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

Holding the Center of Homeschooling

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.

We homeschool our children because we love them. Can anything be more basic? We love our children and we want to be with them, to share our interests with them and to learn about new things together, to cuddle them and kiss them and play games and teach them about the world, and that doesn’t arbitrarily end when they reach the state-decreed age of compulsory attendance.

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.

Popular wisdom would have us believe that parting children and parents at a young age is normal, natural, and beneficial to both, giving the parent freedom to pursue personal goals and allowing the child to somehow develop independence and autonomy. Parents who keep their children at home are indicted as overprotective, unwilling to loosen the apron strings, selfishly damaging their child’s ability to reach his true potential.

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.

Most people don’t think very much about how this system works to perpetuate itself. They’re too busy working and earning a living, so having their kids in school makes sense and is incredibly convenient. To question the educational system from which they themselves graduated would be somehow akin to questioning their own self-worth and the choices which got them to where they are in life. It often takes some kind of crisis, such as a child diagnosed with a learning disorder or just not getting along well in school before a parent takes to questioning the way things supposedly work.

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.

Thousands of parents have started down the path toward homeschooling by doing nothing more than acting on their love for their children. Mark has often said all you need to homeschool successfully is love and a library card, and the library card is optional. Listen to your heart and trust yourself, and trust your children.

When my children were small I remember sometimes sitting and just watching them be children, playing or scuffling or reading or sleeping, and my heart would just ache to see how quickly they were growing up, mastering the mechanics of life, racing through childhood to take their own place as parents. I watch our sons now with their own young children and I see that same light of love, that bittersweet knowledge that the days of childhood are so special, so altogether fleeting and short.

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.

My daughter Jody, 23, told me this evening that the best thing about having been homeschooled was simply the time it gave her to think about her life and what she wanted to do with it. She’s told me many times that being free of schoolish demands and expectations has given her a unique perspective, a way of looking at what is and seeing what can be that her many schooled friends just don’t seem to have.

I wonder about that sometimes, as I wonder about award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto’s well-known claim that schools are designed to purposefully “dumb us down” to ensure a tractable workforce and thereby better grease the wheels of commerce. On the bald face of it this seems like an outrage – and John says it is, indeed. But apparently not enough parents consider it enough of an outrage to keep their children out of the schools. For many, this “dumbing down” probably makes as much sense as sending a five-year-old off on a school bus, or filling the hours of a child’s day with busywork and lessons, or demanding that a child leave his home and family and simply accept it as just the way things have always been done.

For me, for my children, and for thousands of homeschooling families, that’s no longer a valid reason.

© 2003 Helen Hegener, Home Education Magazine

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