framework for continuing to learn and explore throughout one’s life, that’s about all that’s happening with homeschooling. Think about that.

©2002 Helen Hegener and Home Education Magazine

A lot of homeschooled kids are blogging. Information about kids blogging and a regularly running Homeschooled Kids Blog Carnival are over at Julie’s Homeschooling-Ideas.com. The June carnival features great photos and pictures of a kid-created Five Star Chicken Hotel, dead honest book reviews of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and a little girl’s news about having horse camp at home. These and many other posts reveal a vibrant and literate community of homeschooled kids having fun, learning a lot, and using technology to share their lives.

Julie’s going to keep entries open for the July Homeschooled Kids Blog Carnival a few extra days, if your children want to add their blogs. She’ll add anyone who gets a post in before August 3.

Of course I’m thrilled to have my son on a parallel blog course with me, but we all know that I have a secret motive: now that I’ve gotten him started, he’ll quickly outpace me technologically, and I’ll soon have him to turn to as a source of html and trouble shooting.

The November-December, 2008 issue of Home Education Magazine includes some wonderful articles and features, and one of my favorites is Mary Nix’s interview with The 5 Browns: homeschooled siblings whose amazing piano artistry is winning hearts around the world!

The 5 Browns are a classical piano music group. Their repertoire includes mostly popular classical tunes, and they were the first group of five siblings to attend the musical conservatory Julliard, which they attended simultaneously for five consecutive years.

The 5 Browns have a wonderful website with photos, music videos, tour dates, ringtones, biographical information and much more. There are also some great 5 Browns videos on YouTube, featuring their performances from Rhapsody in Blue for five pianos to In the Hall of the Mountain King. Other video clips include a discussion of homeschooling and how they’ve been affected by their growing fame and success.