I have a couple significant disagreements (“questions” may be a better term) with this article, but there is a strong argument that this year has not been a good one for homeschooling.
As an irrational optimist I look at the folks who were close to choosing home education before government forced the Lockdown. The families who were most likely to join the ranks of educational freedom and the learning lifestyle are the ones who may have benefited from the unexpected push. Those families were already questioning the wisdom of allowing the State to control most of their children’s waking hours.
Most families in the school system are all in. They must be. However automatic the decision to place their children in the education system was, it remains a critical one that must be defended. Bringing all the assumptions of the school structure into one’s home is jarring. Couple those assumptions with unemployment, a perceived public health crisis, and nonstop negativity from the media, and the opportunities for any type of success are slim.
As for us, an “unstructured” (ugh, that is one problem I have in the piece) home-educating family, we are in a marginally advantageous position. Our learning lifestyle is built on flexibility, but relies on community. Museums, libraries, parks, gardens, art studios, concert and lecture halls, and private educational providers are not only the places we go to for learning, but, more importantly, the places full of the people we learn from. Security guards, docents, educational leaders, volunteers, other homeschoolers, and those who are living the lives my children might envision for themselves populate our learning lifestyle.
My sons regularly interact with people doing their jobs and sharing their experiences. The Lockdown cut off our most valuable learning resource: humans. The relationships we’ve established over six or seven years of home education continue to be the shining stars on our learning journey. I don’t know what it will do to my children’s brains to not be able to see the smiles of their museum and library friends when they walk in, to miss that surprised look when they shake someone’s presumption about the abilities of homeschoolers, or to struggle to understand an accent through a face mask. As I struggle to maintain relationships under rapidly-changing societal rules, I wonder how much damage is being done to our children.
This all came out a bit more dire than I had intended. We have had significant victories in our personal lives and the few relationships that we’ve been able to put work into. We’ve improved our physical health through diet and activity. I’ve deepened my spiritual practice and discovered the friends who will be steady in tough times.
We have made the best of our situation, but it remains that our freedoms have been limited and our world has gotten smaller. I continue to wrestle with those facts.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason