There are 14 years of archived articles from Home Education Magazine available to read here at the HEM website. From the Jan/Feb, 1997 issue through the current Nov/Dec 2010 issue, the HEM archives offer a wonderful assortment of writing from the oldest homeschooling magazine still being continuously published.

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…”

14 Years of HEM

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:

“I’ve been reading about homeschooling, and especially unschooling, and it sounds so exciting! The more I learn about it the more I know this is what I want to do with my own children, but I still have so many questions needing answers. The one weighing heaviest on my mind is ‘What if I mess up?’ By that I mean what if my children don’t learn to read despite my best efforts, or what if their handwriting and spelling skills turn out to be only mediocre? What if they reach adulthood with no idea 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.

A similar question was brought up on one of our email discussion lists last week, and again, I’d like to share a paragraph:

“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 nodded to myself as I read those lines. Yes, I’ve felt that way many times. When our kids work out math problems, by which I don’t mean workbook problems but real life situations in which math is needed, I know they’re not using the standard schoolish approach to manipulating numbers. They each seem to be working with a different and individualized understanding of math which they worked out for themselves, an invented adaptation of the principles and procedures which works for them, and which is quite mysterious to me. They’ve all tried explaining their various approaches at one time or another, but my school-crippled math phobic mind just can’t see the connections they make.

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.

I think having doubts about our abilities is, in part, what makes us compassionate and caring, by allowing us to relate to the doubts of others. I also think how we treat those doubts within ourselves makes us who we are. I acknowledge my concerns, and sometimes I discuss them with others, but I usually try to find a different way of viewing the situation, another perspective which helps me put things in focus.

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.

Doubts are normal, and doubts about doing the right thing for our children helps make us good parents. But the pervasive nature of schooling, coupled with its mandate to promote dependency on experts and credentials, fosters a reliance on institutional solutions at the cost of family or community based approaches. This is no coincidence. It is the stated reason for public schooling, and has been clearly and unequivocally documented.

Schools and schoolish approaches are a poor substitute for truly integrating the basics of reading, writing and mathematical skills into one’s life. When we perceive schools and schoolish ways as the aberration, and not the norm, everything changes.

Doubts? Yes, I’ve had them. Still do from time to time. But when I look at the results of the decisions I’ve made the doubts dissolve into perspective, replaced by a confident smile. © 2003 Helen Hegener

Doubts

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

Circles

Every parent wants to establish good relationships with their children whether they are homeschooling or not. ~Marty Layne

That line practically jumped off the screen at me as I scrolled through a 1999 interview I did with homeschooling mother Marty Layne, of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Marty had just written an encouraging and thoughtful book on homeschooling, Learning at Home: A Mother’s Guide to Homeschooling (1999, Sea Change Publications), and in our interview she shared her perspectives on homeschooling and mothering.

The quote above came when I asked Marty this question about her book:

The back cover text for your book says it is “as much about establishing good relationships with children as educating them.” Would you discuss that idea a little? Specifically, don’t all caring parents seek to establish good relationships with their children? Isn’t it simply a part of good parenting, or did you have something else in mind?

Marty replied:

“Yes, that’s right, establishing good relationships with children is important to all parents. My hope in putting that quote on the back of my book was to encourage parents who are not considering homeschooling to also read my book. Many of the people who have read my book tell me that it is the parenting, the mothering information that they find the most valuable. One woman said in her review that she almost wished that the title were Learning at Home: A Mother’s Guide without the homeschooling so that more parents would read it whatever their choice of education for their children.

Every parent wants to establish good relationships with their children whether they are homeschooling or not. The things that can make mothering and homeschooling so special is that one has time to spend with one’s children. We get to know our children as they grow. We watch them as they learn to master all kinds of skills from reading to riding bikes or driving a car. There is an intimacy we share that comes from sheer time spent together in everyday things like cooking a meal or raking leaves.

