homeschool

I Guess It Was Love: Andy’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, John Perivolaris.

Content warning: descriptions of self-injury, homophobia.

All of the strong memories I have of my mother include yelling. When I was eight, I was outside watching our bunny, and got distracted. I couldn’t find him. She screamed at me at the top of her lungs. He was fine, just a hop down the street, but I couldn’t forget her voice screaming my name in absolute fury over two pounds of fur.

When I was 14, I began to discover myself. But this led to a lot of bullying.

My real life friends thought I was a “disgusting homosexual.” My “fake” internet friends thought everything I did was for attention. Maybe it was. It’s not like I got any from anyone else.

We left on a trip to Texas, and I remember very clearly that I propped my only mirror up on a rather unstable surface for the week, thinking it would stay. During that week, my codependent best friend and I had a huge fight. I was heartbroken. When we got home, the mirror had fallen. Shards of glass were all over my carpet. I broke. I scrawled “bitch” into my leg in fire and glass and pain. I did it over and over, until it was deep and bleeding and full of glass pieces I dug out for months. A few days later, I realized it wouldn’t heal right. And so I went running to Mom. I guess I’ve always trusted her a bit more than I realized. I don’t know what I thought she would do, I just needed Mommy. I was broken and desperate.

She screamed at me. She screamed questions, why did I do this to myself, what was wrong with me, what kind of person was I. Didn’t I know I was created in God’s image? Why would I ever do that to myself?

All I remember is screaming.

After that, things only got worse. I tried over and over to kill myself, getting more and more frustrated when it didn’t work. Mom and Dad sent me to a therapist to pray the gay away, and a skin specialist to make the scars fade. Not that I really wanted them to.

Then they found out that I had put off my schoolwork for an entire year. Mom screamed at me.

All of the memories after that involve crying. I cried when I came out to some of my homeschool friends, Mom cried when she found out about my girlfriend. Mom cried when she learned that all of my college papers were signed “Andy.” Mom cried when she found out about my testosterone supplements. I guess I started getting better around then. I got my computer back, I started going to college classes, I got away from the “homeschool bubble” that perpetuated the Christianity around me.

Now I’m very comfortable with myself, and about to go off to college. I’m planning to become financially independent and begin HRT alongside my transgender boyfriend.

She’s probably going to scream at me.

I guess she thinks it’s the loving thing to do.

Bob Adelmann’s Deceptive Use of Homeschooling Statistics

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Bob Adelmann, YouTube screenshot.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on May 13, 2015 with the title “Can You Be More Deceptive? Homeschool Edition.”

I just came upon an article by Bob Adelmann of the New American discussing U.S. test scores as compared to those in other nations, and then arguing that homeschooling is the solution to U.S. underperformance. I bring it up because it is a really good example of the way some homeschooling parents use bad data and outright lies to argue that homeschooling is academically superior to other methods of instruction.

I was homeschooled from kindergarten through 12th grade. While there were some gaps, I got a pretty good education overall and went on to excel in college. As a homeschool alumna, there is nothing that bothers me more today than people using bad stats and deception to argue that homeschooling is better than public or private schooling when in fact there is no data that actually says this. Accuracy matters, people! Do we really need to lie to make homeschooling look better? Really? 

Okay, end rant. Let’s look at what the piece said:

The recent flurry of test results on how American students are faring in school has resulted in much commentary decrying their dismal performance compared to their international peers.

. . .

This prompted George Nethercutt, a former member of the House of Representatives, to declare that “Americans get an F in civics” in his article in The Hill last week. He asserted, “The findings showed broad failures. If policymakers don’t soon pay attention to such failures, the perpetuation of citizen understanding of the basic concepts of the American system will continue to be at risk.”

. . .

Nethercutt’s conclusion, with himself and his performance in the House as a prime example, is correct: Students with little or no understanding of their history will have little ability to steer the ship of state in a constitutional direction in the future.

That’s why the home-schooling movement is so vital to keeping that ship afloat and away from the shoals of authoritarianism. In another study (that Nethercutt failed to mention) from the DOE’s Educational Resources Information Center, homeschoolers are learning precisely the skills needed:

Homeschool student achievement test scores were exceptionally high. The median scores for every subtest at every grade were well above those of public … school students.

On average, homeschool students in grades one to four performed one grade level above their age-level peers on achievement tests….

Even with a conservative analysis of the data, the achievement levels of the homeschool students in the study were exceptional. Within each grade level and each skill area, the median scores for homeschool students fell between the 70th and 80th percentile of students nationwide….

For younger students, this is a one year lead. By the time homeschool students are in 8th grade, they are four years ahead of their public/private school counterparts. [Emphasis added.]

Nethercutt is a product of the public schools and traditional universities, and so is severely limited in his ability to see what’s really needed in education in America. That’s why his solution misses the mark when he suggests that “all states should adopt basic requirements for graduation.” No, George. States and the federal government should remove themselves from the educational process altogether and allow the home schooling movement to flourish and grow even more rapidly.

At this point you may be curious to which study Adelmann is referring. I was too! Adelmann says the study is “from the DOE’s Educational Resources Information Center” but does not provide its name or link to it. One wonders why.

It turns out that the Department of Education’s Educational Resources Information Center does not conduct research itself, it merely archives digests of existing research conducted by a variety of scholars in a sort of library to make it easier for researchers or policymakers to find information. The study in question is The Scholastic Achievement of Homeschooled Students, by Lawrence Rudner, published in 1999 and funded by a grant from the Home School Legal Defense Association. You can see a digest on ERIC here.

Portraying a study conducted independently from the Department of Education with money from the largest homeschool lobbying group in the country as though it is in fact an official study conducted by the Department of Education is incredibly deceptive. Adelmann doesn’t even give the reader a link where they can go to find out more about how the study is conducted. Given that linking is standard procedure, especially when quoting, I can’t help but see this as intentional deception.

And what does the study itself say? How was it conducted? You can read an overview at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. In sum, the study was conducted using a volunteer sample, and it does not correct for background factors. To quote the overview linked above:

Rudner’s study tells us essentially nothing about homeschooled high schoolers, children of color, poor children, unschoolers, children with poorly educated parents, children being raised by single parents or by parents who both work, abused or educationally neglected children, or disabled or special needs children. The higher-than-average standardized test scores earned by Rudner’s highly privileged group of homeschoolers are only what we would expect from a study where nearly all disadvantaged children are excluded.

Adelmann makes it sound like the study he is citing proves homeschooling superior to other methods of education, but in fact the study shows only that privileged homeschooled children tend to score well. That’s no surprise, but it’s also no solution for our education system, where the majority of U.S. schoolchildren now live in poverty.

But perhaps what’s most shocking about Adelmann’s use of the Rudner study is this statement by Rudner himself, at the end of his study:

These comparisons between home school students and students nationwide must be interpreted with a great deal of caution. This was not a controlled experiment. Students were not randomly assigned public, private or home schools. As a result, the reported achievement differences between groups do not control for background differences in the home school and general United States population and, more importantly, cannot be attributed to the type of school a child attends. This study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools. It should not be cited as evidence that our public schools are failing. It does not indicate that children will perform better academically if they are home schooled. The design of this study and the data do not warrant such claims. All the comparisons of home school students with the general population and with the private school population in this report fail to consider a myriad of differences between home school and public school students. We have no information as to what the achievement levels of home school students would be had they been enrolled in public or private schools. This study simply shows that those parents choosing to make a commitment to home schooling are able to provide a very successful academic environment. [emphasis added]

In other words, even Rudner himself did not claim that his study showed that homeschooling was superior to public or private schooling! In fact he insisted that his study did not show that! Rudner argued only that his study shows that homeschooling can work, not that it always does or that it works better than other methods of instruction. Indeed he explicitly stated that his study does not show that children will preform better if they are homeschooled.

