Education

Back to basics: why we’re doing this

I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that I’m open to other educational options than homeschooling, should we find ourselves in a place and circumstances with better choices than the ones now available to us. It keeps me from panicking when I think about homeschooling through high school. On the one hand, I’m prepared with a general long-range plan, curricula-wise. But on the other hand — when I think of my desires to provide the kids with a range of experiences, and when I think of the additional state requirements, the need for transcripts, and the long shadow of college in the high school years — I nurse the hope that we’ll have other options by then.

But then I’ll hear something that reinforces that we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing right now, and I realize that it may remain exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. I hear a story like this one, for instance, about the government’s dilemma over what to do with kids who can’t read: hold them back? Or keep them perking along through a failing system in the name of a self-esteem that’s made meaningless by the failure of standards?

Or this one, about a “health clinic” at a California school that provides reproductive services for anyone over the age of 12 without their parents’ knowledge. (Something like this exists without dispute and is paid for by taxpayers, all the while the debate is raging over contraceptive coverage. Figure that one out.)

Or I hear the stories of public school educators I know personally, good ones, talented and smart and experienced, who face children every day whose lives are without direction and in utter disarray. Educating sometimes takes a back seat to simply getting these kids through the day emotionally and socially.

The general impression is of education as a foundering ship in this country, lost at sea and manned by a crew of hopelessly divided and confused experts.

Throw this week’s American Experience program on the Amish into the mix, and it’s quite thought-provoking. This group may reflexively call to mind a sense of cultish constriction and insularity, but I was struck by the reference to freedom at two key points in the program. In one, an Amish man comments on the freedom he feels because he’s off the electric grid. “Think of all the aisles I don’t have to go down at Walmart,” he remarks. He’s free of the forces of consumerism. At another key point, the mother of one of the children shot by a gunman in an Amish school in Pennsylvania talks about the freedom of forgiveness. “I am so glad I don’t have to decide that man’s fate,” she says. “I can leave him in God’s hands and forgive him.”

As a home educator, I couldn’t help but notice that they have “freed themselves” educationally as well. Up until the turn into the twentieth century, the Amish looked pretty much like other people from the outside. The industrial revolution, the growth of consumerism, the lengthening school day and school year and increasing requirements, all gave this community pause for reasons both practical (as an agricultural society) and principled (as a people who take the spiritual formation of their children seriously). They withdrew their children from the public school system, and for a time they suffered punishment for it, with some fathers sent to jail repeatedly.

I don’t think Amish life is easy and I don’t intend to glorify it. (One of the things that struck me about the program was how there are elements of both great grace and great severity.) But it’s clear that these people considered the outcomes of public educational trends instituted a long time ago, and believed them to be undesirable.

I find myself in a similar boat. As homeschoolers, we may appear weird or overprotective or unrealistic. But we don’t like the way the wind is blowing in public education. We take the spiritual formation and the intellectual formation of our children seriously. Unlike the Amish, we don’t enact our choice of alternative education within a strong supportive community. But I’m reminded that we need to be truly prepared for the long haul — for the challenges, but also for the blessings, of following this road.

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