“The more separation there is the more difficult it is to have this opportunity to learn through doing. This is difficult to understand for those who have had a lot of separation from their children. They have no picture of anything else. Of course they interact with their children when they are together, but they often have no way to picture a more extensive amount of time together.

“I think The most difficult issues facing parents is how to make the time to get to know who their children are. Many children have no one who really knows them. For many children, a teacher knows more about them than their own parents. This seems sad to me.

Marty’s words are as true today as they were over ten years ago. There is an intimacy which comes from simply spending time together, and one of the most valuable aspects of homeschooling is the time it affords families to spend in the company of each other.

Read the entire interview with Marty Lane, in which she talks about how John Holt influenced her thinking, how she and her husband came to “the intellectual decision to homeschool,” why she says “original thinkers are in short supply,” and what she means by “mother time.”

Good Relationships

In honor of Labor Day, I thought I’d write a homeschooling-related Labor Day post. It’s always nice if you can come up with a clear thesis, one really good link that supports it, and a way to tie it all to home education. For several days I worked toward this, but the result persisted: no clear thesis would evolve. Instead, I spun around and around in the years of  talk our homeschooling family has experienced about labor laws, management, and work.

My family talks about “Labor” a lot. My husband is a factory manager in a non-union manufacturing facility, though he’s also worked in union environments. He’s definitely “management,” not ”Labor,” even though he’s found himself able to work well in both unionized and non-unionized environments. He’s worked as “Labor” himself, as a production operator during his school years.  And our history includes having lived and worked in textile mill towns; we’ve shown our kids the old pictures of nine-year olds standing on boxes to run dangerous textile equipment for a fraction of the pay an adult would receive.

One of our home educated sons has worked full-time at the dreaded Wal-Mart. Only he didn’t dread it. He excelled, and he came to a personal conclusion that the jobs Wal-Mart provided to some of his co-workers were the only jobs to be had in our economically depressed region – and that was before the Great Recession. He understood that in his case, the oft-reported low wages of Wal-Mart were subsidized by his ability to live in  his parents’ middle class home, yet his Wal-Mart experience stoked him with ambition and possibility. He moved rapidly from unloading trucks to a high-responsibility, high-integrity position, though he was never a manager during his just-less-than-a-year there. He talked daily with us about how some of his co-workers were benefiting from their Wal-Mart work, saving money for college or future entrepreneurial plans. He noted that some people who had apparently missed the lessons at home and school were  learning entry level job expectations (be on time, follow instructions) as well as learning about customer service and computers. He saw people who were  building or rebuilding lives on Wal-Mart wages – hurricane victims, former inmates, newly-divorced, recently laid off, back from the military, rejoining the work force after time at home with children, taking college classes, supporting a family.

Meanwhile, he did a lot of research and brought to our kitchen table discussion of  the criticisms that have been levelled at Wal-Mart. We’ve heard them all. He tried to work out the complexity of Wal-Mart’s impact on U.S. manufacturers and mom & pop hardware stores. We discussed his research and our perceptions of Wal-Mart’s impact on the environment, health insurance, consumerism, discrimination, competition, globalization, and local economic development.

Other kitchen table Labor discussions have seen us recalling the good old health care days for our family, when my husband worked in the automotive industry, and we luxuriated in a generous health care plan, available to us because of the plant’s need to stay competitive benefits-wise with union plants. On the other hand, we’ve also discussed the fact that the plant that once “ran wide open three shifts per day, seven days per week,” was closed — not competitive on the global market.

Our middle son’s work in a grocery store brought up other labor issues. Why were all the baggers male? Why were the males asked to mop up the messes (“Clean-up on Aisle Three”) and clear the parking lot of carts? Why were all the cashiers and assistant managers female but the managers male? Are gender roles at work more prevalent here in the South? More prevalent in grocery stores than in other businesses?

