Not Well-Rounded, But Excellent: Sean-Allen Parfitt
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Sean-Allen Parfitt’s blog Of Pen and Heart. It was originally published on August 16, 2013. This is the second part of Sean-Allen’s three-part series for HA. Read Part One here.
My whole family has been homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. In last week’s post, I discussed how I was forbidden to learn anything that was “unapproved”. Though the effect was a deprived of a well-rounded education, I will stand by my opinion that my home education was actually quite excellent.
The base curriculum my family used was Rod and Staff. As is frequently the case with Mennonite education, the curriculum stopped at grade 10, so for grades 11 and 12 we used the curriculum by Bob Jones University Press. The BJU Press science curriculum was also used to supplement the lower grades, as was their math curriculum from 9th grade on.
The schoolwork we did was in fact quite vigorous, and Mom was a strict teacher.
We were far from “unschooled”, as some families are. Quite the opposite; we were not allowed to play until our homework was done. For many years we were required to complete every problem, question, and assignment in every lesson of every book. Every wrong answer was to be reworked and returned for re-grading until it was correct. Every reading lesson was read out loud to Mom, and any mistakes in pronunciation or inflection were to be corrected and the section read over until Mom was satisfied. Every essay was carefully scrutinized and marked up with red pen. All suggested class questions from the teacher’s manuals were duly asked, and answered. Every flash card drill was performed, with all speed times for each child written in the teacher’s book to be compared to previous work, both by the individual child, and to his or her siblings who had gone on before!
As you can see, this rigorous classroom method kept me working hard at my desk for much of my childhood. I studied math, English, science, geography, history, and other subjects. As the eldest, I did not have the competitive element that came from comparing the younger ones’ work with the older ones’. Nonetheless, the in-depth curriculum, along with Mom’s strict grading, kept me aiming for the highest grades possible. Every misspelled word was -1/4 point, and any other mistake was at least -1 point, if not -2, depending on the problem and the severity of the mistake. An A grade was 95% or higher.
I didn’t pick up as much in science and history as I did in English and math. But the education I did receive, and retain, was quite sufficient. In fact, it was superior to many public-schooled children in America.
Every 2 years our family took standardized tests, and we routinely ranked in the 99th percentile in many subjects.
When I took my SAT, even though my score wasn’t as high as I was hoping, it was still quite good. I took the entrance exam to attend Monroe Community College, which consisted of an English section and a math section. Afterward, when I sat down with the adviser, he told me that I had done so well… I had only gotten one question wrong on the whole test. They placed me in advanced composition, which in which I received an A, and when I took pre-calculus, calculus I and calculus II, I got A, A, and A-, respectively.
I believe that my academic education, though perhaps lacking in literature and humanities, was quite sound. My English skills gave me an advantage when learning Spanish, as I thoroughly understand how grammar works. My scores of essays written in school now serve me as I attempt to communicate with the world. Math was indispensable in college, and I even use it sometimes today. In fact, my career as a software engineer was born from the seeds my father planted, when he taught me how to program in MBASIC on an Osborne Executive when I was only 8 years old.
He nurtured this throughout my middle- and high-school career, and now I program for a living.
Even though there were some drawbacks to being educated at home, I emerged academically well prepared with a career path ready for me to follow. I am extremely grateful for the care my mother and father put into making sure I was ready for life. One thing I’m really not good at: speling.
Sean-Allen Parfitt is a a gay software engineer, who dabbles in creative writing, music composition, and fashion design. He lives with his boyfriend Paul in Schenectady, NY. Follow Sean-Allen’s blog at Of Pen and Heart, or on Twitter: @AlDoug. The following post was originally published on Of Pen and Heart on August 9, 2013 and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
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HA note: The following is the first of a three-part series by Sean-Allen that we will be posting. This post explores the negative aspects of his homeschooling experiences; the other two posts will explore the positive aspects and will be included in next week’s positives series.
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Recently I wrote about how the church keeps us in, because we don’t know any better. This is a concept I call Control Through Ignorance (CTI). Today I’m going to approach it with more detail from a different perspective: homeschooling.