In other words, not only did Adelmann act deceptively by portraying Rudner’s HSLDA-funded study as a government study, he used the study’s findings in a way that Rudner explicitly said they should not be used and to mean things Rudner explicitly stated they did not mean. If this isn’t gross deception, I don’t know what is. I am utterly disgusted.

How Christian Homeschool Leaders Have Addressed Domestic Violence Isn’t Ok

HA Editorial Team21 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Jeffrey.

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

While many homeschool leaders have dismal records in how they discuss and respond to child abuse, their lack of understanding abuse dynamics also extends to other forms of abuse. The following are examples of how homeschool leaders have failed tragically to understand the realities of domestic violence, or spousal abuse.

Michael Farris

The following excerpt is from HSLDA founder Michael Farris’s 1996 book How A Man Prepares His Daughters For Life. Farris has his patriarchal beliefs on full display in this book, including such passages as: “I am very supportive of the concept of the authority of fathers in their home…It’s important to be right…It is appropriate to simply say to your daughter, ‘Because I’m the dad, that’s why‘” (page 21); “a woman should be submissive to her husband” (page 96); and “husbands are ultimately responsible for family decisions” (page 101). He defends “a very traditional view about the role of women in churches” (page 27) and later explains that he means “a doctrinal position of male-only elders” (page 55).

But what stood out the most to me was the following 3 paragraphs with which Farris begins Chapter 5, “Guiding Your Daughter Toward Positive Friendships.” The tone-deafness, minimization, and victim-blaming Farris engages in regarding this very clear situation of domestic abuse — and the fact that he provided legal defense for a domestic abuser — goes to show that child abuse is not the only type of abuse Farris does not seem to take seriously. (For those unaware, a quarter-size bruise is a serious indicator of abuse, both for child abuse as well as domestic violence cases.) From page 77:

When I was a very young lawyer in Spokane, Washington, I was assigned to defend a case in which two professing Christians, “Steve” and “Lana,” were getting a divorce. Lana was seeking a divorce because of the advice of her “friends.” She and Steve, my client, got into an argument one evening and he grabbed her by the arm and squeezed. He left a bruise on her arm about the size of a quarter. He was ashamed of the action—as he should have been—and he apologized. But it was a far cry from the “battered-woman syndrome.” Lana was told by her friends, however, that she was a victim of wife abuse and she should seek a divorce. Believe it or not, she did.

A few weeks later her friends advised Lana that she should start dating, even though Steve was actively seeking to reconcile the marriage. One night when Lana was out on a date, their two-year old son fell behind the bunk bed and died from strangulation.

Lana knew what God expected of her regarding forgiveness and reconciliation, but she listened to her friends instead. She paid a terrible price for the wrong advice from the wrong kind of friends.

Bill Gothard

The following passage is from Bill Gothard’s 1979 Supplementary Alumni Book, Our Most Important Messages Grow Out of Our Greatest Weaknesses. Recovering Grace notes that, “Throughout the publication there are several self-contained Q&A boxes addressing common questions on divorce, such as ‘If two Christians marry and one persists in being unfaithful, does the other one have “Scriptural grounds” to get a divorce?’ (‘Answer: No.’) One Q&A appears to address domestic violence,” which is as follows:

QUESTION:

What if the wife is a victim of her husband’s hostility?

ANSWER:

There is no “victim” if we understand that we are called to suffer for righteousness. “For even hereunto were you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps.” 1 Peter 2:21 Christ was not a victim! He willingly gave His life for us. “By whose stripes you were healed…likewise you wives…” 1 Peter 2:24; 3:1 Christ’s life teaches us how to suffer.

James Dobson

The following passage is from James Dobson’s 1983 book Love Must Be Tough. The book claims to address “disrespect in marital relationships, describing its role in the drift toward divorce for millions of couples.” Dobson examines a number of potential marital conflicts, including (but not limited to) infidelity, substance abuse, domestic violence, and child abuse.

Chapter Thirteen of the book is “Loving Toughness in Other Situations,” and it addresses the topic of spousal abuse. Dobson begins the chapter with a letter from a woman named Laura, who tells Dobson her husband has “a violent temper that is absolutely terrifying” and “beats me with his fists.” Laura then asks Dobson what she should do. “I’m so tired of being beaten,” she says, “and then having to stay home for days to hide my bruises” (p. 146-7).

Dobson begins by stressing that, for Christians, “Divorce is not the solution to this problem,” because “Our purpose should be to change her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage.” His solution is rather to have Laura directly agitate her husband: “I would suggest that Laura choose the most absurd demand her husband makes, and then refuse to consent to it. Let him rage if he must rage.” Dobson hopes this will shock the abusive husband into acknowledging “he has a severe problem” so that he will agree to “competent Christian counseling” that can lead to “reconciliation” (p. 148).

Not once does Dobson recommend calling the police.

After making this suggestion to agitate, Dobson then offers the following “qualification” to his advice (a “qualification” that is, mind you, longer than his actual advice to Laura). The emphases are in the original:

I have seen marital relationships where the woman deliberately “baited” her husband until he hit her. This is not true in most cases of domestic violence, but it does occur. Why, one may ask, would any woman want to be hit? Because females are just as capable of hatred and anger as males, and a woman can devastate a man by enticing him to strike her. It is a potent weapon. Once he has lost control and lashed out at his tormentor, she then sports undeniable evidence of his cruelty. She can show her wounds to her friends who gasp at the viciousness of that man. She can press charges against him in some cases and have him thrown in jail. She can embarrass him at his work or in the church. In short, by taking a beating, she instantly achieves a moral advantage in the eyes of neighbors, friends, and the law. It may even help her justify a divorce, or if one comes, to gain custody of her children. Remember what the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor did to American morale and unity? It solidified our forces and gave us a cause worth fighting for. There are those who believe President Roosevelt ignored warnings of the Pearl Harbor invasion for the precise purpose of unifying our resolve against a rising Japanese imperialism. In the same spirit, I have seen women belittle and berate their husbands until they set aflame with rage. Some wives are more verbal than their husbands and can win a war of words any day of the week. Finally, the men reach a point of such frustration that they explode, doing precisely what their wives were begging them to do in the first place.