The youngest son is 11 and wants to work. He wants to know why he can’t legally do some jobs; we’re well aware of the laws to protect children, and yet he  willingly and ably splits wood for us even if he does fuss about emptying the dishwasher. We try to explain the morass of labor laws (no, you can’t pump gas or deliver papers or work in fast food right now); we explain about work permits. He frets and shifts his thinking to something entrepreneurial.

We discuss the relationship of work, labor laws and compulsory attendance. Our kids venture that one of the reasons kids are kept in school is to delay their cheap entry into the full-time labor market; they think that this creates an unhealthy situation for many in school.

“Guys need to work, Mom. A lot and hard. And they need money,” one of my sons asserts. We agree. Oh boy, do we agree.

At the kitchen table on college break, middle son reports on his classes, among them, macro-economics. I wonder aloud if it’s hard for him, since he never officially studied economics as a homeschooler. Financial management yes; macro-economics, not that we’d realized.

“Well, it’s generally pretty familiar actually, Mom.”

Oldest son, the one with Wal-Mart experience, turns aspects of his kitchen table discussions into a semester of college study, exploring competing theories on the globalization of business. We hear from him about the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and trade groups.

And as our homeschooling family of five embarks on a Labor Day weekend canoeing on Virginia’s James River, we discuss the economic viability of the river company that has provided us with our equipment, and we find out that one of the guys who works there works as an Alaska king crab fisherman during Virginia’s off-season.

“You make a lot of money doing that, right?”

“I make a lot of money if I don’t get killed doing it,” he says of one of the world’s most dangerous jobs.

And thus, our family, launched into the river, is launched into another discussion of Labor.

Labor Day the Homeschool Way

My five kids may dispute the notion, but I’m pretty certain I’ve learned much more from them than they ever learned from me. I’m so sure of it that I’ve put a lot of thought into the idea, and I’ve come to the conclusion that on some levels it has to do with learning the value of learning. Let me explain.

I don’t think kids really value learning per se. Why should they? They’ve been doing it nonstop since they were born, but still we constantly remind them to do it, advise them how important it is, tell them how useful it will be in their lives when they’re all grown up, and we’re constantly coming up with new and improved ways to get them to do it. We buy their toys with an eye toward how ’educational’ they’ll be. We take them places where they’ll learn things like science, history, or geography. When they ask us simply how to spell a word we seize the opportunity to turn the answer into a quest for knowledge: “How do you think it’s spelled. Sound it out slowly. Think about the root word.”

Yes, I was guilty of all that and more early on. It took me a few years to learn the error of my ways, and for that I believe I owe my oldest two sons an apology. They were the guinea pigs, so to speak, the ones I learned how to handle learning with. By the time our three younger kids came along I’d smartened up enough to relax and trust that learning was always happening, with or without my help, and the learning that happened without my assistance was much more likely to be useful and relevant to the learners.

I learned the value of learning, and I think it’s a lesson my kids will need to learn for themselves. Like so many things in life, it’s not something you can just tell someone else and expect to have any meaning , it really needs to be experienced, to have a context all its own.

Eventually we reached a point where learning was just accepted as something that happened, sort of like the fortune-cookie philosophy about life being what happens while you’re making other plans. Learning is certainly what happens while you’re living life. For better or worse, we learn every day, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, whoever we’re with. We learn good things, useful things, handy things; and we learn bad things, destructive things, things we might someday wish we hadn’t learned. Life’s like that.

On the whole, though, learning serves us quite well, and we’re constantly arranging and rearranging our learning so it’s more useful to us. Something draws our attention and we ask questions or find books to read or take classes until we’ve learned enough to satisfy ourselves. Something else seems interesting so we team up with others and share and hone our skills and put our knowledge to work, thereby learning more and more in ever-widening circles. We find ourselves with a need to learn something and we set about doing so just as we set about feeding ourselves when we’re hungry. It’s just what people do. My kids taught me that. But they also taught me so much more.

