A few people sent this *homeschooling* article to me and my wife this past week:
Confessions of a Home-Schooler
At the risk of gross generalization, there's a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don't much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don't experience the subject as a personal affront. Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.
As I say, I understand this a little bit better than I did at first. For one thing, I'm not sure any man can really grasp the competing and largely incompatible demands faced these days by American women, who are expected to be providers, power brokers, nurturers and sex symbols, either all at the same time or in rapid succession. Whether they're working-class or middle-class, most working mothers feel fundamentally torn between home and the workplace. They get shunted into mommy-track careers if they seem insufficiently devoted to their corporate overlords while getting grief from mothers-in-law for not spending enough time with the kids. They're doing the best they can and it's not that much fun, and the last thing they want to hear is somebody telling them, in effect, that they must have missed the latest memo on hip 21st-century motherhood: You're supposed to quit your job and spend your days reading your kids "Oliver Twist"! Home schooling is the new black!
Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it -- more formal, more "academic," reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year -- is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it's also one that's debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.
In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we're not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family -- two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan -- but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. As Alicia Bayer, a Minnesota home-schooler and blogger who's one of Leslie's online mentors, puts it, "People think we're all conservative Christians who hate the government and wear denim jumpers."
In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you'd call the truth.
Now I don't have much to say about this article as it certainly speaks for itself.
Though, to be fair, they've just kept their kids out of kindergarten. It's not like the author has homeschooled 10 kids over the past 20 years or anything. He says they aren't *hippies* but the impression I get is that they aren't really teaching the kids anything. They're just letting they *wander*, *play*, and *explore*.
That's hippy-esque in my book!
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