I remember one woman who came to church with a huge black eye contributed by her husband. She walked to the front of the auditorium before a crowd of five hundred people and made a routine announcement about an upcoming event. Everyone in attendance was thinking about her eye and the cad who did this to her. That was precisely what she wanted. I happened to know that her noncommunicative husband had been verbally antagonized by his wife until he finally gave her the prize she sought. Then she brought it to church to show it off. It does happen. (p. 149-50)

Love Must Be Tough has been reprinted numerous times and this passage remains. The most recent reprint was 2007 and the passage is still there, unchanged

Michael and Debi Pearl

The following passage is from Michael and Debi Pearl’s 2004 book Created To Be His Helpmeet, as reprinted in 2012. It is under the section “Enduring Suffering Wrongly,” in which Michael Pearl argues that “the Bible is so clear” that “we are commanded to submit to every ordinance of the government that we are under—even to ignorant and foolish men.” Pearl first argues that even if slavemasters cause their slaves “unjust suffering and grief,” slaves must “endure it, and take it patiently.” Pearl justifies this by saying that, “It is acceptable with God (God’s will) for the underling to suffer wrongfully and take it patiently” (262-3). Pearl then applies this principle to a woman being threatened by her abusive husband:

Has your husband revile you and threatened you? You are exhorted to respond as Jesus did. When he was reviled and threatened, he suffered by committing himself to a higher judge who is righteous. You must commit yourself to the one who placed you under your husband’s command. Your husband will answer to God, and you must answer to God for how your respond to your husband, even when he causes you to suffer. (p. 263)

Debi Pearl demonstrates this principle in action when she writes about a young woman named Sunny. Sunny faced a horrific situation of domestic violence:

[Sunny] was soon pregnant with their first child, and in a matter of weeks, the violence began. Over the next seven years, Sunny was regularly subjected to his alcoholic rages and beatings, and she endured his flaunted unfaithfulness… When Sunny was pregnant with their third baby, Ahmed came home drunk and tried to kill her with a butcher knife. (p. 132)

Debi Pearl never suggests to Sunny that law enforcement be called, nor does she even suggest that Sunny approach her church’s leadership. Debi also never condemns Ahmed and his actions. Rather, she exhorts Sunny to “stay with him and begin a campaign of winning his heart” by ceasing to “blab about his sins” and begin to “reverence him” because that is “God’s will” (p. 133).

Mary Pride

The following passage is from the 2010 “25th Anniversary Edition” of Mary Pride’s seminal book The Way Home: Beyond Feminism Back to Reality, originally published in 1985. The emphases are in original:

The reason the church is getting lax about divorce is that we no longer understand marriage. If a spouse has problems, such as drunkenness or fits of temper, the other one concludes it is not a “good” marriage and moves on. Those who take this perspective end up allowing divorce “for any and every reason,” just as the Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ day. Jesus answered the Pharisees that destruction of any God-ordained marriage is always wrong… Only adultery, which breaks the partnership by pouring its resources into a spiritually fruitless extramarital union, as well as (in the case of an adulterous wife) jeopardizing the children’s legitimacy, and desertion, which nullifies the partnership, are biblical grounds for divorce… Christians may never, never, never divorce Christians. (p. 21-22)

Heidi St. John

The following image was posted by popular homeschool convention speaker Heidi St. John on her Facebook page, with the explanation that she “thought it would bring a smile today”:

rape-culture-fb

The image, the text of which St. John altered, comes from an old comic that depicts a chauvinistic man sexually assaulting his frigid boss (an action that leads to her marrying him). A close-up of the image makes clear the woman is terrified and crying:

screen-shot-2014-09-20-at-2-13-08-pm

Libby Anne does a great job of explaining the problem here:

The image is photoshopped from an old comic that depicts an employee sexually assaulting his “frigid” boss (see here and here or view the full comic here). Sure, one could try to argue that the image has been removed from that context, what with the new words in the bubbles and all, but that fails given the tear on the woman’s cheek and the fact that she is clearly trying to fight the man off (notice her pounding fists). Whatever the words, the image clearly depicts a woman futilely trying to fight off a stronger man’s advances. In fact, in the context St. John provides the image, it appears to be depicting attempted marital rape…

The trouble is that an image like this, in the Christian homeschooling community St. John is very much a part of, arrives in a context already influenced by writers like Debi Pearl and the teachings of Bill Gothard and others. These leaders explicitly teach that a wife should never say “no” to her husband’s sexual advances. These leaders do not recognize the existence of marital rape, because they see sex within marriage as the husband’s right.

Coming in this cultural context, St. John’s image is not “funny.” It’s a problem. 

It normalizes coercion and marital rape.

As demonstrated by the previous statements by Farris, Gothard, Dobson, the Pearls, and Pride, Libby Anne’s critique of St. John is spot-on. The biggest names in homeschooling have communicated truly shameful messages about domestic violence — messages that will only add further guilt to victims and make them feel trapped and unable to escape. It’s not a laughing matter, and it’s something that we all need to speak up about and push back against.

Note: if you are a victim of domestic violence or know someone who is, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or visit their website here. There is help available and you are worth it.

The Crushing Weight of Being First

HA Editorial Team5 Comments
Illustration by Kiery King.
Illustration by Kiery King.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kierstyn King’s blog Bridging the Gap.  It was originally published on January 15, 2015.

I graduated high school three years before my friends did. I was getting married at the same time they were getting their diplomas.

I felt the eyes of all the parents and their kids on me as I navigated the hell that was my courtship – even the families with kids in their 20’s hadn’t let them do much more than breathe around someone of the opposite gender. So I was 16, and everyone I knew and the few people I saw on a somewhat regular basis were watching, curious. I felt like I had a lot of live up to.

There was a lot of peer pressure to “do it right” as defined by Josh Harris and Amish courtship fiction.

It added a crushing weight that did so much damage.

I can’t put into words how utterly lonely it is to be the first, and then observed like a test subject, because your life skipped several grades and there wasn’t anything you could do about it, or anyone you could talk to, because there was no one else with a frame of reference for what you were going through.

Accelerating life is isolating and confusing – time is a blur and weird hangups are just waiting for you to sort out. All while you’re waiting for someone to catch up with you so you won’t be the only one anymore. It’s like being an oldest child forever, with no hope of finding people your age.

It gets really lonely, being the first in your group to pass life milestones. Really heavy knowing everyone’s eyes are on you and you’re an example for who knows how many people because that’s how the families you knew operated. It’s complicated knowing your parents are talking to other parents about you and your life as a warning, and justifying their response to your siblings.

I was the first in my group to go through the idea that our parents got wind of and excited about, I felt the heat of people’s eyes like lights on a stage, and I am the black sheep…..because I got tired and couldn’t be the example anymore.

It’s not worth it.

Technically, Nicole Naugler Is Not a Homeschool Mom

HA Editorial Team17 Comments

Photo from Blessed Little Homestead’s Facebook page.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on May 9, 2015.

Over the last few days, my social media pages have blow up with comments and articles about Joe and Nicole Naugler, an “off-grid” couple whose ten children were removed by CPS following the discovery that the family was living in tents and had inadequate heat, water, and sewage—a discovery that followed a standoff between Joe and one of the neighbors, in which Joe trespassed on a neighbor’s property in order to steal water, and then, when confronted, threatened to shoot said neighbor.

News articles about the removal tend to have titles like this:

Kentucky Police Seize Ten Children of Homeschooling Off-Grid Family, Arrest Pregnant Mother

BREAKING: Police Seize 10 Children From Homeschool Family Because They’re Off-Grid

Pregnant Homeschool Mom Assaulted by Sheriff as CPS Kidnaps Her Kids in Kentucky

Some homeschooling parents are posting article on the situation to HSLDA’s facebook page to try to get them involved, and I’ve seen scads of homeschooling parents defending the Nauglers as a good, honest, hard-working homeschooling family that just happens to have made different lifestyle choices from other families. If you want an honest look at the situation and what all is involved, see Kathryn Elizabeth’s post, Here Are 7 Surprising Things You Need to Know about Joe and Nicole Naugler. But there’s something slightly tangential that I want to touch on here.

Technically, Joe and Nicole Naugler are not homeschooling.