I am the eldest of 8 children, all who have been or are still being taught at home by my mother.
Our parents decided to teach me at home before I was in first grade, so I never went to public school. Everything I came in contact with was carefully selected for my growth and benefit. There are several areas I would like to address. These are places in my life where my access to outside influence was restricted or completely cut off.
The first area was social interaction. Just about the only friends I had were from our church, and that’s the only time I saw them. I never made any friends who had a radically different upbringing that I did. I never met Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or atheists. I never went over to my friends’ houses for sleepovers. We were often reminded why certain things my friends did were wrong. We were very much kept in the shelter of our own home and my parent’s rules.
Because of this, we actually learned to believe that almost everyone in the world was wrong about something. We were the only ones who had it all right.
Why would we spend time with people who might influence us to back-slide into some sort of sin?
Another way in which we were tightly controlled was through the prohibition of any kind of entertainment except that which my parents approved. Basically, this meant that we were allowed to read Mennonite stories.
Period.
The end.
Here is a list of story elements which were particularly banned, with examples.
Animals that talk/wear clothes
Winnie the Pooh
The Little Red Hen
Any sort of magic
Narnia
Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
Any Fairy Tails
Anything violent
Oliver Twist
Anything non-Christian
The Bobbsey Twins
Sherlock Holmes
Good Night Moon
“the only reading material we had were story books published or sold by the conservative Mennonite publishing house Rod and Staff.”
There were a very few exceptions to the last rule, such as Children of the New Forest. Generally, though, the only reading material we had were story books published or sold by the conservative Mennonite publishing house Rod and Staff. I generally enjoyed them, but there was a very religious/indoctrinating theme in many of them.
In the last few years I lived at home, I saw the Mennonite teachings from these books make a serious impact on my mother and brothers.
When we lived in England,we studied British history as part of our home school curriculum. However, the books we used were all published before 1980, because our parents didn’t want us to be influenced by modern thinking and interpretation of the facts of history. Thus, we learned very little about the last few decades of history.
We were not allowed to watch TV or movies, either. We watched a few Christian movies till about 2003, when our TV/VCR broke. If we were at a friend’s house, or at a party with the cousins, we were forbidden to stay in a room with the TV or a movie playing. We were not allowed to play video games, because they supposedly teach violence, besides wasting time. Any time on the computer was closely monitored. When I was 24 and still living at home, I had to have my computer set up on a table in the living area, so that I could not visit any site that was not appropriate for school, work, or little children.
As you can see, we were very much isolated from everything around us. I did occasionally wish I went to school, but mostly because I wanted to play video games. We thought we were right and nobody else, so we even judged other conservative families at church.
Ours was one of the most conservative and uptight families.
I am so glad that I’m out of that now, but I ache for my siblings. They are still stuck in that environment, in which they have no opportunity to learn about who I am, that I’m not an evil person! That’s the hardest thing about this. I didn’t know that I was OK. What if one of my siblings is gay or lesbian? What if one is transgender? What about my siblings who want to go to college, but can’t because Mom won’t let them?
And I can’t go back and show them these things.
Why?
Because I no longer fit into the category of acceptance. Thus I am excluded from my family.
Children’s Rights and Homeschooling: Patrick Farenga’s Thoughts
One of the reasons John Holt, a secular founder of the homeschooling movement, decided to fully support homeschooling was his hope that parents would be more likely to work patiently and differently with their children at home than teachers in school can, and would therefore learn from the children what is and isn’t working. Holt’s ideas about homeschooling are probably very different from what many members of Homeschoolers Anonymous experienced: Holt didn’t want to bring the techniques and concepts of school—which he showed in his books weren’t working in school anyway—into the home. “Don’t turn your home into a miniature school,” Holt advised in 1981 when he wrote his only book about homeschooling, Teach Your Own.
After years of working in schools Holt was appalled at the gross incivility, mindless activities, and outright meanness inflicted upon children in the name of education. One of the ways he imagined that things could be improved for children was to promote children’s rights, since his own efforts made him realize the futility of trying to make meaningful change within the school system (which is still reforming itself 32 years since Teach Your Own appeared). Holt wrote a book that describes how and why giving children rights makes practical sense: Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (1974; reprinted 2013). It was controversial when it was published, causing both liberals and conservatives to condemn Holt’s ideas that children should be allowed to do pretty much what any adult may legally do.
