The Home School Alternative

I've written a great deal over the years about education, and although I am by profession a college teacher, I am profoundly concerned about how young children are taught in this country. After having struggled through elementary and secondary schooling for my own children, and using band-aid solutions to the problems I didn't know enough to figure out how to solve then, I finally (in the '80s) discovered William Morris. I'd already encountered the legendary John Holt, and had suggested to my teenage daughter that she simply drop out of school and we'd get educated together, but she was already too well ensconced in the American high school experience to want to leave her friends "behind."

For the most part, though, she'd made her own way, even in high school. She didn't participate in any organized extra-curricular activities that I can remember, preferring instead to get a job and take responsibility for her own economic education. After a disastrous first semester in college, she quit to work at data entry and took courses part-time at a junior colleges until she had begun to build a career as a crackerjack administrative assistant for a home-building company's information technology division, and then decided to earn a BFA in interior design. I'm immeasurably proud of her, because her choices were all hers--not those of a system which seems to be designed to turn out mediocre workers in a consumer society.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd have schooled both of my kids at home. Although there are alternatives available (such as Montessori, and both of my children went to Montessori schools during their pre-public school days), they're usually very expensive and frequently have waiting lists. And as more and more wealthy parents discover the richness of these curricula, the population of these schools becomes more and more uniform: upper middle class and monochromatic.

Home-schooling has become the refuge of strongly religious parents who fear the corrupting influences of popular culture on their children, and I can't say that I blame them. I drove by a high school this week, where youngsters were gathering for orientation outside of a gym, and quite frankly it looked like a convention of underage hookers and their pimps. The girls were barely dressed (it is, after all, summer in Texas), and the boys were tricked out in very expensive jeans and rock-star shirts. A fleeting memory of school uniforms made me sigh, and I drove on.

But uniforms aren't the answer either. They offer an egalitarian solution to economic disparity in some school populations--but it didn't work in the Catholic school I went to. We purchased the material for our uniforms and had them made--and rich girls had deeper pleats (that didn't fall out and look scruffy halfway through the day) because their parents could afford extra fabric, or better tailors. Uniforms also promote a vaguely military sensibility, and perhaps they do limit the development of imagination. However, the girls I saw in front of the high school were each wearing slightly different versions of the same "uniform" anyway: tight jeans, skimpy baby-doll tops and multiple underwear straps, set off by a small variety of shoulder bag styles.

The United States seems to possess an almost schizophrenic notion of childhood. Young children need to be both over-stimulated and over-protected. "Young adults" need to be initiated into consumer culture and visually sexualized, but must also stay chaste until marriage. No wonder so many people want to pull the plug on public education and seek an alternative.

The good news is that with the development of the internet and the proliferation of excellent educational websites, coupled with growing educational opportunities in public institutions, parents have a raft of resources available to them. It's quite possible for well-educated parents to develop their own curricula and augment them with informal classes in art museums and nature centers. Many regional museums have also developed educational websites with suggested activities and, occasionally online courses. Universities like MIT are making college courseware available online, and bright kids everywhere seem to be taking advantage of it.

Parents who are less well-prepared to create their own lessons can now take advantage of a multitude of curricula available through growing home-school networks and websites. Some of these have a decidedly limited framework, but many encourage the kind of wide-ranging exploration that highly creative parents seek.

Children who stay home also have time to engage in the most educational activity of all: reading. Combined with regular physical activity out of doors, such as nature hikes and gardening, home-schoolers can learn the way our ancestors did. Not constrained by standardized tests that stifle creativity, home-schoolers have the opportunity to learn art and music, to explore the nature of mathematics instead of engaging in the rote memorization of formulas. If kids don't have to spend half their day going to and from school and to and from classes within the school building, they can read, or learn about germinating seeds, or create a blog (!), or practice the piano--or choose from any number of activities that will educate them far better than sitting in a classroom with thirty other children, preparing for a high-stakes exam that will teach them exactly nothing except how to memorize information without having digested it properly first.

One of the main arguments against home-schooling is that kids won't get properly socialized. My response to that is socialized into what? Early sexualization? Rabid consumerism? Classism? Racism? Bullying?

In the nineteenth century, William Morris decried the institutionalism of British public (i.e. private) education, and the degeneration of boarding schools into "boy farms." We haven't come much further than that in our public schools, where kids are squeezed into patterns of expectation, and are "educated" primarily by their peers. Do we really want our country to be led eventually by a generation who spent their school years penned into a room with a single adult as a model? Why not teach our children by example? They can surely be better socialized by spending high-quality time interacting with intelligent adults, rather than letting their chums "teach" them about birds, bees, life, the universe, and everything.

My own childhood was hardly idyllic, but my fondest memories involve large amounts of time spent with my parents and their friends. Being taken to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Taipei for lunch, or accompanying a group of adults to a local lake for a day of swimming and conversation were common occurrences, and taught me that adults really do enjoy conversing with children who have grown up being treated like reasonable human beings. And when we weren't interacting with adults, my brother and I had the opportunity to explore our surroundings on our own; when we were really stumped for something to do, we'd put on elaborate plays and pretend to be everything from Arthurian knights to samurais to children in Enid Blyton stories. Of course, we could only do these things because we'd read the books that gave us the ideas in the first place. Perhaps the best part of our growing up is that we didn't have access to television until we were teenagers. Now, there's an idea . . . .

And so, for my friends Sheryl and Jenny, who have been or are beginning to home-school their children, you have my deepest admiration for your imagination and your courage. You give me hope when there frequently seems little to be hopeful about. And for you I'll continue to post information and resources on home schooling when I find them in my own unending search for ways to develop a truly humane (and human) way to help our children survive difficult times and craft a better future.

Image credits: James Tissot, "A Little Nimrod," and a little girl reading by Jessie Wilcox Smith, both from Wikimedia Commons.