A Diagnosis

As soon as I learned that I was expecting a child I knew that I would home school. 

There were many reasons for making this decision.  At the time, the foremost reason was essentially that God had made me a mother, so there was no doubt that He wanted ME to raise my children.  As I saw it, there was no way that I could do that if I willingly sent my children away for six to eight hours a day, five days a week.  

My own experience with public school was the secondary reason, at that time, for making this choice.  As an intelligent young girl, I found myself quite bored with school, except for when I was playing and talking with other children who didn’t exactly share my parents’ moral values, or flirting with all the boys (yes, I was that girl).  By the time I was in high school, I had read all the required literature for my high school English classes on my own time outside of school, which essentially negated those classes for me and I was allowed to spend those hours in the library after completing all of the tests related to the reading material prior to class.  By the time I was a Jr. I had earned the credits required for graduating, so my Jr. year of school, with the exception of a science and English composition class, were spent in study hall or independent online advanced placement and college credit courses, which, in case you have trouble with the math, were only two real high school classes for the entire year.   Yet, when I requested early graduation, I was met with fierce opposition because they “didn’t want to set a precedent”.  Wow.  In fact, they refused me completely, but through meetings with the school board and asides with the Superintendent, I finally managed to convince them to let me go to college for my senior year as a “special student”.   Still enrolled in my high school, I attended college two states away, only returning to my school for graduation the following spring.  Naively, I had assumed that in college I would actually learn something instead of being "taught" a bunch of useless information and directed towards a preset thoughtline.

Admittedly, I was a geek.  I loved learning and deeply yearned to learn more about the things I was interested in knowing, I wanted to learn more about things I wanted to do and accomplish in life…but school gave me no time to learn!  In fact, the only thing that I clearly remember from my 11 years of public education is arguing with my teachers about why I had to learn things that I would never use, like imaginary numbers, and why our “social studies” classes were so ridiculously bent on bashing our Nation’s history and government (my teacher actually suggested that I read the book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” because he thought I would appreciate it—at least he was honest.  I remember arguing with my science teachers about why they shouldn’t be teaching evolution as fact and that the best answer I ever got was “because the curriculum says so”.  How telling.  I was fortunate to have two distinct experiences with science teachers, one who sent me to the principal’s office for making her look like an idiot on multiple occasions, and the other who only graded my tests based on the questions that I answered, as I refused to answer questions to which the “correct” answer conceded to evolutionary theory.  I also remember being told more than once to put away books that I was reading in class because they weren’t part of the course content (I was reading Hemingway or Steinbeck and finished with my work for the day every time this happened…).  In fact, most of the learning I did that stuck with me was what I learned outside of school, from reading things like the college textbooks that I would purchase at garage sales or used book stores here and there, or simply by observing life, or having real conversations with adults about life.

 

I did NOT want for my kids to experience any of that.  I wanted them to love learning as I did without the constant discouragement from the school system.  I didn’t want my kids to be spoon fed information their whole lives and never learn how to learn or think for themselves.  I didn’t want my kids to be taught lies that directly contradict my own firmly held beliefs.  I didn’t want for them to be influenced by kids who have been influenced by things that I would recommend all people avoid, regardless of their age…

As my children grew closer to school age, my priorities began to change and “sheltering” them became much higher on the list.  In the years since I was in school, our culture has become so much more degraded.  Values and philosophies that were once radical have become so pervasive  that they are now the common thought.  Homosexuality, feminism, broken families are all accepted and taught as “normal”, even glorified in books and on television and in the schools.  We don’t want to make Sally feel bad about her parents’ divorce, so let’s tell everyone that divorce is not only normal, but good.  Let’s have them read books about how happy mixed families can be, just never mind all that emotional pain and baggage that will potentially destroy Sally’s spirit and future.  I could go on forever about homosexuality and sex ed…but I won’t.  Back on point, kids today are just not the kind of kids I want influencing my children…as a result of their schooling, family life, the entertainment industry, little parental control and involvement, etc.  The world has become a scary place for children.

I also began to place more importance on the spiritual influences that I wanted my kids subjected to.  Their souls, I recognized, are so much more important than academics, and time spent on developing their relationships with God and others would never be time wasted, regardless of what their futures hold. 

But somehow, with all of the issues that I had with public schools and everything that I knew from my own experience, you’d think that when I began teaching my own children I would have created a “home school” that looked dramatically different than public school.  You’d think.  Yet the day my son turned five, I started ramping up for school, ordering a boxed curriculum that covered all the bases, complete with hours and hours worth of seat work, a great set of instructions for what and how to teach, when, where, and why…and when we began, my little boy was so excited! months later, he was miserable and I was stressed.  He began to dread “school” just like I did.  His energy level frustrated me, he was distracted on every side, in fact, I could see what looked like a little circus going on in his mind as he stared blankly at me while I lectured him on phonics and arithmetic, and I became the mean teacher hovering over him with threats of skipping recess if he didn’t complete his 90 problem speed drill in the next two minutes…all the while, missing the fact that while not in school, that little boy was reading books and absorbing every bit of information in them like a sponge.  Missing also the fact that he understood what he was taught the first time I taught it and didn’t NEED to do the same things over and over and over and over again!

I began to realize that I was giving my kid exactly what I wanted to avoid.  Somehow I had been infused with this philosophy of education that I hated!  How could this be?  Slowly, I began to experiment with new ideas, but the thought of doing something different was terrifying!  I’m not kidding…the anxiety that came with the idea of freedom from that boxed curriculum, and hours of seatwork, was ridiculous. 

I knew that I didn’t want that kind of bondage for my kids; I knew I wanted them to learn independently and to learn what they wanted to learn how they wanted to learn it…but something about that freedom was so difficult and scary for me.  

Now, almost five years later, and with three students instead of one, I still find myself drifting back to that box every once in a while, looking at it longingly as though there is comfort there—even though my memory and common sense tells me that it’s nothing but trouble!  I’m just like a kidnapped child, raised by her captor, who goes on to find freedom as an adult…the years of captivity were horrible, the kidnappers stripped me of what I should have experienced during my childhood, crippling my growth and potential, but now that’s all I know and somehow there is comfort in that!  

This is me shaking my head. 

Because I have what is known by psychologists as Stockholm syndrome.