Please pardon the hair. My girls are going through a phase where they love to pretend that they are the girls from Despicable Me. Paige calls herself Edith, Claire is "Ag-us" and Emma is "Margo! Margo! MARGO!" I don't think they actually know which girl is which on the show, and neither do I, but their play is adorable.
We get a lot of questions about our decision to homeschool. I hesitate to post about it too much on the blog because it's one of those topics that tend to make people really uncomfortable. But I want to share more, because it's a big part of our life, and I hope that sharing will help people understand it a little better. I'm certainly not trying to convince anyone to make the same decision, so please don't take it that way. I just hope that maybe it will help people to see the value and validity in such a decision for others and to dispel some of the weird ideas that people tend to assume are just part of the package. To give some reassurance that we've thought long and hard about this before jumping in, and to give y'all some hope that our children will be well adjusted adults. ;)
Today I was thinking again about the benefits of homeschool, and this post here from the Matt Walsh blog helped me to further explore some of my feelings. It's not a post about homeschooling at all. It's a blog response to a boy struggling with being bullied in school. I absolutely loved the response. He tells this boy,
Do you know why so many kids at your school don’t like you? Because you make them uncomfortable. You aren’t going with the program. You aren’t behaving like they think you should. You aren’t the sort of person they think you should be. You have passions, you are intelligent, you think more than you speak, you are thoughtful. Those traits will serve you well in the real world, but in the claustrophobic confines of public school — where mindless collectivism and groupthink reign supreme — they’ll cause you trouble. The only way you can really get the herd to “accept you” is to fall in line and join their stampede. I hope you don’t do that, Alex. You sound like a fascinating and awesome person, I’d hate to see you compromise even one ounce of your individuality for the sake of a bunch of insecure cows.
And then my favorite part comes here:
We put a ridiculous premium on “friends” in our society, as if we can measure a man by the number of acquaintances he has accumulated. What you’ll realize when you’re an aging, grizzled, world weary 27 year old like me, is that family is far more important than friends. We are only capable of having a limited number of close, meaningful, intimate human relationships. People who waste their quota on their peers at the expense of their family will regret it one day.
Thinking about this post, I realized is that at least for me, public school didn't teach me to form lasting, meaningful relationships. I have about two friends from school years that I try to keep in regular contact with. The rest are just facebook acquaintances. Yes, I do realize the value in having known and learned from others in younger years, but I do hope for my kids that quality will make up for quantity. I feel lucky to have been a part of the good friendships I had way back when. Because most of the time I felt so awkward. I was always hyper sensitive to what people must be thinking of me, and it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized they were all too busy thinking the same thing to care! I was painfully shy, but I didn't realize until it was pointed out to me years later that much of my shyness came off as aloofness. Many of my "friends" were actually friends of my friends. I didn't develop a real closeness to most of them. I realize that this is not the case for many people and that lots of adults have life-long meaningful friendships from public school. But for me it was a social rat race and I hated it. Simply putting children in large groups doesn't teach them to behave well, or form healthy relationships. Good parenting does that. I know there are many children lucky enough to have both the good parenting and good friends at school. For us, I feel that teaching our children how to love and respect each other, while keeping them in an environment where they feel loved and safe is the best way to help them really learn how to interact with others in the "real world." And for the record, public school is not at all like the "real world" in our minds.
I don't mean to say that we don't want our kids to have friends outside of our family. That is absolutely not the case. But especially in these younger years, I want friendships formed carefully, in environments where they can be guided and choose friends that actually have the same interests and values and not just because they happen to be stuck with them in the same room all day. To teach them what it really means to be a friend and how to cultivate that. We don't stay holed up in the house all day. We involve our children in sports, in church activities and I take them ev-er-y-where I go. They interact with real people of varying ages and backgrounds on a regular basis. But I want their first and greatest influence to be at home.
To the question of, "Aren't you worried your kids will be weird?" or the statement of, "I knew this one homeschool family and they were so weird!" my answer is emphatically, that I hope they will be! I want them to always stay as unique and special as they are now. I don't want them to learn how to behave like everyone else. What is becoming socially acceptable anymore is changing, and changing fast. I want my kids to think and learn and feel for themselves and not to please others.
Again, I know that fabulous parents everywhere are accomplishing the same goals we have while participating in the public school system, and I applaud you. Sincerely and from the heart. I hope that our differences can be appreciated, and that it can be acknowledged that different means can accomplish the same ends.
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