Kathryn Brightbill

Crosspost: That Was Certainly Not Something I Expected To Be Controversial

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

Crosspost: That Was Certainly Not Something I Expected To Be Controversial

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kathryn Brightbill’s blog The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person. It was originally published on June 7, 2013.

When I wrote my post The One Thing You Should Never Ask a Homeschool Kid a few weeks ago, it didn’t cross my mind that it might generate controversy. It was basically just a rant about something that’s bugged me since I was really little, and since most homeschoolers I know have complained about random people quizzing them about homeschooling, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. “Don’t put homeschool kids on the spot to defend their education,” pretty simple, right? I figured that maybe a few people would see it and think twice before quizzing the homeschool kids they come across and some kids could be spared the general weird awkwardness of those encounters.

So yeah, turns out that I’m a bad judge of what’s controversial.

[The next] Tuesday my little rant was crossposted to Homeschoolers Anonymous. I assumed that the most it would get was a few former homeschoolers commiserating about how much we were annoyed by the questions while we were growing up. That’s the response I got when I posted my original blog post to my personal Facebook.

It seems, however, that some homeschool parents just really aren’t a fan of people saying anything negative about homeschooling—not even if parents are only mentioned in one line of a post that’s mostly about bad behavior by non-homeschooling adults. In my estimation, there should be nothing about saying that no six year old should be expected to explain homeschooling laws, history, and philosophy to adults that could cause defensiveness on the part of parents.

This leads me to ask the following question:

If I, someone who has repeatedly said that I had an overwhelmingly positive homeschooling experience, cannot talk about a negative that is more pet peeve than anything without getting push back from parents, when are homeschoolers ever going to be given the space to be honest about their childhoods? I wasn’t criticizing my parents with that post, I wasn’t criticizing other homeschool parents, I was criticizing the elements of the non-homeschooling public who lack appropriate boundaries in interacting with kids.

Are we only allowed to speak about our experiences if they are positive?

I can tell the positive stories.

I could talk about how when I was diagnosed with ADD as an adult, my doctor told me that homeschooling was probably the best thing for me because the smart quiet kid who stares out the window for hours yet still gets good grades usually falls through the cracks. Or I could write about the research that shows that it’s experiences in middle and high school that scare girls away from computer science and engineering, but that I never had anyone to tell me I wasn’t supposed to be good with computers until I’d gotten to college and already knew my capabilities. It would all be true, but it wouldn’t be the whole truth, and deliberately leaving out important information that would allow people to make informed decisions is an awful lot like lying.

The truth is that for as many good things as I can relate, defending homeschooling to strangers before I even lost all my baby teeth was not fun. Neither was spending a good chunk of my childhood and college years trying to make sure that no one would think I was one of those “weird homeschoolers.” Ditto for the pressure of knowing that people thought I was the model homeschool child (it’s impossible to even rebel when your options seem limited to finding some counter culture and possibly being seen as “weird”—what you’ve been trying to avoid, or else becoming the cliche of the goody two shoes who goes wild).

Do those negatives outweigh the positive for me? No. If I had to do my life over again and was given the choice of being homeschooled I’d probably go for it. That doesn’t mean those experiences and feelings weren’t very real and aren’t the reason why I’ve been reluctant for years to discuss anything one way or another about homeschooling.

When homeschooling parents discount the experiences of those of us who actually lived it and have found our way through to the other side as adults, they’re saying to us that we don’t matter. That it’s irrelevant that we were the guinea pigs, and because the results of the little experiment didn’t come out quite like they wanted they’d rather we just disappear.

If I can’t tell my story without generating controversy and flack from parents who don’t want to hear anything negative, then how are the people who had genuinely bad experiences going to be heard?

So again I ask, are we only allowed to speak if we tell you what you want to hear?

Crosspost: The One Thing You Should Never Ask A Homeschool Kid

HA Editorial Team35 Comments

Crosspost: The One Thing You Should Never Ask A Homeschool Kid

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kathryn Brightbill’s blog The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person. It was originally published on May 19, 2013.