Up until 2012, 9 out of 10 of Holt’s books were still in print. Escape From Childhood is the only one of Holt’s books that I have never been able to interest another publisher in; all editions of the book have been published by HoltGWS since the original publisher let it go out of print. Clearly, this is not a topic mainstream people want to engage with but, as I’ve learned over the years, it is vitally important if we want to find other ways to help children and their families get out of bad situations besides creating more layers of child protective service agencies.
Many of the ideas Holt puts forth in Escape are to prevent tyrannies at home and in society, and they are based on our Bill of Rights, thereby grounding all people to the same rights and responsibilities. However, Holt adds a new dimension to the concept of rights to account for children’s inexperience and their need to learn from the choices they make over time. Rather than just give children the rights of citizenship all at once beause they have turned 18, Holt offers a framework where children are able to move in and out of the “walled garden of childhood” as they feel ready and able to, so they can test the waters of responsibility and swim, or decide to wait for another day if the responsibility is too heavy on them now. Holt felt the best way to get good at making choices is to make a lot of genuine choices and determine what worked best for you. Right now our society denies young people responsible choices, while expecting them to assume this same responsibility at an arbitrarily determined age. This is the essence of Holt’s argument, though I urge you to read his book and learn about the history of childhood and all the nuances about rights, children, families, and primary and secondary guardians that Holt presents.
The issue of children’s rights is large, but I want to focus specifically on child abuse and homeschooling. Holt deals with abuse from several angles in the book, including the adult points of view. For example, he discusses the burden of having children and how the authority of the old is diminishing, but Holt presses the case for why adults need to relinquish some of their authority in order to provide children the opportunity to grow independently.
. . . to expand protection against abuses of authority without diminishing authority, is impossible, a contradiction in terms. There can be no adequate protection against the abuse of authority, of parents or the state, except to give the victim the right to escape it.
The authority that Time has in mind when it talks about the “psychic benefits of parental authority” is not natural authority but only the power to compel, threaten, punish, and hurt. The fact is that children can be and are regularly punished, by parents and the law, for any of the reasons, and the same reasons for which slaves used to be punished—for talking back, for “disrespect,” for disobedience, for being at large without permission, for running away—in short, for doing anything that might imply that they think they have any freedom or rights at all. (p. 153)
Escape From Childhood is full of examples of how children, from the mentally challenged to compliant overachievers, are often hurt or neglected by adults who, “for their own good” force them to do things the children would rather not do, so I won’t labor the point here. However, it is important to note that Holt wrote this in 1974, not knowing anything about homeschooling as we know it; he saw all children in society as being mistreated. Holt was willing to take the chance that by supporting homeschooling some children will be raised by parents whose views of children and education are radically different from the self-actualizing vision of learning Holt supports. Holt hoped that most homeschooling parents would not be so obedient to the demands of modern educational theory or religious dogma and would instead learn directly from their children what was and wasn’t working for them, and make adjustments accordingly.
Unfortunately, many adults seem willing to sacrifice their relationship with their children upon the altar of education and dogma, so I’m not surprised that now, as adults, children whose lives were insecure and violent at home now want to sacrifice homeschooling upon the altar of education and dogma. However, I urge you to take a step back and reconsider strategy and tactics.
It is easy for me to imagine Homeschoolers Anonymous becoming a typical political group, uniting anti-homeschooling forces under the banner of regulating homeschooling to protect homeschooled children from abuse. This will certainly result in an increase of professional educators’ and government reach into people’s homes, which will lead to the exact opposite of what Holt advised: our homes will become miniature schools run by the state. Your anger at being physically and emotionally abused as children, and then, as adults, being outcast by the homeschooling community for publicly noting your suffering and wishing to ameliorate it for a new generation of homeschooled children, is perfectly understandable. However, homeschooling does not cause child abuse. Being a tight-knit or loose-knit family doesn’t cause child abuse; child abuse occurs in public and private schools, churches, sports, the entertainment field, in all professions. It is a problem that is much bigger than homeschooling and we should treat it as such.
