It's Not the Homeschooling

Some of my close friends took their son out of school in December; both his parents work, one of them as an instructor at the University of Michigan, and he spends the two days each week that she has to be on campus with us. I usually pick him up in the mornings; it's about an hour each way, and I find the drive a pleasant chance to drink my coffee and listen to music, or think about stuff. I-96 to M-52 to Territorial: that's my me time.

This morning I was thinking about a long note I wrote on Facebook a few months ago, about how we homeschool. When I posted it, I knew that there would be at least a couple of people who would not be able to resist posting a comment or sending me an e-mail about "this one homeschooling family they know" and how wrong and neglectful and abusive they are, and how terribly their kids are turning out, and this is why they just don't support homeschooling. "I'm gonna de-friend anybody who writes me about that," I said to myself. And I did. I de-friended two people who were guilty of the "this one homeschooling family I know" fallacy.

I could counter with the "this one family I know with their kids in school" fallacy, but I don't think people would necessarily get my point. In my experience, people are more likely to blame the kids for not being able to accommodate themselves to the school, even in situations where it looks to me like school is, at least in part, the problem: a kid is too introverted to spend 30 hours a week in a busy classroom with no downtime and no privacy; a kid is expected to demonstrate competence in a very specific way that sets her up for failure, instead of being offered an alternative; active kids, perhaps especially boys, are expected to sit still for lessons despite recess times dwindling, down to zero in some places; kids who grasp the lessons quickly are expected to "learn to cope with boredom" (an old therapist of mine, an expert in child development, told me this as if it were a universal truth gifted kids just had to accept); a teacher is widely known to be bad at her job in some way, but it's the kids' responsibility to cope with that (and the parents' job to "just hope," as a friend of mine said to me recently, "that she'll have a better teacher next year.")

This is not an anti-school rant, though. It's about how quick people can be to blame homeschooling if something is going badly with your kids--or anybody's kids. School is so widely accepted that individual kids' problems with it are seen as just that: individual problems that ought to be addressed within the school system. But individual homeschooled kids' problems are seen as a problem of homeschooling per se, and sometimes as an indictment of homeschooling altogether. It reminds me of this great xkcd cartoon that so perfectly captures the "girls can't do math" problem: people in a minority are somehow seen to represent the entire minority.

The problem for homeschoolers--other than having to listen to people who want to tell you about this one family--is that we make this mistake, too. On the mailing lists I read, it's not uncommon for a parent to post about a problem their child is having, and wonder if maybe the kid would be better off in school, if maybe they've created this problem by homeschooling. Often it's an academic problem, like a kid reading below "grade level" or not knowing as much math as the parent thinks he ought to; sometimes it's behavioral, or boredom, or lack of motivation or excitement about things that used to be interesting.

Of course, they're asking this question on homeschooling, or unschooling, lists, so people usually don't think putting the kid in school is a good idea. Unschoolers actually have a saying for responding to these situations: "It's not the unschooling!" That is, whatever is going wrong is probably not being caused by homeschooling; there's no guarantee your kid in school would not have the same problem, and certainly no guarantee that putting her in school will fix it.

It's hard for me to think of any problems that might come up that wouldn't be exacerbated by the structure and expectations of school. For my own Eric, for instance, I can think of a couple of challenges we've had. One is that he really really does not like to be told what to do, and can be pretty inflexible once he's made up his mind. There have been rough stretches when he was younger during which we were having so much conflict between us that I sometimes thought, despairingly, that it might be better for him to be in school, if only so he and I could have a break from each other.

On the other hand, schools need kids to submit to authority if they are going to function. Eric hates being told what to do so much that I can only imagine, if he were in school full-time, that he would be "a discipline problem." (He does well in his groups at Quaker gatherings we attend, but they're much more active and less rigid than school, and it's only for a few days. And even so it takes a lot out of him.) I often lament our lack of a "control Eric" we could send to school, because not having a comparison makes any conclusions we make about Eric-in-school unscientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if the parallel-universe Eric who was sent to school had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder by now. Poor parallel-universe Eric; how he suffers. While the one in our universe--and our living room--thrives.

A favorite version of the This One Homeschool Family I Know fallacy is, "...and the kids are really weird." Well, I know a few weird homeschooled kids, too (and a lot more I'd call "quirky"), and my reaction when I meet them is not, "Wow, homeschooling really turned those kids weird." It's: "Thank God those kids are being homeschooled. Sending them to school would be like tossing a bleeding puppy into a tank of starving sharks." Some kids are just weird, and homeschooling can give them room to be weird while letting their wonderfulness show, too.

I've drifted a little bit. I meant this to be another post in my ongoing series on Advice To the New Homeschooler, and it turned into more of a rant than I intended. But there you go. I don't have time to make it perfect: I have to go put kitchen towels in the wash; and remind Noah he wanted to take a break from his video game and read for awhile this afternoon; and make sure nobody is starving; and swab down the bathroom real quick because oh-so-very-many-boys; and read up on some projects and games I want to try with the kids before too long; and have my afternoon snack and read a few more pages of The Thirteen-Gun Salute; and do the hand dishes, which I don't like to do so they pile up; and make some lists, because I love making lists.