The local paper does stories on all of the high school graduations, and where the stories for the other school graduations follow the same formula—mention something from the speaker, go with a few quotes from graduates about going out into the world, the homeschool support group graduation story includes quotes from kids talking up homeschooling as a concept.

Don’t ask that question of kids. Seriously, just don’t. No kid should be put in the position of defending and explaining their education to adults.

Aside from the fact that in 2013 it’s not like homeschooling is something nobody’s heard of, that’s just not something you should put on a kid. It’s too much pressure and it makes the kid feel even more like an outsider, an “other,” and not part of mainstream culture. Even if a kid had an absolutely wonderful experience, homeschool apologetic isn’t something a kid should be expected to do.

Parents, don’t ask this of your kids.

Random strangers, don’t put a kid on the spot and start asking questions. It’s not fair to the kid.

I had to put up with random strangers asking me questions about homeschooling since I was six.

Six.

Let that sink in for a second.

How in the world would anyone think that’s remotely something that you should put on a six year old? I can’t even count how many times I was wandering around the public library minding my own business looking for interesting books when I’d be stopped by a stranger asking me, “why aren’t you in school?” Now, granted, back in the ’80s, homeschooling was a novelty, but still. It would have been one thing if it had ended with me responding, “I’m homeschooled,” but nope, the next question was, “Is it legal?” Seriously, people would ask a little elementary schooler to explain the legality of their education. No six year old should ever have to cite statutes for any reason, but I spent a good chunk of my early school years explaining the legal status of homeschooling to adults who wouldn’t stop asking questions.

It took me a few years after I finished college before I could begin to look at homeschooling objectively because so many adults spent so many years putting me on the spot, asking me to defend it to them. I still don’t understand why an adult would ask that of a child, especially a very young child, but that’s what happened to me and my siblings. It would make me feel like I was some kind of performing freak show to them.

So next time you encounter a homeschool kid and feel tempted to ask them about homeschooling, resist the urge. No kid should be put on the spot to defend their entire system of education,

And thus ends Kathryn’s rant.

Guard Your Heart, Part Two: Kathryn E. Brightbill

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Kathryn Brightbill blogs at The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person.

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two

*****

Sometimes the hardest person to come out to is yourself.

After spending a few years post-college working as a wedding and gift registry consultant (turns out I liked studying computer science a lot more than doing it), I decided a change of course was in order, packed up everything and moved to Vietnam to teach for a year. I had a wonderful time and learned a lot about myself and also learned tons from the very talented and accomplished Vietnamese faculty at the university where I taught. Coming back to the US sent me into a tailspin of reverse culture shock and I spent a long few months feeling like I didn’t know which end was up or what ground was solid. During that time I found myself questioning all sorts of things as I tried to figure out what to do with myself and which direction was forward. It was during that time that I began to realize that it wasn’t just that I had been really good at guarding my heart, and that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t found the right guy, it’s that I never was attracted to guys in the first place.

When you’re the model homeschool child, “gay” is something that happens to other people. As a kid it was those people I’d see on TV marching, or who my parents’ religious right friends would rail against, but it’s certainly not the sort of thing that a good little homeschooled church kid would consider to have anything to do with themselves. And it’s most definitely not the sort of thing that even crossed my mind as something to consider as an answer to make sense of things in my life as I was growing up.

In retrospect, all sorts of things about my past make sense, from never having an answer when my sister would ask me who I had a crush on when I was little, to not being able come up with a guy I thought was hot when asked by my hall mates in college, oh, and the reason I watched xXx about six times in the theater my senior year of college wasn’t just because I liked the car chases (though the car chases didn’t hurt), and it certainly wasn’t Keanu Reeves who I was watching The Matrix for. But back then, I was so busy guarding my heart that I didn’t see any of that.