Yes, you read that right.

Kentucky does not require homeschooling parents to submit academic assessments of their children’s progress or keep portfolios of children’s educational materials, but the state does require homeschooling parents to file paperwork with the local school board, and the Nauglers have not done so.

Technically, the Naugler children are not being homeschooled—they’re truant.

Please don’t think I’m here to nitpick or to suggest that education cannot take place at home if the proper paperwork is not filed. I’m not. Because the Naugler’s self-identify as homeschoolers, I’m inclined to think of them as homescholers even though they’re not considered homeschoolers before the law. This blog post is absolutely not to say that we should reject the family’s identification as homeschoolers (though we absolutely should support them filing the paperwork to homeschool legally).

Why, then, am I bringing this up? Simply put, because it seems like every time a homeschooled child is horrifically abused or killed by his or her parents (such as the cases listed here), anti-oversight homeschooling parents disavow the family as not actually homeschooling. We saw this most recently after the deaths of Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry, who were in fact legally homeschooled regardless of what anti-oversight homeschooling parents claimed. There are other cases of horrific abuse where the parents claimed they are homeschooling but never filed the proper paperwork.  In these cases, homeschooling parents are quick to distance themselves and denounce the family as not actually homeschooling. I would understand this if it was consistent, but as the response to the Naugler family makes clear, it’s not.

Homeschooling parents have not (that I’ve seen) questioned Nicole Naugler’s self-identification as a homeschooling mother even though Nicole never filed the required paperwork and her children were therefore legally truant. But it goes further than this. I’ve been told that the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) accepts families as members even when they’re not following their state’s legal requirements for homeschooling. In other words, HSLDA accepts as members families that are not considered homeschoolers before the law, and are instead legally truant. But then, when horrific abuse comes to light in a family that claimed to be homeschooling but didn’t file the required paperwork, they’re suddenly not actually homeschoolers.

How is it not obvious how inconsistent this is? You either need to not consider any families that are legally truant as homeschoolers, regardless of whether they claim to be homeschooling—and that includes Nicole Naugler—or you need to count all families that are legally truant as homeschoolers if they claim to be so—even if they are revealed to have brutalized or murdered their children.

Here is how Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, run by the alumni-founded Coalition for Responsible Home Education, determines which cases to include in its database:

What is your criteria for including a child in the HIC database?

We include all school aged children (ages 5 to 17) who were the victims of severe or fatal abuse or neglect who were legally homeschooled or whose parents, guardians, or captors claimed to be homeschooling them at the time an incident occurred.

While not everyone may agree with their method of characterizing which children are and are not homeschooled, they do at least have a consistent standard. I’d like to see homeschooling parents who oppose oversight demonstrate the same consistency.

“Worse Than Any House I Saw on My Little Island”: A Homeschooled MK’s Thoughts on the Naugler Family

HA Editorial Team28 Comments
Our eating table. We're sitting on either buckets or the captains chairs. It was my birthday.
Our eating table. We’re sitting on either buckets or the captains chairs. It was my birthday.

Danica is a MK and homeschool alumni. She blogs at Ramblings of an Undercover TCK.

I came across an article about Joe and Nichole Naugler on my newsfeed today and clicked on it out of curiosity. As a quasi-homesteader myself (we live on ten acres, have chickens, and aim towards a self-sufficient lifestyle), who was also homeschooled and has homeschooled my own kids, I was interested to see for myself the ‘horrible living conditions’ mentioned in the article.

I was highly skeptical that the conditions were really all that bad.

See, my personal definition of ‘livable’ is very different from the average American’s definition of ‘livable’. This is because I grew up, not in America, but on a small Pacific island called Luaniua, in the Ontong Java atoll.  Do a search for it on Google Earth, and you’ll find my family’s little house still standing, just behind the church at the center of the village.

One of the village houses. Our village was kept pristine — no trash anywhere.
One of the village houses. Our village was kept pristine — no trash anywhere.

The house was tiny, only 900 square feet.  It stood five feet off of the ground on stilts, had mat walls woven from coconut fronds, and a corrugated tin roof which both housed our solar panels, and also funneled drinking water into our rain tank.  The floor was 2×4 timbers, each spaced about a centimeter apart.  This was helpful when sweeping, because food would fall through the cracks to the chickens waiting below, but also provided the village kids hours of entertainment by way of poking little sticks up through the cracks into our bare feet above.  The cracks also allowed mosquitos to come up into the house when the monsoon rains left puddles for them to propagate by the millions, so Dad used to pay us 25 cents a ‘line’ to Elmer’s glue strips of cardboard into the cracks.

The front door, accessible by steps made of more 2×4’s (everything in the house was built of 2×4’s, plywood, or mats), was rigged with a rope that stretched to a pulley under the eaves, then down to a heavy conch shell that pulled it shut with a slam whenever anyone went in or out.  The locals were convinced that we had affixed that conch shell as a tribute to our ancestors (it was at the front door of the house, and anyone who entered had to pass by it, so logically speaking it was there to protect the family, obviously), and wouldn’t be dissuaded no matter how many times we tried to tell them otherwise.  The front door opened into the veranda, which stretched across the entire front of the house.  Here is where we ate our meals together as a family, and also entertained people who stopped by.  It was a long but narrow room, so Dad rigged up the dinner table by attaching it to hinges to the wall.  At meal times, we’d lower it down.

After we were done eating, we’d raise it back up like a drawbridge, and you could access the whole room again.  We had two folding captain’s chairs and took turns sitting in those, while everyone else sat on 5 gallon buckets of rice or flour.  Mom cut squares out of plywood, padded them with some foam egg crate, then covered them with cloth.  These we used to lean against the wall, or put on the buckets as seats (5 gallon buckets can get really uncomfortable if you sit on just the lids for extended periods of time – plus, the lids wear out and the seats protected the lids from all that use).

My sister and I on the veranda grating coconut (and feeding the cat).
My sister and I on the veranda grating coconut (and feeding the cat).

Our little 900 square foot house was divided into thirds.  The front third was the veranda.  The middle third housed the kitchen and the girls’ room, side by side.  From the kitchen you could access the back third, which was the boys’ room and my parents’ room.  My sister’s and my room was barely wide enough to accommodate our two beds, which my dad built against opposite walls on lofts, with about three feet between them.  At the foot of my bed, was the wall of fiction books.  At the foot of my sister’s was the food safe.  Under our beds were our desks (built from more 2×4’s and plywood), and our ‘closets’, which were the shipping crates we had used to move all our stuff from America, to the island.

My two brothers slept in a bunk bed, with their clothes stored underneath in plastic containers.  One wall of their room was dedicated to our nonfiction books, including an entire set of encyclopedias and all of our school books.  Both of their desks were also in that room, and there was just enough room in their back corner for our solar powered fridge.  My parents’ room was mostly taken up with their bed (all of our beds consisted of 2 inch thick foam mattresses), with a desk on one side and another shipping-crate-turned-closet on the other.  The space under their bed was for storing boxes of canned goods, other supplies, and more buckets of flour, rice, oats, sugar, and powdered milk.

Me washing a pot on the beach.
Me washing a pot on the beach.

The kitchen had laminate counter-tops, made from the lids of the shipping crates that my mom had the foresight to have laminated back in America.  She cooked all our family meals on a single Bunsen burner.  We had a sink that was connected to the rain tank outside, which we didn’t use for washing dishes (that would have been a waste of precious drinking water).  The kitchen also had more storage for more 5 gallon buckets.  There was a chalk board taking up one entire wall.  Our ham radio was also in the kitchen.