They taught me that life makes us all learners, but while some of us learn easily, others learn with more difficulty. They taught me it’s okay to skip knowing something. They taught me there will never, ever be enough time to learn everything I’d like to learn, to do everything I’d like to do, and that’s how it should be. They taught me to view them – and indeed, everyone I meet , as individuals, and not to fall into the trap of sticking people with convenient labels based on my personal experiences. They taught me to acknowledge that everyone has their own experiences which make them unique in the world, and try as I might I’ll never know all there is to know about anyone except myself. My kids taught me it’s a mistake to sacrifice your life to work or even to lofty ideals. Work and worthwhile causes come and go, but the people in our lives are what are most important.

My kids taught me to listen with an open heart, and to see without making judgments. They taught me patience, and perseverance, and persistence , but they also taught me to know when to quit. They taught me that love does not bring conditions with it, but just is, and they made me a much better person than I’d have ever been without them.

Thanks kids, for homeschooling me.

(© 2004/2009 by Helen Hegener. Adapted from an HEM editorial from 2004. Still learning after all these years…)

Learning from My Kids

I came across an interesting resource today:

The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning

This journal seeks to bring together an international community of scholars exploring the topic of unschooling and alternative learning, which espouses learner centered democratic approaches to learning. JUAL is also a space to reveal the limitations of mainstream schooling.

JUAL understands learner centered democratic education as individuals deciding their own curriculum, and participating in the governance of their school-if they are in one. Some examples of learner centered democratic possibilities are unschooling, Sudbury Valley, Fairhaven, the Albany Free School, and the Beach School in Toronto. In terms of unschooling, we view it as a self-directed learning approach to learning outside of the mainstream education rather than homeschooling, which reproduces the learning structures of school in the home.

The founder and publisher of The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning is Dr. Carlo Ricci, who notes in his biographical credit:

I teach in the faculty of education’s graduate program at Nipissing University and I founded and edit the online Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL). I try to incorporate the spirit of unschooling, democratic and learner centered principles in all of my classes. Everything of value that I have learned, I have learned outside of formal schooling. I have never taken a course in school connected to what I now teach and write about. I have taught in elementary and high school. I have also taught in undergraduate, teacher education programs and graduate programs. My personal schooling experience as a student and later as a teacher has inspired me to revolt against institutional schooling. I continue to heal from the wounds inflicted on me by formal schooling. I have two daughters ages 2 and 4 that I hope will decide to be unschooled.

From JUAL’s submissions page:

We invite submissions that celebrate the successes, and challenges, of non-mainstream learning, and that help promote an understanding of how authentic alternative learning environments can inform educational policy. As well, we welcome articles that highlight the limitations of mainstream schooling.

The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning publishes articles in a variety of scholarly forms; for example, review essays, discussions, book reviews, research notes. We encourage and support creative representational forms of work.

The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning

April is National Poetry Month, and while I’ve never been a poet, I do love poetry, and my mother was a poet, which probably comes as a surprise to many members of our family. Mom didn’t share her poetry much, and I only know about some of it because every once in a while I’d find a poem scribbled on the back of an envelope or grocery list. I think she wrote them primarily for her own enjoyment, which seems to me the highest form of poetry. Just the simple joy of how words can fit together into something lovely, funny, inspiring, memorable.

Mom wrote beautiful long poems, short poems, haiku (the smallest literary form, and with the most rules!), freestyle verse, rhyming poems and those that didn’t rhyme but were just lovely to read and gave one something to ponder, to enjoy, to remember long after the poem had been lost to the trashcan or the fire. Being a homeschooling mom, and unschooling specifically, that was the subject of some of her most memorable poems, for me anyway, and I wish I still had some of them I could share. But alas, after all these years I have only the fond memories of poetry about children snug on cold winter days, and her reading to them by the fire while they enjoyed her fresh warm oatmeal cookies and mugs of steaming hot cocoa.

