Not Back to “School”: Notes on the 25 year long haul of educating people
“School” starts tomorrow at our house. This is our first year with only one student. Hannah is in her last year at Queen’s. Fitz is accruing hours towards his Captain’s license. Elisha is finishing his first two college classes and working furiously so that he can take off on his Gap Year, free as a bird, in another three weeks.
We are down to one child.
Is he a child if I have to look up to talk to him?
Over the summer he learned to drive a car, take off and land a plane (we won’t talk about learning to do stalls. Moms can’t talk about that, or watch) and he worked almost full time at his first job; I count all of those things as learning. But book work starts again tomorrow, and I got excited reviewing this year’s book list:
1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, the Picture of Dorian Grey, Frankenstein and Dracula, among others.
His electives are fun choices…
Decisive Battles of the History of the World (The Great Courses), Acting (Master Classes), Space Exploration, and Guitar. Of course the usual suspects too, Geometry, Composition, and Anatomy, are on deck this year.
He’s begging me to buy him a piano. He’s still flying (that’s a long term project). He’s on a basketball team. We’re going to Mexico for a month. He’s working.
Education is so much more than book work.
Book work is like the topwater, the part that gives you a little taste of the immense depth below the surface. The part that you look at for the overview, in the same way I eye Barrett’s Bay of a morning to get a sense of the possibilities for the day, or a lifetime. But it’s no less important for being only a tithe of the process.
I’m reading the book Educated — a memoir, by Tara Westover, right now… and… I’m horrified. All of the worst aspects of the anti-schooling movement dipped in a thick layer of religious fundamentalism, and probably mental illness, to be fair… but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know people on that spectrum. And that’s the thing that’s most disturbing. It’s making me think about education, the alternative ed movement, and the many options that exist for all of us. Options are a good thing. Mostly. When people are sane. I’m only halfway through the book.
And I’m reflecting on the educational choices we’ve made for our kids… from serious long term travel and worldschooling, to consciously developing a child centered, but parent directed, educational framework for them. It’s easy to get drawn to extremes where kids are concerned (parenting books suck), where education is concerned… it’s so important to “get it right” (whatever that means) that we’ll go to any lengths.
Last night, in a rare bit of luck, all five kidults were home for the evening.
Tony cooked a three pound roast, half a bag of potatoes and a raspberry pie to celebrate. Ez and Will did all the dishes. William almost always does the dishes.
- Then, two of them got out guitars, played and sang for a couple of hours.
- There was a lot of laughing.
- They talked about Hannah’s last first day of school at Queens… she made William take her picture that morning, like I always did then they were small.
- Fitz and his dad made plans to move the sailboat as far as Castleton, on the Hudson, next week. So that it will be out of the lake and the Erie Canal by the time his cruise ship job is done and he’s ready to push south for the winter.
- Elisha came in, dog tired from another long day of work and laughed at Hannah’s story of finally defeating some creature in some game that I can’t remember right now because of my concussion. (I googled it to help her. This made Elisha laugh more.)
I relished the evening, realizing that it might be the last until Christmas that we are all in the same room… and even that isn’t guaranteed.
So goes this stage of life, launching one piece of my life’s work after the other into the wild and wonder of the world.
Tony and I chuckled sideways in the kitchen, that, to this point, our parenting project has gone better than expected. Their educations included. And, from the beginning, we expected it to go well.
Right now, with three down and one to go, two self supporting and one getting there, with just one “child” left in my house, staring down our next to last year of our brand of education:
I will say this about the process thus far:
Caveat: We are talking about only MY four children, here… and OUR experience. There are lots of ways to get the job done. This is not a judgement on any process but our own. You do it your way.
I’m glad we didn’t send them to school, for our kids, it would have been a waste of their time.
Knowing WHY we weren’t sending them to school was pivotal: NOT because we were trying to “protect them” but SO they could have much more than a school could provide.
I’m extremely glad we traveled far and wide. This was perhaps the best “class” they took.
Reading aloud every day from pre-birth through, well… about two years ago, I guess, was essential and maybe “the key.”
Giving them as much freedom of self determination and direction as we could manage in a community of six is what has avoided “rebellion.”
Not having a TV in the house (but never banning it elsewhere) was a great choice.
Buying them a gaming system, once everyone’s character development was well in hand, was also a good choice (our youngest was 16 when this happened… they looked at me like: “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH OUR MOTHER??!” I just smiled and told them not to make me remind them to carry their weight in the community. They haven’t.)
Standing toe to toe and pushing hard on the character development issues was the right choice. Across the board. It wasn’t fun. For anyone. But it is the single greatest pay off in the kidults. Ask Ezra about that next time you meet him.
I often wondered if “making” my kids do things… like chores, copywork, math problems, practice music, and “walking with quiet feet” when they were angry… was the right thing to do. It was.
I often wondered if NOT “making” my kids do things… like wear shoes, play sports, or sit at the table for hours and hours “doing school” was the right thing to do. I don’t think it mattered, in the end.
Sitting down, near the beginning, and plotting the arc of what we hoped for over, what has turned into the 25 year, long haul of raising and educating them was probably the single most useful exercise.
Although I’ve done it five times, I still hate potty training and teaching people to read. If I could have outsourced both of those I would have.
Personal responsibility is every damned thing. For them, and for me.
Community minded thinking is a nail to pound.
Resiliency is built through risk taking and failure, analysis and trying again. Note to self: don’t do anything for them they can do themselves. Ever. But help with the analysis, always.
Balancing days between work-play-service has been a good thing to do.
We got lucky. Exceptionally lucky, on a million fronts. There’s no accounting for the value of luck in parenting or anything else.
I’m proud of their accomplishments, but they are theirs, not mine.
There are lots, and lots of ways to educate kids, and no one has the corner on the market, not the public schools, not the private schools, not the homeschoolers, not the unschoolers, not the worldschoolers. So don’t buy into the guilt that gets shoved down throats in heaping spoonfuls. Find a community with open hearts and minds who will love you and your kid, no matter what it looks like today, or this year, and just keep going.
That seems to be the key lesson: Just don’t give up. Keep going.
