I wish Ron Paul would stop giving homeschooling a bad name..

When my boys were at the end of 7th and 4th grades respectively, we decided to homeschool. I didn’t like the environment they were in. The older boy was in a junior high school that had become so violent that parents were staying at school in shifts to act as monitors. One little boy didn’t show up for his last class. He was in my son’s home room at the end of the day. The teacher finally went to look for him and found him in the commons area sitting on a bench, bloody and crying. It seems that six eighth grade boys surrounded him and beat the crap out of him. I refer to him as little, because he was smaller than many of the kids there.

In addition, the school had a policy of bathroom hall passes if a student needed to use the bathroom during class. You could get a pass ten times a year. The school was huge and if the kids had to go back to lockers to get more books or anything and had a class at the other end of the building, there wasn’t enough time to do all of that and not be late to class. So, my son was told to use up a bathroom pass if late or pay a quarter to the teacher, or pay a fine or push a broom at lunch when his ten passes were gone. 

Now, I found all this irritating. Mostly I found it irritating because my son didn’t tell me about any of this until he needed money to pay the teacher for being late to class. This was at the end of the school year. And then that funny E word kept coming out of my mouth. You know the one. Extortion. And yes, I used that word when speaking to the vice principal. So imagine my surprise when he retaliated by bringing my son into his office and reading him the riot act about reporting this to me. Then he demanded to know what teachers were doing this. So, my son told him exactly who took money from him and who didn’t. This resulted in his Science teacher accosting him in the hallway, yelling at him for telling that she did that when she didn’t. So, once again, my son had to be the adult in the room and carefully explained to her that he specifically said she did NOT do this.

Now, over at the grade school where my younger son attended, he was in the TAG program. That’s the Talented and Gifted program. My older son was apparently one point off on the testing, probably due to the cold he had that day, and was being watched for future inclusion in the program. (I didn’t know that until I spoke with the program director, because no one tells parents anything) So, he’s in the fourth grade, being taught by a kindergarten teacher. Yes, that mattered. She was opposed to TAG, even though the entire class was taught the same lessons. The TAG kids were just given separate assignments. So it had stopped being a pull out program. But she felt it was intrusive and preferred to treat the fourth graders as 5 year olds. Note to anyone who hasn’t spent time around gifted children: you don’t do that.

So when I asked the boys if they’d like to homeschool, they jumped at the idea. My oldest was relieved. My youngest was thrilled because he didn’t apparently like his chair at school. We didn’t do this because we were mad at the government. We didn’t do it because we wanted to have some fundamentalist religious curriculum. We just did it because I didn’t think they received the education they COULD receive, or be treated with the respect they deserved. Because my boys were always the students teachers wanted to have. They were nice kids. So no one was happy at the school district when we did this. It was a statement on their worth in their view. I guess in some ways that’s true. But I don’t think as Ron Paul does that parents are failures for sending their kids to public school. Not everyone can do what we did. Or should. The boys had good teachers for the most part when they attended public school. We live in a small town though, so I’m sure that had something to do with that. Parents were involved in their kids’ education. We just decided to try something different.

And it worked! The boys discovered interests and I was more of a facilitator than a teacher. We adopted mostly an unschooling approach, with some directed subjects that they would need to learn skills for college. Math was Saxon math. History was Zinn’s, A People’s History of the US along with Lies My Teacher Told Me. Okay, I’m a liberal hippie, and yes I disagree with Mitch Daniel’s attempt to eradicate the world of the works of Howard Zinn. I re-took Writing 121 and the boys used that as their writing curriculum. We read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. They both became interested in computers and the oldest ended up graduating from college with a dual math/computer science degree and the youngest graduated with a degree in computer engineering and a full minor in computer science. They both work in their chosen fields. 

The best thing about homeschooling is that your children will have the chance to explore their interests and develop their natural love of learning. They will understand that learning is not something that is done TO them, but BY them. It’s their responsibility to embrace education. And if nothing else, as long as they learn that, then it’s a complete success. My oldest started taking classes at the community college when he was fifteen. The youngest began attending classes at sixteen. They could do that under high school concurrent enrollment. My oldest was the only one to do that, however. They both took their GED tests at sixteen and either worked in the case of my oldest, or began attending college full time. By the time both were seventeen, they were in college full time.

One last thing. My boys are martial artists. We ran a kenpo school and they trained with us. I had no qualms about their ability to defend themselves should it become necessary while at school. One problem. The school district didn’t share my viewpoint. If either of them had been involved in any altercations, they would have been expelled and arrested. The martial arts part has nothing to do with that. It was just a policy of expel, arrest, and sort it out later. I didn’t like that. Here we were, training kids to defend themselves and at the one place they would likely experience an attack, they couldn’t use what they had learned. And I’m not just talking about my kids. I’m talking about all the kids we taught over the years. So you know, when I hear this ridiculous second amendment argument about needing to have assault weapons so that we preserve our freedom, I have to laugh. Or scream. How do you tell a child he or she cannot defend themselves? How can school policy not preserve the rights of the victim? What message to they really want to send here?

People homeschool for lots of reasons. Sometimes they do it for Ron Paul’s reasons. But to me, there’s a little brainwashing there. I view my kids as separate entities from me. They have their own views, their own needs. It wasn’t about me. It was about giving them what they needed, standing back, and watching the magic happen.

I cherish those years my boys were home. I witnessed what most parents never get to see. I witnessed first hand how my children learned and processed the world around them. You miss that when they’re at school. So believe me when I say, I am the luckiest mom ever.