No space was left unused.  The rafters above were lined with shelves, which housed more boxes of canned goods.  We came out to the village for several months at a time, and we had to bring enough food for our entire village stay, out with us.  Extra school supplies, toiletries, birthday presents, tampons, batteries, first aid supplies … whatever we’d need were stored up in those rafters.  Under the house, we had clothes lines, clothes washing station, and a dish washing station, as well as several more buckets for carrying water from the well, and a couple tubs for washing.

This was the house I grew up in, my home for seven years. This was normal for me.  

This is why I really don’t fret about cobwebs in my house here in America, or the sink faucet that doesn’t work unless you twist it just so, or my perpetually dirty floors, or the moths that dive bomb my light when I read at night.  It’s also why I was skeptical when I first read the article about the Nauglers.

Surely this was just a bunch of first world Americans complaining about first world problems.

Surely the Nauglers’ living conditions weren’t that bad.

We daily swept dirt out with coconut brooms. Here's me sweeping the path behind our house.
We daily swept dirt out with coconut brooms. Here’s me sweeping the path behind our house.

Then I clicked on the link to their Facebook page, showing pictures of their house.

The ‘house’ that the Nauglers live in with their ten children is worse than any house I saw on my little island.  It was even dirtier and more poorly kept than the grass huts most of the Islanders lived in.

And the Island huts had dirt floors!  

I have lived in what I feel are the sparsest of living conditions, but even a grass hut with an earthen floor can be kept clean.  And this was in the third world, on an island that had a ship visiting it only every four months or so, where there was little electricity and no vehicles, and everything had to be built literally by hand.

There is absolutely no excuse for a family who lives in America, where there is a Home Depot or Walmart within even a day’s driving distance, to live in such conditions.  

The Nauglers are deliberately depriving their children of running water, a warm home in the winter, and even their own beds to sleep in.  More than that, they are depriving their children of an understanding of how to function in the world they will eventually inhabit.  I had to learn how to use a microwave, how to cook on an electric stove, how to operate a washing machine, skills that most American kids learn young, I learned as a teenager.  I know from personal experience that the Naugler kids will have to learn all of this, not to mention the ‘hidden curriculum’ of how to relate to their peers who grew up in typical American homes.  Their parents are depriving them of physical comforts now and key skills they need for when they are adults.

This isn’t an issue of civil liberties.

It’s an issue of stubborn, close minded adherence to a way of living even our forefathers were working to rise out of.

Joe Naugler’s Oldest Son Alleges Physical, Sexual Abuse; Children Not Returned

HA Editorial Team23 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Joe and Nicole Naugler, the off-grid homeschooling family in Kentucky whose 10 children were taken away last week due to allegations of unsafe living conditions and truancy, attended a custody hearing today before a Breckinridge County judge. Kentucky Child Protective Services had placed the 10 children in foster care after the local authorities seized them. The seizure happened after local sheriff Todd Pate showed up at the Nauglers’ homesteading property to serve Joe with a summons for allegedly threatening his neighbor with a firearm. According to an emergency custody affidavit from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the family lives on property with only one makeshift shed and two makeshift tents.

As of 5:45 pm Pacific, the Nauglers have remained silent on their Facebook page as to the results of the hearing. However, local news agencies and a family representative report that the Naugler children will not be returned to their parents this week.

The most dramatic turn of events is that 19-year-old Alex Brow, Joe Naugler’s oldest son who lives out of state, showed up at the courtroom with Sheriff Pate and made a public statement. When Brow was 4 years old, he too was removed from his father’s care. Brow said he fears for the well-being of siblings because he personally experienced significant abuse from his father. According to WLKY, Brow said, “I am very worried about them and I hope that everything that can be done, that was done here, can help them move on and have a better life.” Brow alleged not only physical abuse, but also sexual abuse: “I got all the beatings. I got most of the mental abuse. There was a lot of sexual abuse towards me. We had a very dysfunctional relationship.”

HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, is allegedly assisting the Naugler family. HSLDA attorney TJ Schmidt spoke in defense of the family for a WorldNetDaily article and Michael Farris, Jr., HSLDA’s social media director and son of HSLDA founder Michael Farris, also expressed support.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 12, Joe and Nicole Naugler will return to court to face criminal charges.

Additional reading:

UPDATE, 05/11/2015, 6:12 pm Pacific: Joe Naugler issued a statement via their Facebook page claiming that CHFS “have confirmed, and confirmed again today that our children are happy, healthy and well cared for and that our property is sufficient for their needs.” Joe also said he was “heartbroken” over his oldest son’s testimony. An image of the statement is saved here or you can read the full text below:

We have allowed CHFS to inspect our property and interview our children multiple times. After every visit they have confirmed, and confirmed again today that our children are happy, healthy and well cared for and that our property is sufficient for their needs. Despite that, the judge decided as a result of the deliberations in today’s hearing that our children will remain in CHFS care while they continue their investigation. Alex, my 19-year-old estranged son, testified in today’s hearing. We are both heartbroken with the way Alex’s upbringing away from us and his strained relationship with his mother have affected him. Although we are sad our children will not be returned to us today, we have nothing to hide. We have cooperated with all requests made to us by CHFS and will continue to do so. We are confident that throughout this process Nicole and I will be shown to be the good parents that we are and that our family will be reunited. We thank everyone for all you have done for us and ask for continued prayers for our children. We want all our children to know that we love them and we are constantly with them in our hearts.

UPDATE, 05/12/2015, 1:35 pm Pacific: Joe and Nicole Naugler appeared in court again today (Tuesday) to face criminal charges. They each pleaded not guilty. Additionally, HSLDA today said in a WorldNetDaily article that they are no longer assisting the Naugler family.

Notes From a Homeschooler: Michelle Hill’s Story, Part Three

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Notes

You can follow Michelle Hill at her blog notesfromahomeschooler.blogspot.com

At best my mother is toxic, at her worst, she’s been emotionally abusive.  I’ve now come to realize that during my childhood, along with self-harm and restrictive eating, I also suffered from depression.

My parents are now more controlling than ever since I’ve moved away to college.

Not in the physical way, but in the worst possible way, though emotional control.  The guilt that they’ve put on me for not going home has led me to tears more times than I can count.  Nothing I do is good enough, and I always wonder “Why? What am I doing that’s so bad?”  I am an A student on scholarship, always find my own employment, never ask for money, just this year I filed my taxes by myself, I’ve also gotten help for my depression against their wishes.

Ah depression, the beginning of the end with my parents.  I saw the school’s counselor last September because something was wrong.  I was always mad at the world for everything, I was having problems adjusting to the new school year, and I had overwhelming anxiety.  I was diagnosed with moderate depression. After some research, I saw that it made sense that I did have depression all along, and I probably had it as a child.  After some research, I decided that I needed a strong emotional support base from family and friends. So I called my mother and told her the news.

 I was met with denial and her making me promise not to see a therapist and especially not to take any medications. 

She said, “Don’t go see those people. They don’t know you like me. Remember that one time you cried about getting a bad grade in government class, and I told you that it was going to be alright?  You’re just having a bad week. You just need to trust yourself.”  From that day on, I started hiding more and more things from them because I knew I wasn’t going to get any support.  I saw a therapist against their wishes; I started taking Prozac on a low dosage, and things started getting better emotionally – just not with my family.

