A few nights ago I told you about the self-defense class for women that I attended with dd13 and dd15. The martial arts studio that offered the class is owned by a homeschooling family who have been home educating for a long, long time – they decided to do it when their 22 year old son was an infant. Afterward the three of us hung around and chatted with the husband and wife, and later were joined by their college age daughter and friend.
Recently I’ve been feeling somewhat troubled by the changes I see in the homeschooling world that is paralleled in the Jewish world. Home education has gone from a choice made mostly by parents who have done a tremendous amount of thinking and considering, who are looking at the individual needs of their children with the focus on how to support individual strengths, who were willing to go against the current because of their strong belief in those principles – to growing numbers of those who look at it as a parallel academic choice, as just another way to do fulfill the scope and sequence. (Edited to add: that’s to say that there’s been an increase in families who are viewing home education in the latter light; however, the majority are definitely still in the former category.) To me, that’s a real loss of potential joy in learning and in family life that has always been inherent in homeschooling.
So because this has been on my mind lately, it was especially enjoyable spending so much time speaking to long-term homeschoolers who know exactly what trends I’m referring to, and find it equally of concern. So refreshing to speak to people who intuitively ‘get it’. We all started off talking together, and then we started having more than one conversation so the girls spoke to the wife and later on her 18 year old daughter while I spoke to the father. Finally after an hour we said goodbye – we could have kept talking lots longer.
When we got back in the car, the girls both strongly commented at how nice homeschoolers are. They really enjoyed the conversation with the mother and the college daughter, and commented on how unusual it is for them to be treated with that kind of respect or enjoyment by people older than them, but how common it is with people who have been homeschooling a long time. One went on to say, “There’s a difference between homeschoolers and people who homeschool. When people are homeschooling for a short time, they tend to be more similar to people who send their kids to school.” That was quite an interesting observation, and fairly accurate, too. (Edited to add that I’ll clarify what was meant in a different post since after reading this I realized it could seem to be a criticism of those homeschooling a short amount of time.)
In our discussion of homeschoolers, we were noting some subtle qualities found in those who have been homeschooling a long time that are really nice to experience. In general, homeschoolers tend to be accepting, interact with people of all ages comfortably, and are respectful of the differences. This is noticeable in social groupings with homeschoolers, where the differences in how the kids interact is so visibly different from the typical playground interactions that it’s quickly notable.
Something else that’s unique is how homeschooled kids enjoy one another regardless of age – I recently took four of my kids to a homeschoolers pick up sports session, where ds4 was able to play softball with ds7 and dd9 (they were on different teams, though). It’s so nice to see how there were kids ages 4 – 10 on these teams all having fun together (we also see this at our local homeschool gatherings – a mother new to homeschooling recently commented that she couldn’t believe that so many kids could be playing together without adult supervision, and no fighting, no yelling, no bullying!).
There are many positive qualities I’ve noticed in homeschoolers: their willingness to think about difficult issues and really act on their concerns rather than follow the crowd, the commitment to their childrens’ well-being, their intelligent and thoughtful approach to life in general. But in short, they’re really nice people to spend time with, and it seems the longer they homeschool, the nicer they get!
Avivah
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