I urge Homeschoolers Anonymous to recognize the fluid nature of homeschooling regulations and laws in the United States and how many of the court decisions that allow alternatives to compulsory attendance in public schools are based on religious exemptions that are tied to preserving traditional ways of life (Amish, Mennonite, and so on). It is unlikely at this time in our history that the courts are going to rule against religious freedoms. Further, many adults in the United States appear to support corporal punishment—paddling is explicitly allowed in public schools in 19 states—and its widespread, though no less punishing, variant: time outs in closets, padded rooms, and so on. It also needs to be noted that invasive practices such as electro-shock therapy for “difficult” children are permitted in many private institutions in states that otherwise ban corporal punishment in public facilities, so the situation is not easily solved by changing existing laws.
Rather than battle homeschooling regulations head on, with the real danger of creating more regulations for secular homeschoolers and strengthening the religious exemptions that permit families to prevent their daughters from aspiring to high school or college and keep their sons in line with stern obedience to authority, Homeschoolers Anonymous can build on the do-it-yourself model that homeschooling embodies. The prospect of increased scrutiny by outsiders keeps many abusive situations from being publicly acknowledged, and homeschooling is no exception. However, I think Homeschoolers Anonymous is correct to sound the alarm now so we can create awareness and solutions about this difficult issue that is different than what we’ve seen to date from other institutions. Like the leaders in the Vatican, the BBC, Penn State, and numerous other institutions, homeschooling’s leaders can easily fall prey to the means (ignore or cover up the abuse) justifying the ends (the institution continues to flourish despite the ongoing abuse, which the institution says it is handling in its own mysterious way). Like you, I refuse to see homeschooling freedoms preserved upon the broken bones and dashed hopes of children, and I hope we can get others to agree to offer help and enforce existing abuse laws rather than accept the status quo as the only way to preserve homeschooling freedoms.
Child abuse is a major, ugly issue that is difficult to discuss, especially among homeschoolers who are fearful of government intrusions into their lives. We tend to dismiss child abuse in homeschooling circles because most of “us” are “good people” or “good Christians.” But the reality is there is some child abuse going on in homeschooling, just as it goes on in schools and homes all around the world. To have the courage, as Homeschoolers Anonymous does, to stand up and call out an injustice being done to an unrepresented minority, children, is an important first step. Showing how this injustice is perpetuated in practice can help parents and children see that their situation is not normal and they are stuck in a bad homeschooling situation. Homeschoolers Anonymous can then provide support for dialog within their family, healing, or escape routes, among other options. It is important to let children and spouses know they are not alone and that others have navigated this path. The Underground Railroad was built and functioning for many years before the Emancipation Proclamation was made law, and I think we need to remember that.
Building the moral and legal case for children’s rights should not be a single, high-stakes courtroom battle focused on homeschooling, but a tactical approach focused on helping children and spouses find ways to get out of abusive situations and a strategic one of uniting with other groups that seek to end corporal punishment—not homeschooling—for children in society. We have a long tradition at HoltGWS of being against corporal punishment (scroll to the bottom of the page) and the list includes a Christian homeschooling group opposed to hitting children (Parenting in Jesus’ Footsteps).
I thank Homeschoolers Anonymous for the opportunity to express some of my views on children’s rights and homeschooling. There is so much more to say; I’ve only just scratched the surface with these remarks. However, I look forward to seeing the creative and powerful solutions you will make regarding children’s rights based on your collective experiences.
Escape From Childhood will be also available as a printed book from Amazon as of June 1, 2013.
About the author:
Patrick Farenga.
Patrick Farenga started work with John Holt in 1981 and published Growing Without Schooling magazine and numerous other publications related to homeschooling, unschooling, and learning outside of school from Holt’s death in 1985 until 2001. Farenga and his wife homeschooled their three daughters, who are now adults. He continues to keep Holt’s ideas alive by writing, speaking, and publishing through HoltGWS LLC and www.JohnHoltGWS.com.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 