I won’t pretend that finally realizing and coming to terms with being gay was easy because it wasn’t. I knew that I needed to live honestly and that doing so meant that my life wouldn’t be quite the same as I’d envisioned for myself—staying in the closet was not an option I was willing to consider.

I’m fortunate though, in a number of ways. First, by the time I figured it out, I was out of the homeschool bubble. When I was growing up I was the model homeschool child. I don’t think my parents were ever aware of the pressure I felt I was under with other people telling their children to be like me—I never said anything about how kids would comment about what their parents had said about how brilliant my siblings and I were—but when you know that other people think your family is wonderful there’s pressure not to let them down. By the time my younger brother finished school, my parents were more than ready to hand any responsibility they still had off to others and to just be done with the whole homeschool world completely. While I didn’t feel it, there are a lot of queer former homeschoolers who do feel the pressure of what their coming out will do to their parents’ reputation within the homeschool community.

Second, by the time I realized I was gay, I’d already thought for years that LGBT people deserved full equal rights, and had concluded that the belief that it was a sin came from taking scripture massively out of context. For kids, homeschooled or not, who grow up in evangelical households, the sin issue is usually an enormously difficult thing to grapple with.

Ironically, perhaps, I feel like the other issues aside, my background as a homeschooler actually helped me. As mainstream as my family was, and as much as I worked to blend in with my surroundings so I wouldn’t stand out as the “weird homeschooler,” homeschooling—or at least homeschooling during the era I was homeschooled—at its core is a countercultural movement. Fundamental to any countercultural movement is a willingness to go against the mainstream, to stand out, to be different, and to question the dominant paradigm. By homeschooling, parents do not just teach their children academics or a particular set of theological or political beliefs or worldview, the very act of homeschooling is teaching children how to think and act counter-culturally. That’s not something that just gets turned off or erased when you graduate.

The recurring theme when I try to write about my homeschool experiences is the tension that exists between what is and what was supposed to be. Homeschooling was supposed to produce activists, and here I am, an activist, but I’m on the opposite side from where I was supposed to be. It was supposed to teach us how to learn and keep learning on our own, and it did. It’s just that I kept learning enough to learn how much of what homeschool “leaders” were saying wasn’t true. And homeschooling was supposed to produce young adults who could stand up for what they believe and who wouldn’t be buffeted about by external pressure. Well, here I am. I was taught not to care what society thought and I’m not going to suddenly start listening now or bending to external pressure when it comes to my sexual orientation.

I’m sure others in the homeschool world consider me to be a disappointment, wondering what went wrong because I’ve so clearly ventured off of the path that homeschooling was supposed to set me on. I don’t doubt that there are those who are trying to figure out what to do to avoid such an obvious failure as the increasing number of homeschoolers who are coming out must, in their minds, be. And, I am sure there are those—even some who are reading this piece—who are wondering what my parents did wrong, since homeschooling was supposed prevent people like me from happening.

I would argue, however, that my story is a homeschooling success story. The reason I’m here today, the person I am, is because of what my parents did right. I am the person I am today, with the internal fortitude to live my truth openly and honestly and to be my own person because of my experiences as a homeschooler. So what if that person is a politically liberal, openly gay, Christian, nerd with an activist streak a mile wide? The system worked. Just not in the way intended, and that’s a good thing.

End of series.

Guard Your Heart, Part One: Kathryn E. Brightbill

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

Kathryn Brightbill blogs at The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person.

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two

*****

It turns out that it’s easy to guard your heart when you’re not attracted to someone, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. To begin this story, we need to go back in time, back to when I was a homeschool kid growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Despite my parents running the private school for homeschoolers, and my mom finding herself spending far more time on the phone giving advice to new homeschoolers than she would have liked, and that one time that they wound up helping to put together a state-wide homeschool convention (something they vowed never to do again), my family wasn’t nearly as connected to the homeschooling subculture as many people. There really wasn’t that much of a homeschooling subculture when my parents started homeschooling, since back in the mid ‘80s there weren’t many homeschoolers.