Since then, I’ve had an emotional disconnect with my family.  They no longer feel like immediate family; they are more like the ones that you see once a year and you put on a happy face for.  Thanksgiving break ended with me self-harming myself for the first time in almost four years.  Christmas break ended in tears and me coming back to the dorms because I was happier being myself that with my family.

Before I left, I remember my dad telling/asking me if I was having one big pity party with the impression that my depression was all in my head and made up.

It still hurts today.  Spring break ended with me thinking about cutting them off and never going back again.  Easter weekend ended with a revelation that my parents are controlling and that I now need to look out for my own happiness and stop caring about what they think is best for me.

Now I just worry about my siblings that I left behind.

My little brother has dyslexia, though has never been tested because my mother is worried about the school investigating.  He is years behind and will probably never reach a level high enough to pass a GED let alone going to college.  They talk about him building a house on their property for him to live in and later take care of my parents in their old age.  I wonder if he will ever find a wife. I wonder if he is happy.  As of right now, he only has one friend and only leave the house once or twice a week to go into town with my mom shopping.  My little sister has Down syndrome.  I don’t know how she compares educationally because there’s no way to really compare.  My bright, sweet, little blonde-haired sister has no friends and hardly ever gets out.  She does not even attend a Sunday school.  Her socialization includes watching TV and seeing my brother play with his one friend he sees occasionally.  I wonder how she will turn out and it makes me deeply sad.  She is the only thing that keeps me from cutting off my parents completely.

I feel no love for my parents anymore, but her isolation makes me ache deep inside.

A Former Off-Grid, Homeschooled Child’s Thoughts on the Naugler Family

HA Editorial Team341 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Paul Jerry.

The following post is written by Gary. The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gary” is a pseudonym. Also by Gary on HA: “The Deep Drone of Unseen Cicadas” and “Hurts Me More Than You: Gary’s Story”.

To begin with I would like to state several things.

1. I do not know the Naugler family. I have never met them. All of the following observations are based solely from the information this family posted, publicly, on their blog and public Facebook page.

2. Much of the “information” being spread about the internet in regards to this family is clearly, factually incorrect. This can be seen through simple observation of posts on the family’s public Facebook page and blog.

Most of the information people are referencing is based only from the first few photos and/or posts on the family’s blog and Facebook page. For instance, the cover photo used in much of media coverage is clearly (based off the age of the youngest child featured) taken as much as two years ago. Another instance would be the “cabin”. When the family first moved to the property they did, indeed, have a cabin of sorts. In reality it was a small prefab home bought on credit. But this cabin was later returned. Where it stood is now a concrete slab, bare and seen in photos as a resting place for a heard of goats.

Since then the family has lived in a series of small open air shacks and tents — none of which even have 4 walls, windows, a solid floor, or a working door. This as well is clearly visible from photos publicly posted.

3. The dates of the photos posted on the family’s pages do not necessarily correlate to the date the photos were actually taken. Once again, this can be established by noting certain structures (or lack there of) on the land, the ages of the youngest children, and the time of year the photos were taken. Thus, no reliable timeline of any kind as to the health and welfare of the children, at the time they were taken, can be established by the online information. The most recent group photo I could find (once again based from the ages of the children) might have been taken as long ago as last fall.

4. The situation at the homestead, based off the photos and posts available, seems to be getting worse. There are several reasons for this, and they have to do with the effects of animals (goats, chickens, dogs, etc.) and human habitation on a spot of land. In the beginning the pond appears to be a real pond (turtles and fish are pictured), by the (apparently) latest photos, the pond has turned into a filthy mud pit devoid of most life. This is the natural consequence of animal dung running off the surrounding landscape with the rain and melting snow, the traffic of people, animals, etc.

This same trend can be seen in the yards and areas surrounding the shack. At first the dirt is held down by plant roots, but as the small trees were killed by the goats or chopped down to form fences, the dirt turned to mud. This mud gets mixed with the animal dung (goat, chicken and dog) and gets tracked by the bare feet of the children over every surface of the homestead. This state of affairs is clearly visible in the photos.

With this comes water from rain running straight off into the pond, carrying with it animal dung and any and all other forms of filth, from oil and gasoline from the generator, to cooking and food waste. This means that any photos taken at the beginning of this homestead experience simply can not be relied on to show the true living conditions of the current day.

We do see some photos of a shallow ditch covered by a few muddy boards, that was dug in an attempt to keep this filthy rain run off from flooding the shack.

5. These conditions will continue to get worse unless there are major and lasting changes to every aspect of the family’s food preparation area, sleeping area etc. The mud and run-off water will get worse as the hillside continues to break apart. The pond will become even worse of a health hazard as it fills with more animal dung and garbage. The structures, such as they are, will begin to mold and rot from the ground up. (This is, in fact, based off photos. It is already taking place).

6. I am not going to talk here about the family’s religious beliefs, their choice to un-school or homeschool their children, their practice of not providing their children with immunizations, Social Security numbers, or birth certificates.

All those issues are, in my opinion, secondary to the very real and pressing issues of the health and physical safety of these ten children.

Despite all the media coverage to the contrary, that does seem, based off all information available, to be the actual and factual reason the children were taken from their parents.

So without further ado, here is a bit of what is going on.

*****

My family is sick.. We never get sick, its been nearly 3 years since we have been sick…But I think the children ate some bad food. ~lesson learned, ask mom before you eat something.. 7 of 10 children down. Olivia, being the nurturing one that she is, is taking care of everyone with me. She is bringing water to them, making sure they are all cared for..She has been on top of it not missing a step even when I stopped to feed the baby. Quinten made up everyone’s spot.. .. ,,,,at least they like to sleep outside. ( true campers!) But no one is up for roasted marshmallows

-Direct quote from the “Blessed Little Homestead” Facebook page, posted on July 24th 2014

In the photo (which got over 20 likes) we see multiple children, dressed in dirty shorts, sprawled on mounds of blankets in the dirt around an open air fire pit.

They are obviously sick:

Food poisoning. Or was it? They, “the children” had eaten some unidentified “food” with out asking their mother if it was safe to eat.

Was it some of the wild mushrooms featured in many photos on the “Blessed Little Homestead” (BLH) Facebook page?

Was it rotting left over food sitting in any number of the unwashed and grime incrusted Tupperware and plastic containers lying scattered around the open air “kitchen” (really a stack of bricks filled with open flame and topped with rusty and filth incrusted wire racks)?

Was it Salmonella?

Let us see if this description matches some of the living environments seen on the BLH Facebook page.

Food: Contaminated eggs, poultry, meat, unpasteurized milk or juice, cheese, contaminated raw fruits and vegetables (alfalfa sprouts, melons), spices, and nuts

Animals and their environment: Particularly reptiles (snakes, turtles, lizards), amphibians (frogs), birds (baby chicks) and pet food and treats.

There are picture after picture after picture of small children, covered in grime, holding and handling:

  • Snakes.
  • Toads.
  • Baby Chicks.
  • Turtles.
  • The list goes on and on.

There is photo after photo of a “homestead” coated inches deep in mud, and with up to eight goats roughly a dozen chickens, two cats and seven dogs running loose around and in the shacks that serve as “home” for this family, one can know, with absolute mathematical certainty,  that this “mud” that coats everything form the children to the floors and walls in a persistent layer of grime, is at least in a significant part, animal dung.

