September 03, 2003

Homeschooling

A recent article on MSNBC.com discussed the growing trend of parents home schooling their children. The article focused on a family that started homeschooling after the oldest daughter kept having problems in school and was diagnosed as having ADD. Now the daughter is doing fine and is off Ritalin.

About once a year or so, I notice some major media outlet doing an article on homeschooling. The basic format is always the same: "Here are these kids that are home schooled and doing great. They have friends, they are excelling at school subjects -- life is great." And then, always, there is a quote from some supposed 'expert' on the dangers of homeschooling -- almost always something about how homeschoolers will suffer without "proper" socialization.

The MSNBC article includes this quote from Ted Feinberg, assistant executive director for the National Association of School Psychologists: "Unless you’re going to keep your children in a bubble for the rest of their lives, you have to expose them to a world that isn’t always sweet and nurturing."

The quote, fairly typical for such an article, implies that a home schooled child will grow up to be a vulnerable, scared, wisp of a person, unable to deal with the harsh realities of a cold world.

Like me?

At the age of 5, I entered kindergarten in Knoxville, TN. I have generally pleasant memories of the experience. I liked the kids, and I liked the teacher. School work was not a problem for me. Thanks to my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all reading to me practically from the day of my birth, I could read before the first day I started school. Math was fun for me.

Over Christmas break, we moved to Mansfield, Ohio. School there was very different. I quickly learned that school could be a mean, uncaring place. The rules were rigid, and you did NOT want to break them. I turned six.

After a summer break, I went back to the same school for first grade. The teacher was new, but she was cut from the same mold as the teacher I had just left. I remember her explaining to mom that she had already been warned about one of the kids entering her class, and she was ready to deal with him. The kid was one of my best friends. She hadn’t even met him yet, and he already had no chance. She was very unimpressed with me for being friends with him.

This, I suppose, is what Feinberg believes is a helpful situation for children, one that will serve them well later in life.

My parents despaired at the changes coming over their son. I came home grumpy, snapping at my little sister for any infraction. Math was a thing to be hated. And, thanks to the emphasis the school placed on learning to read by phonics, I could no longer read at all. My mother frequently told the story of my reading the word “lotion”, a word I could have read successfully at age 5, as “lah-tee-on”.

Finally, my mother saw John Holt on the Phil Donahue talk show. Holt was an advocate for something called “homeschooling”. Mom was so taken with the idea that my parents decided to pull me out of the public school system over Christmas break.

The next time I enrolled in any kind of formal education was when I started college, twelve years later.

It took a while to undo some of the effects of my year in Mansfield’s schools. I was nine before I showed even the slightest interest in touching math again. Then, by the age of 11, I was asking my uncle to explain the ‘Integrate’ function on my calculator to me. I took a while to bounce back, but when I did, I came back in a hurry.

While my parents originally tried to make my experience close to "school at home", we soon settled into a method described as "unschooling". We didn't have a curriculum or set subjects that I needed to study. I studied the things that interested me, following the paths to diverse fields of knowledge. My interest in the solar system led to the math and phsyics of planetary orbits, and the history of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries. Reading about Galileo led to the history of the Catholic Church's influence on the sciences, and the repression of Galileo's discoveries.

We did, eventually, move to a city that had a much better school system. The original plan had been to put me back in school once that happened. But by then, homeschooling had proven to be so successful for me that my parents decided to keep doing it.

To this day, most of the time when someone finds out I was homeschooled, they invariable ask, “but did you have any friends?” I had lots of friends – of all ages. I was writing shareware computer software by the age of 14. That led to an introduction to someone living in Boston who would, a few years later, get me an internship with Apple Computer before I even started college. Closer to home, I was involved in the local community theater, doing tech work for plays that brought me in contact with people from age 5 – 50. I did volunteer work for the local public library and met people there. I met other homeschoolers my age across the country.

When I was being homeschooled, it was still very unusual. At the time, the laws in most states didn’t prohibit homeschooling, but nor did most of them allow it. Mom, ever cautious, decided that the best approach was to simply not tell most people we were homeschooled. People assumed I was in school, and we didn’t bother correcting them. Later, by the time my three younger siblings were school age, laws were being passed allowing homeschooling. At the same time, it was becoming much more popular. My younger siblings had numerous friends of their age, in the local community, that were also being homeschooled.

Was I not being socialized?

Feinberg and others, unable to point to real, concrete examples of problems with homeschooling, continue to draw on fear, uncertainty and doubt to make their case that there just must be something wrong with it – something dangerous and, conveniently, hard to quantify.

Homeschooling is clearly not for every family, and public schools are not always bad. My wife loved her time in the public school system – so much so that she became a teacher. For her, it was a wonderful experience.

But, just as homeschooling is not for everyone, nor is the public school system. Homeschooling worked miracles for me; the public school system was crushing me. It was through homeschooling that I learned to deal with the world – both the good and the bad in it. In the end, I think, I turned out OK.

Posted by Mike at September 3, 2003 08:45 AM