Most of the national opportunities like debate weren’t around until I was done, or nearly done, with high school. Also, my mom didn’t particularly like hanging out with other homeschool moms and talking about each other’s children, and (with the exception of the aforementioned convention) avoided homeschool conventions like the plague. The parade of supermoms in denim jumpers and white sneakers who sewed all their own clothing, baked all their bread, and still found time to design grade-appropriate unit studies made her feel inadequate—after all, she didn’t do a single unit study in 18 years of homeschooling, hated denim jumpers, and especially wasn’t going to be sewing the aforementioned jumpers. That’s not to say I didn’t have more than my fair share of homeschooled friends, but they were mostly ones I knew from non-homeschool circles, and I never considered myself one of those homeschoolers. We were about as mainstream as they come.

I don’t remember where we first heard about courtship, just that somewhere along the line when I was in middle school it began to become fashionable even among the friends who were mainstream homeschoolers. These were not the people who made their daughters wear shapeless jumpers and wouldn’t let them cut their hair; they were the cool people with the latest clothes who educated their sons and daughters equally, and it all seemed so reasonable couched in the idea that it was all about waiting until you were done with college and had a career before pursuing a serious relationship. And didn’t it make sense? After all, when my parents met my dad had already finished his first master’s degree and my mom was 28, independent, and had even studied in the UK and traveled around Europe. What was the point of rushing into a series of relationships before you even had the chance to live?

This not being the 19th century, none of us knew how this whole courtship thing was supposed to work in the modern era, but then someone had given someone else some tapes from this guy who talked about courtship, and he went by the name Little Bear Wheeler, and, oh, you should listen to him because he might be a little out there but he’s entertaining. And so off my family, who hated homeschool conventions and avoided them like the plague, went to hear this Little Bear fellow speak. That’s how these things seem to work in the homeschool world and how normal families get pulled into extremism. You start out reasonably and the next thing you know you’re wearing your one and only denim skirt (because you instinctively knew that’s what you needed to do to blend in) and you’re listing to a guy cosplaying as a pilgrim who’s telling you that the Puritans didn’t date.

I don’t remember many details, it’s been nearly twenty years, but I do remember hearing, over and over, that you needed to, “guard your heart.” If you guard your heart, then you won’t give pieces of it away to the wrong guy. If you guard your heart, then you won’t have frivolous crushes on guys who would never be suitable mates. Guard your heart. Guard your heart. Guard your heart. If you’re really spiritual and godly, you’ll be able to guard your heart until the right season of your life.

It was a message that grew into a chorus in the homeschool circles I grew up in. Guard your heart, always and in every situation, guard your heart. By the time I neared the end of high school, the chorus had grown into a cacophony, as courtship went mainstream into evangelicalism with Josh Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” And by the time I made it to college, it seemed as though everyone had read it, and even if they called their relationships, “dating,” it was still operating on those general principles.

Through all of this, I patted myself on my back because I wasn’t getting any “frivolous” crushes on guys, and clearly this meant that I was super spiritual and doing a great job of guarding my heart. It turns out it had less to do with being super spiritual than it had to do with being super gay.

But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve never asked my parents about this, so I don’t know what they would have done if one of us had wanted to date in high school, or what they would have said if we’d have read all of the courtship material, listened to the speakers, and announced that we thought it all bunk. My parents didn’t have a problem with me voicing an opinion that was different than theirs, and if I had objections to courtship back then, I suspect that I could have brought those up and we would have discussed it. Except that I didn’t have any objections because my siblings and I all bought into it. It didn’t matter that we were as mainstream as they come, that my sister and I both wanted educations and careers and had been taught we could be and do whatever we set our minds to, that my brothers didn’t want to marry someone who wasn’t their equal, we still bought into it. Their experiences and opinions are not my story to tell, other than to say that despite all buying into it, eventually we all decided that the whole courtship system was a problem.