So, was it Salmonella?

Was it E-Coli?

Was it poison mushrooms cooked up by an unknowing child in a grimy pot over an open fire? (The kids, after all, are shown doing the “cooking”, and the mother brags in several posts about how “the kids do almost all the cooking for the family.”

We don’t know. The mother doesn’t know either. And that’s a big problem when it comes to the health and safety of the 10 children living in filth and squalor in a 380 ft. three sided shack.

*****

But what makes you an expert you may ask?

Well.

I grew up in a similar environment.

My family bought 12 acres of land, 50 miles from the nearest town, in the North West back in 1982. We spent that first summer living in an army tent. During that first summer my father and mother and older brother built a 20 by 15 foot log cabin. That’s 300 square feet.

By snow fall we had a insulated, steel roofed, 300 square foot log home, it had a real cinderblock foundation, it had 3 double pained insulated windows, and it had a barrel stove.

We did not have electric, we did not have a well, we did not have indoor plumbing. Internet and cell phones did not exist in 1982. The nearest phone was at a neighbors home over three miles away. Then over the next 3 summers my father and mother built a 8 room, two story, glass windowed and hard wood floored, log home. It has a stone fireplace, a full basement, and a root cellar and a pantry.

They also built: an animal shed, a shop, a tool shed, and a woodshed.

During those years we became a working “homestead”, including 4 goats, two dozen chickens, geese, a small horse, a dog, 35 rabbits and two cats. We had a large garden as well. During none of this did we ever have: a well, a phone, air conditioning or refrigeration. We lit our home first with kerosene lamps and candles and then later with propane lanterns. We cooked our meals first on a wood stove, and later on a propane stove. We gathered our water from a local public well. (for drinking) and from a system of rain barrels, (for bathing and watering the garden.) After about 10 years we hooked up solar power and ran a system of electric lights.

We were (and my parents still are) “off the grid”:

  • 33 years with no well.
  • 33 years with no internet.
  • 33 years with no indoor plumbing.
  • 33 years with no eclectic grid hook up.
  • 33 years of gardening and eating wild game.
  • 33 years of gathering drinking water at a local public well.

All of us children were raised, from 1982 till 2013 when the youngest left home, in a true “homestead” environment.

We lived it.

I lived it.

For the first 18 years of my life.

I ran free in the woods, home schooled only 4 months out of the year, much of it self directed learning. I milked goats, I hunted wild game, I tilled that garden by hand, and toted water from rain barrels to water the plants. I was barefoot all summer long, from May to October. I fished in the river, at the age of 9, with no adult supervision.

It was, quite literal, “homestead” living.

It really was.

However.

We had a real house, insulated, enclosed on all 6 sides, and heated. We had a fully enclosed, 7 foot deep, ventilated outhouse, with a real toilet seat and a locking door located a sanitary distance form the house. We had bedrooms, with real beds and real mattresses, for the children, one for the girls, one for the boys, (bunk beds with your brothers can be great!) We had a bathtub. We were kept clean, very clean, by the constant work and insistence of my mother. Our farm animals were kept separate from our yard and our home by fences.

Even our yard was clean, swept with a push broom till it was smooth hard packed earth.

We were healthy.

Our meals were cooked in spotless pans and served on real ceramic plates at a real table, (solid oak, passed down from Grandpa). We had a “real” Homeschooling curriculum for all 12 grades (sure, it said electricity was a mystery and people road dinosaurs like horses just 4,000 years ago, but what can you do?)

The family of 12 (soon to be 13) living on the “Blessed Little Homestead” have none of those things.

I have been on their Facebook page.

I have looked through years of photographs.

I have read post after post, on the public Facebook page and on their public blog.

Their living conditions are among the worst I have ever seen. Ever.

My family was not the only one “homesteading” in this remote area of the Pacific North West. I knew over a dozen families living in nearly the same conditions as my self. That is: living on clean, well organized and maintained farms and homesteads, usually with out electric or plumbing, often home schooled, and deeply conservative. I knew a family living in a teepee for two years. I knew a small commune of three families living in a communal yurt. And I never, ever, saw living conditions even half as dangerous, anarchistic or filthy as what is shown on the “Blessed Little Homestead” site and Facebook page.

This family isn’t “homesteading”, they are, for all practical purposes, homeless.

This family does not have the cabin featured in some of the photographs, it was bought on credit and later “returned”.

This family was living, twelve deep, in a tree sided shack. The floor is covered in dirt and filth, the children are as well. The shack they sleep in is built from old pallets and two by fours. I won’t bore you with the details of structural integrity, but let’s just say that I am very surprised the shack did not collapse under last winters several feet of snow (photos of which are on the BLH public Facebook page) and kill or injure the 12 family members huddled inside.

(Note how the two by fours are driven, with out foundation, strait into the dirt, and how the load bearing single two by fours in the front of the shack are spaced 6 feet apart.)

I could go on for pages about the myriad dangers from accident and infection and disease these children were being exposed to on a daily basis. I could mention the animal dung covering the whole area in a layer of slime, pounded into a grimy coating by the bare feet of ten children, draining with the rain and melting snow, down hill from the “homestead” into the pond that has now, after several years of occupation, apparently gone from being home to fish and turtles (in earlier photos) to being a mud pit doubling as an open sewer choked with animal dung.

I could mention the generator and gasoline cans, (visible in several photos) located right next to the shack ( there is an extreme danger of carbon monoxide poisoning killing the entire family, in fact, the only reason I suspect this hasn’t happened yet is the fact the dwelling is not enclosed on all four sides).

I could mention the filthy conditions of the “cooking area”, including dirt encrusted plastic cups, drifting smoke and food being eaten by the grimy unwashed hands of children as young as 4 who cooked their own meals, over the open flames. (also clearly visible in photos on the B.L.H. public Facebook page.)

I could mention the photos of dog bites, wasp stings, scrapes, cuts, and bruises.

I could mention that the BLH blog links to articles about how Tetanus shots aren’t needed as long as the:  “wound bleeds, cus Tetanus can’t live in oxygen and there is oxygen in your blood”    (I kid you not).

I could mention the  fact that with out any doubt what so ever, this “homestead” also smells like an open sewer.

It does.

I know because I grew up on a farm/homestead.

I know because you simply can’t have 8 goats, 7 dogs, two cats, a dozen chickens and twelve people living loose around a muddy pond in the Kentucky summer heat with no running water and not have it smell so rancid that it could be smelled half a mile away.

It’s impossible.

This has been framed as a “off the grid” issue. It is not. “Off the grid” does not mean, by default: dangerous, filthy, ignorant of basic food preparation and safety, anti Government and anti documentation. “Off the Grid” living can be done safely, cleanly, and in full compliance with all local laws and regulations (in many states). I know. I lived it.

This has been framed as a homeschool issue.

It is not.

Kentucky has very open homeschooling laws. It’s legal. Heck, “un-schooling” is legal there too.

The children were taken because it was unsafe. VERY unsafe, not because they were homeschooled.

This, surprisingly, has not been overly framed as a religious issue, at least not yet.

But this isn’t about homeschooling, parents rights, “off the grid living” “government control”, “erosion of our right to do what we please” etc.

It isn’t.

It is about the fact that the conditions at this particular site, in this particular case, with this particular family, where absolutely horrifyingly dangerous, unsanitary, and unsafe on multiple levels. This isn’t hearsay or supposing.

