What if…

…I didn’t home school?

Usually, the question occurs to me as a mark of my inadequacy. I ask it as an anxious acknowledgment of what my children are missing. “They would have more time with other children,” I respond to the inner interrogator. “They would be educated by experts in child development. They would have gifts called to the surface that are missed by the familiar eyes of family. They would have a larger world.”

But of course, each of these answers is only partly true. And last night, as my 10-year-old pored over the “Science and Technology: 500 BC – 500 AD” spread in the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, exclaiming over the clever design of an ancient Grecian coin-operated sacred water dispenser, the question occurred in a different light. It was just so hard to imagine her making this discovery, or using her time this way, or even having this book on the shelf, in any other context but home schooling.

So… what if I didn’t home school?

My children would have more time with other children — and less time with books, with legos, with each other, with artistic invention, with their dad, and with me. They would probably not use words like “enthusiast,” like my 7-year-old did today. They would probably not be quite so skilled at entertaining themselves — or as historically aware about it.

They would probably not get along as well as they do — not that every day is charmed around here, but even the bad days have the gritty feel of real life and real relationship.

They would be educated by experts in child development, many of whom might well be skilled and passionate about their subjects or their students. It’s not hard to imagine someone more excited about elementary school math than I am. With me, they get inexpert instruction, yet even so it’s dispensed with love. In math, it’s the instruction of someone working hard to do something to which they’re not naturally inclined, out of love. In other subjects, they get someone wildly enthusiastic and, in one field, expert beyond anything that’s required by them right now. I’m an absurdly mixed bag. Yet somehow, it can’t be denied: it’s working at fostering natural curiosity, initiative, acquisition of needed knowledge. I think it’s love that does that.

Would I hear, as I did from my mother-in-law after my 7-year-old spent the weekend with them awhile back, that she had spent an hour and a half sitting on the back porch watching for birds in the back yard? Would she have that kind of interest, or that kind of concentration span?

Would I hear my 10-year-old explain casually the difference between buteos and accipiters while observing a hawk soaring overhead? Or would the girls be as interested in insects and moths and (granted, it was with some coaxing) owl pellets? I’m not sure they’d have a collection like this one in the garage.

Would my husband routinely shoot us photos of caterpillars and moths and birds to identify? At home, they get me as the primary teacher, but also their dad, who coaches them in basketball and explains how engines work… also their paternal grandparents, who routinely supply us with bird’s nests found in their yard… also their maternal grandparents, who can spot a sapsucker tree on a woodland walk that we would otherwise have passed by entirely.

They get instruction in handicrafts from a grandmother skilled in sewing, and in gardening and canning.

And they get to discover things and teach one another, experimenting with constructions that rise out of unlikely materials, simply because they have the time.

They might well have gifts that others could call out better than family. But I feel sure, as I mull over these things, that they also have gifts called out in this context that would have no time or air to grow if we didn’t home school.

As for living in a wider world, perhaps the public school available to us would provide that in some ways (though at the moment, it’s only the innocence-killing aspects of the wider world that come to mind). But can the world get any wider than the imaginative terrain of shared books, nature exploration, or history study? We just wouldn’t have the time or motivation to read Black Ships Before Troy, or take as many walks as we’ve taken this summer, or assemble a book of centuries that puts human history in chronological order. The interests would be there, but probably they’d be latent.

The other day, I ran into an old friend at the library, and she asked me how homeschooling was going. “You have the personality for it,” she said. I think at the start of this enterprise, I thought that too. It didn’t take long to realize that I’m not naturally equipped for this at all. But I am called to it, among the options available to us in this time and place. And by responding to that call, we’ve opened the windows to more and different light than I saw coming. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It reveals my weaknesses like nothing else could, I sometimes think. But it’s a blessed enterprise. I’m glad for these rare moments of knowing that, deep in my bones.