By the time you make it through college you think that you know yourself. College is when you’re supposed to find yourself, after all. And so, even after I decided that courtship was bunk, I never stopped to consider that the reason I hadn’t met the right guy had anything to do with anything other than the fact that my hometown has a serious dearth of college educated, available men. Seriously, it’s quite literally one of the worst metropolitan areas in the country for a college educated single woman to find a guy with an education, and there are plenty of statistics to back that up. It was an easy excuse, especially considering that my sister spent plenty of time complaining about the demographics too. So easy an excuse, in fact, that it never crossed my mind that it was an excuse.

To be continued.

This Isn’t Just A Few Disgruntled People

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kathryn Brightbill’s blog The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person. It was originally published on May 9, 2013 with the title “HSLDA and Child Abuse.”

"HSLDA needs to see that this isn’t just a few disgruntled people but that the homeschool community as a whole believes that it’s time for them to do something about this."
“HSLDA needs to see that this isn’t just a few disgruntled people but that the homeschool community as a whole believes that it’s time for them to do something about this.”

I’ve made no secret that I don’t exactly have the most positive opinion about the Homeschool Legal Defense Association’s brand of religious fundamentalism but I never thought that HSLDA was covering for and protecting child abuse. For all of their scare tactics, and for as much as I think that a legal defense organization is unnecessary in a post-Tim Tebow world, I always assumed that the training-up-the-next-generation-of-culture-warriors aside, it really was just about keeping homeschooling legal. That if they were representing a family, it was because the family was wrongly accused.

I found out recently that I was completely wrong.

HSLDA is pursuing a course of action that is helping to protect child abusers while doing nothing to protect kids.

Blogger Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism, herself a K-12 homeschool graduate, has a series of posts exploring HSLDA and child abuse. It’s a long read but I encourage you to take your time to go read it all, it’s an informative series and it opened my eyes as to just how out there HSLDA really is on this.

Seriously, go read it, I’ll wait until you get back.

Have you read everything?

Good, let’s continue.

On Tuesday, HSLDA posted an indirect response to Libby Anne’s series by way of a message posted on their Facebook page. Their response is basically a bunch of buzzwords and denials that doesn’t address any of the actual allegations. Libby Anne responds here.

I had no idea about what HSLDA was really up to and my memories are filtered through the eyes of a homeschool kid reading the Court Report. I rather suspect that this is news to some of the people reading this as well. It makes me mad because this organization that I thought was there to protect homeschooling has ended up protecting abusers. They’d trot out the “success stories,” but they only ever care about the kids if the kids are making them look good. They don’t actually care about the safety and well-being of homeschooled kids, or if they do, their actions are an awfully funny way of showing it.

And here’s the thing.

The advice that HSLDA gives about not letting people into your home without a warrant, not talking without an attorney present, the whole nine yards, is absolutely the right legal advice that attorneys should be giving their clients. The question though, is why is HSLDA even getting involved in child abuse cases? Unless they think that parental rights and homeschooling include the right to lock your kid in a cage or beat, oh sorry, they call it spanking, your kid until you leave bruises and welts, just because a family homeschools shouldn’t mean that a child abuse investigation is automatically a homeschooling issue. HSLDA shouldn’t even be getting involved until the abuse investigation is resolved. And yet, when a friend sent me the link a few days ago to the story of a parents that beat their children until they broke bones and told me to, “prepare to raeg,” I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find out that HSLDA had represented the parents and claimed to World Net Daily that it was social workers persecuting a good Christian homeschool family.

Defending homeschooling should not mean defending abusers. That should be obvious, but apparently it’s not.

I would argue that if you really want to protect the ability to homeschool, making it clear that the homeschool community has a zero tolerance stance towards child abuse is the best way to do it. If HSLDA’s behavior in abuse cases ends up becoming synonymous in people’s minds with homeschooling, then any parent who decides to homeschool is going to be considered suspect. The best way to protect homeschooling is to stop covering for abuse and to make it clear that it will not be tolerated. Covering it up, denying, and stonewalling protects no one but abusers.