This is clearly visible in dozens on dozens of posts and photos posted publicly by the family themselves.

Quite frankly, I am surprised all the children made it out alive.

Notes From a Homeschooler: Michelle Hill’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

Notes

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Michelle Hill’s blog Notes From A Homeschooler. It was originally published on January 20, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part One

My Homeschooling Story

I often wonder how homeschooling has shaped me, and who I would be if I didn’t have such an unusual upbringing. My roommate, Natasha, and I are very similar, almost creepy similar, and we’ve often wondered if this was due to us both being home-schooled in a very similar fashion. So in today’s post, I’ll go over my homeschool experience. In a later post, I will break it down and examine how I think it has shaped me. As a disclaimer, I would like to note that every family’s and every individual’s experience is unique and should be considered as that. My experience is unique to me, though you may have noticed homeschoolers, or even yourself, have had some similar experiences.

In my previous post I described the origins my family beginning homeschooling and why my mother had continued to teach us at home. I think that my parents had a different reason for each of their children. My older brother, Mark, was taken out of public school in fifth grade. Like many boys, he was extremely intelligent, but didn’t feel the need to apply himself. He also was falling into the wrong crowd and my mother was worried that he would end up in some sort of trouble.

So she took him out of school to take him away from the negative influences that are so prominent in today’s school system.

Her hopes were that she could get Mark to apply himself to his studies and eventually into a collage of some sort. It ended up well for Mark. He is now 24, has graduated from a tech school with a degree in Heavy-Diesel Mechanics. After a few job switches, he has now found a work place he enjoys where he is the shop foreman for a large trucking company.

My experience was a little bit different from Mark’s. I was taken out of school because I was failing English and writing. My mother was worried that if I stayed in school, I would fall even farther behind than I already was. As a side note, I would like to say that I am now an avid reader, like many homeschoolers, and place well ahead of my peers when it comes to reading comprehension (home-school.com).

Mark’s and my elementary days were dotted with school, playing outside together (we live in the country on 50 acres), and riding on the school bus that my mom drove every school morning and afternoon. I don’t remember much of the school work we did. My mother said I had hated spelling so much that I would cry after every test, so she stopped teaching me spelling. I know that my favorite subject was reading and I would spend hours in my room reading my favorite books at the time, Little House on the Prairie. My parents said I used to talk about her like she was one of my friends. Once a week, we would go to a local co-op of homeschoolers and take extracurricular classes, such as home ec. (Keepers of the Home), art, science experiments, and chess. That was our main form of socialization besides spending time with the other kids who rode on the bus my mom drove.

There was this type of social isolation that comes with homeschooling in a small town.

The town we lived in had one private school for elementary through middle school, and one public school for preschool through high school. My family was the only family in the town who homeschooled, and my parents’ decision to homeschool was frowned upon. One of our neighbors who lived a mile away was a retired school teacher. She would tell my mother that she was worried about our socialization and how we would function after we got out of high school. The point I’m trying to make is that living in a small town and home-schooling in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE felt more than a little isolating.

Middle school followed the same pattern of elementary school. The difference was that my mother no longer worked for the school and drove the bus, and now my little brother, Jason, had joined us in homeschooling. There was a brief span in 6th grade that I was convinced I would like to go to public school. So my mother enrolled me in the fall and I attended for two months. It was different for me than other school kids because my father was always complaining about the public school; how we wasted time switching from class to class; how they gave us busy work….

He had a very negative view of the school system which affected the way I felt about attending public school.

I would also come home from school to find out all the cool stuff my family was doing without me while I was gone. So when the opportunity came up for me to join a Christian homeschool basketball team, I took it. It was my excuse for giving up on the public school idea.

During 6th grade, I was on the basketball team and had twice a week early morning practices that took an hour to drive to. My brother was also on the boy’s basketball team, so his practices were after mine. I could say that I enjoyed being on the team, but I didn’t really. I enjoyed socializing with the other girls and families, but basketball was not my thing. Not to mention that we only won one game in the entire season. So it wasn’t a surprise to anyone that I didn’t return to basketball the next year.

During 7th and 8th grade, Mark stayed on the basketball team, so we continued the early morning practices twice a week. The founder of the team had also created a separate co-op that had weekly classes taught by certified instructors. We joined the co-op and I spent hours there after my one class, sign language. It was a big day for us because we would drive an hour away to go into the city for co-op classes, basketball practice, Elizabeth’s therapy, and the public library.

Then for the rest of the week, we mostly stayed at home only to emerge to make a trip into town for groceries.

I didn’t go to friends’ houses often because all of my friends lived in the city and it was a big ordeal to have to drive two hours there and back. If I did go, it was normally for an overnight sleepover.

For me, high school was full of turmoil. During my sophomore year, my mother had to pick up a part time job at a group home for residents with intellectual and physical disabilities. My mom started out working weekends, Friday 5pm – Sunday 5pm, and would be away for the entire weekend. Being the oldest daughter, it was up to me to cook dinner for the family because we always ate together at the family dinner table. I also had to make sure the house didn’t fall apart and become a disaster zone. I would spend my weekends washing dishes, mopping, and cleaning the bathroom. My father is not much of the parenting type, so I had to make sure that Elizabeth was taken care of, got baths, and had her teeth brushed before bed. During Winter break of my junior year, my mom’s work was short staffed and had asked her to work during the week in another house. She worked Sunday – Friday, 5pm – 9 am. However, she had already signed up for her weekends, so she also had to work the entire weekend too. For three weeks, I ran the house. I helped make the meal plans, cooked dinners, cleaned, and took care of my younger brother and sister. I didn’t go out very much because there would be nobody to watch Jason who was 10, and Elizabeth who was 5. It was a lonely time for me.

Looking back, I think I had become depressed, but didn’t know that there was a label for what I felt.

I had my times of restricting food, now I know it was because I craved control. I also had a two month time period when I felt so sad, lonely, and forgotten, that I would self-injure myself. It was not a happy time for me.

On top of this was my dad’s wild scheme that we could raise organic, free range chickens and sale the eggs to Whole Foods. Honestly, I try to block out the memories of having to feed and take care over a thousand birds using only manual (unpaid) labor. Not to mention cleaning the eggs every single night which would take hours and hours. I had no free time to visit friends because I had to run house and help with all those God Damn chickens. If you can’t tell, yes, I am very bitter about this, and never want to see another live chicken. Thankfully, after over a year of the chickens, my dad sold them and reduced the number to a more reasonable amount of twenty chickens for Jason to take care of.

Senior year was when I was my happiest during high-school. I had a part time job working at the same place as my mom, only in the money-raising greenhouse portion of it. I worked 4 days a week for roughly 5 – 8 hours a day. Then I would come home and do homework for my online dual credit college classes. I also attended a once a week co-op to learn Chemistry and Spanish. During my second semester as a senior, I took remedial math classes at the local junior college because I had huge holes in my math education. I had failed the placement test for math classes, and needed to get my score up before I would be attending any four year college. (I am glad to say that my math is now average and I can keep up with my peers at college.) For the first time, I had also had an actual boyfriend who I had met at my weekly classes.

I think senior year is the most socialization I ever had.

I had a part time job, dual credit classes, weekly home-school class, and a boyfriend who I could go on dates with. I thought things couldn’t get any better than that.

Sources:

http://www.home-school.com/news/homeschool-vs-public-school.php