On Home Schooling

It's hard not to think as I do about education--that it is not the same as schooling, and more of the latter is not necessarily better--without thinking about home-schooling.


Not long ago, I harbored many of the commonly-held stereotypes about home-school parents and the children they home-school:  The parents are paleolithic conservatives who don't want their kids to know about homosexuality and popular culture, and those kids would turn out to be highly regimented social misfits.  However, I have come to know some parents who home-school their kids, and I have had some students who were home-schooled.  And, while I concede that there are probably still some home-schoolers who simply don't want their kids to live in the 21st Century, there are others--like the ones I've met--who understand the ways in which schools, at least the ones that are available to them, simply cannot meet some of their children's important needs.  They also understand that schools can also exacerbate the fears, anxieties and hostilities that those schools may have ignited in their kids.


One such parent I know is a former teacher in her local public schools.  Her husband makes a considerably-better-than-average salary and earns even more through consulting work; still, it was a considerable financial sacrifice when she quit her public-school teaching job, in part because some of her kids' (and her own) medical needs.  But no one in that family regrets their decision:  The father says he doesn't mind the long work hours and the travel involved in his job because he feels that his kids have grown more intellectually--and are much healthier, physically and emotionally--than they would have been had they remained in any school, public or private, in their area.  Plus, he says, he likes the relationships that his kids have developed with their mother, and with him.


So why, you might be wondering, is she home-schooling her kids?  Well, even though they--a girl in her senior year of high school and a boy in his freshman year--were among the best students in their school, they had difficulties.  The daughter is transgendered--actually, she was born intersexed and, although the doctor assigned her to the male gender on her birth certificate, she has always seen herself, and has been seen, as a girl and plans to have gender-reassignment surgery after finishing her diploma.


As you can imagine, kids gave her no end of grief about that.  But they reserved even more of their contempt and wrath for her brother, who seems to fit any template one can find for a "normal" boy.  All he ever did was to defend lesbian, gay and transgender people even though he himself fits into none of those categories.


Now, some would argue that kids should be in public school, or any other kind of school, in order to "learn how to deal with different types of people" or simply to "toughen up."  More than a few--including the majority of teachers I've known--would even say that the daughter should learn how to deal with being male and to accept it.


My friend doesn't disagree with those people who think that her kids should be exposed to all different kinds of people.  So, she has encouraged them to join organizations in line with their interests--in molecular biology for the daughter, in creative writing for the son.  In those activities, they meet other people of all ages--including their own--who share their interests.  


Moreover, the daughter has already received credits in several academic areas in her state's flagship university, and the son is working on doing the same.  And--I'm not making this up--the daughter reads Japanese books in the original language, which she taught herself.  She is also fluent in German, French and Spanish.  Of those languages, she received instruction from her mother only in French.


All right, you say.  Those kids are exceptional, and their mother is a teacher.  What about "normal" families?


Well, my home-schooled students come from a variety of backgrounds.  One was taught by parents who had only high-school diplomas and managed to get the state's permission to home-school their kids by claiming a religious exemption.  This student did missionary work with her family's church and, after that, worked with another organization that sent her to Africa to educate women about health issues.  I have rarely met a young person who was as confident in herself without being arrogant.  Other students recognized this quality in her and sought her out for advice about various dilemmas in their lives.


That student, and my friend's daughter and son, share a trait with other home-schooled students I've taught, and others I've met, and which I find conspicuously absent in most so-called educators:  a true passion for learning.  Almost no education administrator I've ever met, and very few teachers and professors I've encountered, know much of anything they didn't learn in a classroom.  Sometimes they haven't learned those things particularly well, or learned them so long ago that their knowledge is enbalmed rather than the living, organic energy that it must be if anyone is to actually learn, much less teach, it.


But the worst thing I've noticed about schools--and another thing of which home-schooled kids are noticeably free--is the disrespect educators instill in kids for people who are different from themselves, or at least different from what they've been taught to believe they are.  The schools do this by giving kids the message--or sometimes saying outright--that kids who are on the high academic track are "better" than those who are in vocational programs (if indeed those schools still have such programs).  And it just happens that in any school with a heterogeneous population, the kids in the programs designed to get them into prestigious colleges are whiter (or more Asian) and richer than the ones in the vocational or remedial tracks.  


Also, in too many schools (like the high school I attended), athletes are venerated while scholars toil away in obscurity.  And those who, for whatever reasons, can't earn a spot on the teams but who have the brute strength to tackle or hit someone and the rage to do it to anyone who happens to get in their way end up becoming the school's de facto "protectors."  (Everyone knows that most school security guards are a joke.)  Teachers almost never challenge this arrangement, and when some bully's offenses are egregious enough for a dean or assistant principal to notice, said bully gets nothing more than a token symbolic "punishment."


The result, as John Taylor Gatto put it, is that schools teach kids that they are either predators or prey and that if they are prey, they should just get used to it.  My friend, as you can imagine, wants no such fate for her kids.  On the other hand, any time I see a freshman (or even higher-level) class, I can already see that some of those young people have learned to relate to the world as an abused child relates to his or her parents, and others have become accustomed to doing as they please with no regard for the consequences.  In such an environment, I can usually spot a home-schooled kid.