The past swooped over me yesterday, casting a shadow as it flapped its wings against my ear. It happened last night, when I clicked over to SF Gate and read the headline that California parents are in jeopardy of losing the right to homeschool their children. The Chronicle photo of Debby Schwarzer and her two sons reading books around their dining room table brought back a rush of memories.
I thought about all the mornings, year after year, that my brothers and sisters and I sat down around our round brown dining room table, surrounded by textbooks and #2 pencils. Debby calls her "school" Oak Hill Academy; we called ours Mason Hill Christian Academy. A lot of home schoolers use the word "academy" - there's something fierce about it.
Mason Hill Christian Academy began each school day with two pledges and a prayer: one pledge to the American flag, and one to the Christian flag.
I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands...
Day after day, I sat around that kitchen table, working through Geometry exercises, dreaming about wearing stylish clothes and having a group of girlfriends to giggle with. I dreamed of going to basketball games and cheering on my secret crush. Of having a locker. Of being asked to go to the prom. Of having a wry, witty homeroom teacher who wore a sweater vest and a scholarly-but-intriguing pair of spectacles. I doodled in the margins of the book, sighing, imagining the Real Life I should have been living.
I told my mother that I would never, ever perpetrate the horror that was homeschooling upon my children, if I ever had any, which I was sure I wouldn't, because I was already bouncing one sister on my hip and helping another into her coat, and I couldn't imagine that any torture could possibly be worse.
Then, I would have done cartwheels to hear that home schooling might be made illegal.
This many years later, I'm not quite so certain.
No: I didn't slip on a pair of rose-colored glasses along the way; those mornings at the kitchen table don't have a misty tint in the rear view mirror. Rather, I now see what I couldn't fathom then: that our entire educational system is broken. That programs like No Child Left Behind don't even begin to approach the travesty of near-adults graduating illiterate, of schools turning into battlegrounds.
That every schooling option, from home to private to public, comes with a unique set of risks, opportunities and advantages.
Such is the difference between me today and me as a teenager: things don't fit quite as neatly into the Good and Bad boxes that I was sure they did then. The concept of home schooling still has a certain tang to me, an unmistakable flavor of frustration and helplessness and angst, but I know now that my feelings aren't so much about where I learned the difference between sine and cosine, but rather a complex web of circumstances and interactions that is simply Life.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if our educational system could be re-imagined, if we could bring together bright minds from different disciplines to create a whole new approach to learning?
Until then, the grown-up me understands that this isn't the time to legislate one option in or out.
+ The Buzz from the Blogosphere
The war over homeschooling continues.
