Your author is a compulsive writer who longs to build a passive solar Pagan monastery. I am mostly and overwhelmingly a mama. I coparent with the daddio, an author. We move junk around as a family for profit, living off the stuff other people throw out.
In addition to the four kids on the sidebar there, there's a grown-up one who is married. I try not to talk about him too much because he can correct me if I'm wrong. No, no, because he is an adult with dignity. That's it.
I heard you were unschooled.
I was twelve years old when my lack of motivation to earn decent grades inspired my dad to ask, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" He had me research what was required to become a teacher, my profession of choice.
Doing that, I found an article by New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto. I read his Six Lesson Schoolteacher with an interest I hadn't experienced since peeking at my fathers' college textbooks on child development.
I was feeling stifled, and that's what Gatto said the school system was designed to do. In my heart, I accepted his word as gospel. But I kept reading and researching. Gatto was on a booklist with John Holt. I read Holt's Teach Your Own, which taught me about unschooling. I subscribed to Growing Without Schooling magazine, back then a monthly chat group really, of answers and questions from and for unschoolers around the world. Soon I had decided I was never going back to school. Eventually, I convinced my flabbergasted father of the same.
In my new free time, I read every book about education I could get my hands on. Enthused by how this tiny bit of information on education had changed my life, I was now addicted to educational theory. I read about Steiner, Montessori, Piaget, Erikson, the Austrian government, ancient Greek skola, Druid saplings and the relatively modern Celtic hedge schools, Charlotte Mason and her PNEU schools, modern European gymnasiums, Dorothy Sayers (Susan Wise Bauer and Veritas Press hadn't emerged on the scene yet) and Raymond Moore's Formula. In the end, I took a little from each to end up with an ancient, classical idea of what a liberal education should be, and an idea of what good pedagogy looks like that can be labeled both tribal and modern.
Why do you homeschool your children now?
I homeschool because I believe that school is an artificial and contrived environment that isolates humans-in-training from the real world they need to mess around in to learn about. Six hours, five days a week, sequestered by age in a big concrete building? No way! That's just not natural, not healthy, not productive.
Besides that, we homeschool because we like being together, because we can adjust our methods and pace instantly, and because we can teach to our family's unique, specific goals. Also, cruelty abounds at our local schools. We learned from the Gamer's experience there that the only thing worse than seven-year-olds who act like teenagers is teachers and administrators that do.
Plus, we can't think of any good reason to send them to school. What could they have there that they couldn't have as homeschoolers? Independence from me? I'm not keeping them inside any locked doors. They're free range kids.
I feel confident that homeschooling is something we're going to do forever. Sometimes I toy with the idea of forming or joining a community of full-time scholars. But I remind myself that if we remove life we'll remove the best learning, and anyway I'm a lazy homebody introvert. So I drop the notion of how fun it'd be to join up with others who are passionate about pedagogy, and I get on with reading to the littlest on the porch with the breeze in our hair. You see, the closer we draw to the core of what is essential to life, the further away schools get pushed from us. Hear that carefully; I said, what is essential to life. For, if anyone were to ask me the meaning of life, it'd sound a lot like why we homeschool. Picture this: a woman pushing a child on a swing, a breeze blowing leaves down on them while they sing in rhythm and harmony, another child laughing, "look at this bug!" and a man going to talk with him about it. . . or picture a child sprawled belly down on the grass, a book spread to the left of him, one to the right, two women working in soil nearby . . . . The meaning of life may be ineffable but it's in there, in learning through life. Once a community of scholars gets together, someone inevitably has to decide for someone else what their life will be all about, for the day or for the next few years and sadly sometimes for a whole childhood. That's too sad.
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