While I was mailing some things at the post office the other day I noticed a new display they have on American poets, and it was so interesting that I looked up some more information when I got home. Here are a few good sites I found; a few minutes on any of them will provide some inspiring reading:

Famous American Poets and Poems

The Academy of American Poets

American Poems

And then there’s poetry for kids:

Poetry 4 Kids

Nursery Rhymes

In that category I must share a really lovely blog I came across when looking for poetry information: Smallworld Reads: Reading Poetry with Children

From that site, this lovely bit:
“Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.” ~Eve Merriam

The wonderful world of poetry is fun to explore, and most of us have many good memories relating to poetry in some way or another. Remember The Cat in the Hat, The Highwayman, The Raven, The Road Not Taken, The Ants Go Marching, Paul Revere’s Ride, Jabberwocky, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Lorax, Trees?

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…

I dunno. The poems my mother wrote were really lovely…

Spin me a memory

For as long as I can remember, Patrick Farenga has been a good friend and ally, not only to we at Home Education Magazine, but to homeschoolers and unschoolers everywhere. So it was with great dismay that I read the essay this morning at his website, PatFarenga.com. Pat wrote, in part: “It has come to my attention that there are some concerns about my credibility as a speaker, stemming from questions about my children’s school attendance and our approach to homeschooling.”

Pat doesn’t elaborate, but anyone who follows homeschooling discussion groups will recognize the source of this contention. It’s not important, and I’m not interested in furthering the perpetrator’s notoriety. Suffice it to say we too have had difficulties with them over the years.

What is important and worth noting is Pat’s measured response. Like everything I’ve read from him, it’s sensible, forthright, and compelling: “I have always believed in and been excited by the stories of freedom, choice, flexibility, support, real-world activities, and above all trust and respect for children and families that John Holt wrote about and that hundreds of parents and children described in the pages of Growing Without Schooling for so many years. The possibility that the term, or the idea of, unschooling could come to mean something so rigid, so codified, that a family could be measured against it and found wanting would have baffled any of us in those days of publishing GWS magazine. It baffles me today.”

It baffles me as well. No, more than that, it disappoints me and leaves me feeling like something vital and valuable has been lost. I’ve been accused of pining for the past, yearning for those long-gone days when all homeschoolers and unschoolers were united in their new-found freedom from the traditional models of education. Yeah, actually, I am guilty. Those were golden years and I doubt that anyone who wasn’t there would understand why those times were so special. We were like little kids on the first day of summer, turned loose and joyful in the world, unfettered, free at last – and we knew our children would always be free. It was a heady, exciting, enriching time, and it will never be again.

But back to Pat’s dilemma. On the one hand he’s never going to make everyone happy – not that he should even try. We’ve had some heated exchanges – okay, flame wars – on our discussion lists over the years about this business of who is and is not a homeschooler or an unschooler. We’ve taken a lot of heat for our firm stand against public school charter programs masquerading as homeschooling, and at the same time we’ve been accused of ‘watering down’ the definition of homeschooling. Reminds me of the old Ricky Nelson lyrics, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”

Pat doesn’t try to please everyone, and he doesn’t pull any punches with his last paragraph – as indeed he shouldn’t. Pat takes a principled stand against unreasonable behavior. His no-nonsense statement, “…I won’t talk about my children in a way that seeks to measure their lives against others’ standards, assumptions, or definitions…,” is heartening and encouraging to this old war horse. 

Perspective: Use it or Lose it

The Unschoolers Project Network

I received this note from a young unschooler in Wisconsin today:

Hi, my name is Ethan and I have recently started a podcast, The Unschoolers Project Network. I have been doing it for a few weeks and mostly share my own projects I do as a 15 year old unschooler in Wisconsin. But Im running out of projects that don’t involve alot of expensive equipment if you don’t already have it. So I was hopeing you could put something in about it.

I’m always interested in helping these kids blaze new trails, so here’s his site:

The Unschoolers Project Network

The Unschoolers Project Network