Because of this, I am joining with Homeschoolers Anonymous in saying that #HSLDAMustAct. HSLDA needs to stop covering for abusers, they need to acknowledge the problem, and they need to implement an education program to teach their members how to recognize abuse. Instead of instilling so much fear in families about child protective services that people are afraid to call, they need to educate families that abuse can happen in even “good Christian homeschool families” and that child protective services is there to protect kids in those circumstances.

It is high time for HSLDA to take proactive steps to combat abuse.

If you agree that HSLDA must act, add your name to the petition. HSLDA needs to see that this isn’t just a few disgruntled people but that the homeschool community as a whole believes that it’s time for them to do something about this. If you’re a homeschool parent, we especially need you to add your name to the list of people calling them to act. And while you’re at it, I’d strongly suggest considering cancelling your membership. If their complicity in abuse starts hitting them where it hurts—their pockets—they’re going to be more willing to act.

Staying Silent When I Know There Are Problems

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kathryn Brightbill’s blog The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person. It was originally published on April 29, 2013 with the title “Heads Up.”

"If I stay silent when I know there are problems, then I’m complicit in the silencing of other homeschool kids’ voices."
“If I stay silent when I know there are problems, then I’m complicit in the silencing of other homeschool kids’ voices.”

You may be asking why, when I’ve already gone on record that my homeschooling experience was largely positive, I’m contributing to a site that chronicles some of the problems that people have had with the homeschool subculture.

The reason is simple. Those of us who were homeschooled have all seen the problems and the abuses. If we’re honest, we know that those problems exist, even if they didn’t exist in our own families. Implicit in the insistence that we weren’t one of those homeschoolers is the acknowledgment that those homeschoolers exist. Those who are telling their stories of how that the subculture hurt them deserve to have those of us who know the truth acknowledge that their stories are real. That we heard the messages from national homeschool leaders as well. That we saw the same things they saw, even if we did not live them.

I could sit here and insist that because my experiences were largely positive that this is proof that homeschooling works and brush aside those stories, but that would be dishonest. Homeschooling can and does work, but it’s also true that well-meaning parents buy into a lot of the craziness because they just want to be the best homeschoolers they can be and they’re being told that this is the right way to do that. If those of us who know better present a vision of homeschooling that is nothing but positivity, we’re doing nothing to warn parents of those traps.

More importantly, in the discussion about homeschooling, those of us who were homeschooled have a right to be heard. Too much of the talk about homeschooling comes from parents, or it comes from kids who are still in the bubble repeating what their parents have told them, while those of us who have graduated and are out in the real world are only given a voice if that voice is repeating the talking points about homeschooling’s wonderfulness. The moment an actual homeschooled kid speaks up about problems, people try to silence it. Homeschool parents insist that, “not all homeschoolers are like that.” Homeschool leaders insist that anyone with a problem was doing it wrong (even though most of the problems come from following their lead). The Christian media that sings the praises of homeschooling and is quick to publish when a homeschool graduate has something good to say, goes silent. The voices of the people who matter most in homeschooling—the kids—aren’t heard. If I stay silent when I know there are problems, then I’m complicit in the silencing of other homeschool kids’ voices.

Not only that, but when I talk about how I had a positive experience and how I consider myself to be a homeschooling success story, it would be lying of me to leave out that as much as I consider myself a success story, I know full well that the homeschool subculture doesn’t see it that way. The way that the conservative homeschooling subculture is sold to parents is that if you do everything right and follow all the steps, your kids will grow up to believe exactly the same things as you do and to continue down that path that you set out. Success is defined in both academic excellence and becoming an ideological and spiritual carbon copy of your parents. That means that as much as I consider myself a success and believe that I am where I am today because of what my parents taught me (and that that’s a good thing), in the homeschool subculture I’m not a success story, I’m a cautionary tale. And that should be evidence enough that there’s something wrong with the subculture.