In the midst of a writing project that already requires an insane amount of reading, I now find myself facing the awesome task of researching homeschooling. I didn’t plan on this, but almost overnight, I’m up to my eyeballs in it.
Although our son is only 4 and a half and won’t begin kindergarten for a year, it feels like I’m late to this game. That’s probably because the essay that lit my fire was written by a mom I know who indicated that she and her husband knew before their first child was born that they would home-school. Now, I’m thinking that we need to have our act together by May 2014 – the month our school district has sign-ups for kindergarten the following fall.
Oregon doesn’t mandate kindergarten, but we do feel that our son should be involved in some brand of formal “schooling” in a year, since he’s done so well in preschool, which he loves. So if he does not head to kindergarten in 2014, we should be connected with some community infrastructure in order to ensure his continued intellectual and social development. I know little about home schooling, but I do know that it doesn’t occur in the isolation of a single household, presided over exclusively by the parents -- a fate I would not wish upon anyone. Indeed, one of our goals is to afford him an opportunity to engage more fully with the world.
Part of the motivation stems from the former. What started as an effort to sharply limit his television time has offered a window into how his mind works. It’s not like he was watching a lot to start with (I kept it, more or less, at two hours or less daily) but now, with a lot of effort, I got him down to 60-90 minutes per week. Days will go by without him even asking to watch television. The result -- besides leaving me even more wiped out at the end of the day -- is that his reading time has dramatically expanded. That’s his initiative. His choice. And it’s now clear that this has had an immediate impact: After meticulously tracking his reading activity and observing his behavior for the last couple weeks, this is what I see: He is teaching himself to read.
This is not something we’ve pushed. Certainly, as a writer, I live in a house that is full of books. My wife and I are both readers, books and newspapers. We don’t require him to read. We don’t use it as a lever for good behavior – i.e., “You can watch "Bob the Builder" for 30 minutes if you read this book with me.” Conversely, books are never taken away as punishment, which is not true of toys. All I do is ask, two or three times a day: “Shall we read a story”? If the answer is yes, a book (or two, or three or four or five) comes out, and my theater training pays off as my "stage voice" switches on. Let me tell you, reading "Horton Hears a Who" is a serious workout. To do it right takes about 17 minutes. I've had short monologues that were easier.
If the answer is "no," which it sometimes is, I don’t press the issue. The choice to read is always allowed to be his choice.
Even so, he’s clearly into it. He wants to learn. And he is learning – and he’s doing it without me or anyone else trying to explain the bewildering phonics of the English language. I understand it well enough, but I don’t personally feel equipped to teach it in a responsible way.
So there’s that. Also, my wife and I agree that he is simply not going to benefit in a classroom that has a student-teacher ratio of 30-to-1 or higher. How could anyone?
For me, this is an extraordinarily complex issue. It’s a deeply personal decision, but it involves difficult political and historical questions that are bound up with a planetary ecological crisis and the crisis of capitalism, which is clearly exhausting itself. Even if one puts aside moral questions raised by a system that produces fabulous wealth for the few at the expense of the many, it is impossible to ignore what strikes me as the single most vexing contradiction: An economic system – participation in which the school system is ostensibly intended to prepare one for -- that requires endless growth to survive cannot continue on a planet with finite resources. It’s impossible by definition. This is not ideology. It’s math. It’s physics. It’s geography. It’s chemistry. It’s a reality we face – one that, in my view, responsible parents and teachers ought to prepare children for.
Because you don’t raise a child to exist in the world you grew up in, or to some extent, even the one they grow up in. You raise them to live, work and play in a world that doesn’t yet exist. Do our public schools do that? I am inclined to say that they don’t. I read the other day of a science textbook that gave a single, mealy-mouthed paragraph to global warming. It needs to be said: In the present climate of social and political reaction, one can hardly blame public schools for their failings. It's not entirely their fault. This issue alone is wildly complex and it’s not one I intend to address here.
On the other hand, I also believe that we are obliged to defend public schools against the reactionary tsunami of for-profit (usually) privatization, standardized testing, budget cuts and attacks on teachers. And that’s on top of the insane nonsense the Christian right is always trying to crowbar into public school curricula.
It is in that context that we are considering, with increasing urgency, the question of whether to home-school our child. Because that is, after all, what we are essentially doing already. And as evidenced by our 4-year-old’s remarkable advances with language development and reading, it seems to be working so far. So we may continue to do it, or we may opt for public schools with (obviously) plenty of involvement and support on our parts.
