Homeschooling freed my son to be who he is.
Part of an EmbraceRace series on homeschooling & race.
According to the National Home Education Research Institute, about 2.3 million kids are homeschooled in the United States, as many as 1-in-3 of them kids of color. The 1-in-3 figure is smaller than the slightly more than half of K-12 students who are nonwhite, but, if close to accurate, still points to much greater racial and ethnic diversity in the homeschooled population than many of us suppose.
This much we know: the number of homeschoolers is growing and becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. We also know that many parents and guardians who choose to homeschool their kids of color do so, at least in part, for reasons related to race.
EmbraceRace asked a few such parents to take no more than 1,000 words to reflect on how their child’s (children’s) racial identity shaped either the decision to homeschool or how they homeschool.
These are their stories.
See also:
On Freedom and Space, by Maliha Balala
When School is Part of the Problem, by Ali Wicks-Lim.
Homeschooling my Black Son for Liberation, by Gillian Ashworth.
Homeschooling freed my son.
My son may not go to college — and that’s okay.
I recently blew someone’s mind when I said of my son, “Oh, we don’t know that he’ll choose to go to college.” I watched her face register the shock she tried to hide. Her own child, a recent high school graduate, was getting ready for school, following the usual path in our small and highly academic part of western Massachusetts. She stumbled over herself for a second, “reassuring” me that my son “might change his mind about all of it! You don’t know now!”
By now, I’m used to people being confused about the fact that two adults with graduate degrees would be open to a path without higher education for our son. It’s not the first time we have encountered this kind of thinking.
My son is Korean-American; my husband and I are both white. This means that we don’t always fit peoples’ expectations of a family unit. While this is frustrating, it’s no longer a surprise. What is a surprise to me is the fact that, in many ways, this has helped us to adjust to a life outside the educational mainstream for our son.
We spent nine torturous years trying traditional school. There were many reasons why things were so hard, but it was mainly because of my son’s powerful dedication to the things he’s passionate about, things that were often not part of a school curriculum. School was a study in patience, holding it together while spending seven hours every day feeling that he couldn’t be himself. He was angry and upset and failed to understand why he was being asked to participate in a system so contrary to who he was.
I can’t claim that our decision to homeschool was mainly about race but there were troubling instances of racism that helped fuel our decision to leave the school system. The most glaring was a homework sheet with racist images that had gone unnoticed before being distributed to the entire class.
And then, when my son was still in school, my mother and I planned a trip with him to Vietnam that required a week-long absence. The pushback from his teacher was strong, but I was equally forceful and said it was important for an Asian American kid being raised by white parents to spend some time in places, unlike his classroom, where people who looked more like him were in the majority. The teacher’s inability to recognize the value of that educational experience was frustrating at best, infuriating at most, and it helped to solidify our decision to choose home education.
That said, the primary reason we chose to homeschool was because we wanted our son’s education to reflect our values and beliefs as a family, and because we did not want our child to have to squeeze himself into a box that did not fit. I do believe that our experiences with being on the “outside” as a multiracial family made this decision easier than it might have been otherwise.
Now my son can be the learner he is, the caring, creative, enthusiastic individual he has always been, a passionate student of life.
We wanted educational opportunities that exposed our child to the world, helping him to find his place within it. From hearing the call to prayer each day on a family trip to Turkey to learning the history of the old mill district where he welds each week, from readying himself for a career as a first responder in his work as a junior firefighter to a mountaineering trip on Mt. Washington, he learns new things every day. He visits his grandmother in NYC, walking her neighborhood streets of Harlem, and dreams about a trip to Japan scheduled for next spring. His sense of the world is expansive and he is aware that there is life outside the bubble we live in.
He also has a strong and significant relationship with his welding mentor, a man of color who models for him a way of being in the world as a person of color, something my husband and I cannot claim expertise in and that he did not have in school.
The life experiences of his mentors and co-learners have meant that, for us, homeschooling has brought more diversity into our son’s life, whether with respect to race, age, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, or nationality. He meets, learns from, and teaches people of all kinds, enriching his life in a way we believe is preferable, for him, than the alternative of spending his days in classrooms filled only with other 9th graders, learning by prescription rather than by following his passions.
To be sure, our homeschooling experiences reflect our incredible privilege. The freedom to educate our son this way is one that most families do not have. At the same time, because of this education, he is more in touch with what it means to be a global citizen.
As a strong man of color, learning where he fits in the world and how others live and learn has increased his sensitivity to others. It has also magnified his lifelong desire to contribute to his community and the world in a way that has meaning for him, whether that includes college or not.
Our family will never “fit” with the expectations of others, but that fits us perfectly.
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