But I have a lot of questions.
Although our son is only 4 and a half and won’t begin kindergarten for a year, it feels like I’m late to this game. That’s probably because the essay that lit my fire was written by a mom I know who indicated that she and her husband knew before their first child was born that they would home-school. Now, I’m thinking that we need to have our act together by May 2014 – the month our school district has sign-ups for kindergarten the following fall.
Oregon doesn’t mandate kindergarten, but we do feel that our son should be involved in some brand of formal “schooling” in a year, since he’s done so well in preschool, which he loves. So if he does not head to kindergarten in 2014, we should be connected with some community infrastructure in order to ensure his continued intellectual and social development. I know little about home schooling, but I do know that it doesn’t occur in the isolation of a single household, presided over exclusively by the parents -- a fate I would not wish upon anyone. Indeed, one of our goals is to afford him an opportunity to engage more fully with the world.
Part of the motivation stems from the former. What started as an effort to sharply limit his television time has offered a window into how his mind works. It’s not like he was watching a lot to start with (I kept it, more or less, at two hours or less daily) but now, with a lot of effort, I got him down to 60-90 minutes per week. Days will go by without him even asking to watch television. The result -- besides leaving me even more wiped out at the end of the day -- is that his reading time has dramatically expanded. That’s his initiative. His choice. And it’s now clear that this has had an immediate impact: After meticulously tracking his reading activity and observing his behavior for the last couple weeks, this is what I see: He is teaching himself to read.
This is not something we’ve pushed. Certainly, as a writer, I live in a house that is full of books. My wife and I are both readers, books and newspapers. We don’t require him to read. We don’t use it as a lever for good behavior – i.e., “You can watch "Bob the Builder" for 30 minutes if you read this book with me.” Conversely, books are never taken away as punishment, which is not true of toys. All I do is ask, two or three times a day: “Shall we read a story”? If the answer is yes, a book (or two, or three or four or five) comes out, and my theater training pays off as my "stage voice" switches on. Let me tell you, reading "Horton Hears a Who" is a serious workout. To do it right takes about 17 minutes. I've had short monologues that were easier.
If the answer is "no," which it sometimes is, I don’t press the issue. The choice to read is always allowed to be his choice.
Even so, he’s clearly into it. He wants to learn. And he is learning – and he’s doing it without me or anyone else trying to explain the bewildering phonics of the English language. I understand it well enough, but I don’t personally feel equipped to teach it in a responsible way.
So there’s that. Also, my wife and I agree that he is simply not going to benefit in a classroom that has a student-teacher ratio of 30-to-1 or higher. How could anyone?
For me, this is an extraordinarily complex issue. It’s a deeply personal decision, but it involves difficult political and historical questions that are bound up with a planetary ecological crisis and the crisis of capitalism, which is clearly exhausting itself. Even if one puts aside moral questions raised by a system that produces fabulous wealth for the few at the expense of the many, it is impossible to ignore what strikes me as the single most vexing contradiction: An economic system – participation in which the school system is ostensibly intended to prepare one for -- that requires endless growth to survive cannot continue on a planet with finite resources. It’s impossible by definition. This is not ideology. It’s math. It’s physics. It’s geography. It’s chemistry. It’s a reality we face – one that, in my view, responsible parents and teachers ought to prepare children for.
Because you don’t raise a child to exist in the world you grew up in, or to some extent, even the one they grow up in. You raise them to live, work and play in a world that doesn’t yet exist. Do our public schools do that? I am inclined to say that they don’t. I read the other day of a science textbook that gave a single, mealy-mouthed paragraph to global warming. It needs to be said: In the present climate of social and political reaction, one can hardly blame public schools for their failings. It's not entirely their fault. This issue alone is wildly complex and it’s not one I intend to address here.
On the other hand, I also believe that we are obliged to defend public schools against the reactionary tsunami of for-profit (usually) privatization, standardized testing, budget cuts and attacks on teachers. And that’s on top of the insane nonsense the Christian right is always trying to crowbar into public school curricula.
It is in that context that we are considering, with increasing urgency, the question of whether to home-school our child. Because that is, after all, what we are essentially doing already. And as evidenced by our 4-year-old’s remarkable advances with language development and reading, it seems to be working so far. So we may continue to do it, or we may opt for public schools with (obviously) plenty of involvement and support on our parts.
But I have a lot of questions.
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