Crosspost: Homeschooling’s Unwilling Boosters?

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 12, 2013.

Note from Kathryn: The following guest post is a follow-up to my posts, The One Thing You Should Never Ask a Homeschool Kid, and Well, That Was Certainly Not Something I Expected to be Controversial. The author wishes to remain anonymous.

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Kathryn blogged [a few weeks ago] about homeschool children who are asked to defend homeschooling to strangers who want to know if they’re well educated and well-adjusted. What does it look and feel like when our parents and homeschooling community expect us to be apologists for homeschooling?

This kind of upbringing can lead to 2 results:

1. You grow haughty about your own superiority and stand at a distance from your peers

2. You don’t learn to be self-reflective, and you end up a crippled version of yourself because you don’t change the things you need to change to become a fully developed adult and.

I know this, because I’ve both seen it in others and lived it myself.  As a homeschool student from K-12, I too was asked by many strangers and friends to defend my experience as a homeschooler.  But the same expectation existed within my own community.

My homeschooling experience started in the early days of the homeschooling movement.  I was often asked by my parents to describe the benefits of my homeschooling experience because they were proud of me, but also because homeschooling still required defense in a lot of circles.  At my graduation, the unwritten expectation of my homeschool community was that I would speak about how my experience was superior to that of my peers.

This expectation exists for most homeschool graduations I’ve been to—parents expect their children to stand as apologists for their homeschool experience.  I once attended a graduation where the two speakers talked about the superiority of their educational upbringing—they were confident, articulate, and very convincing.  Except that I’ve known one of the two speakers since she’s a baby, and I can say quite confidently that she is poorly prepared for the world and hasn’t been given a foundation of independence or critical thinking about her experience or the experiences of other 18 year olds preparing to step into the world.

I went on to college, completed a master’s program, and am a successful young professional.  However, it was only when I was able to objectively look at my homeschool experience and see the good and the bad of it that I was able to grow into a mature adult and shake off the fears of others that kept me from growing into the most complete version of myself.

The problem with those 2 results of being a homeschool apologist?

1. When you’re haughty about the superiority of your homeschool education, you hold all others at arm’s length and rich relationships are impossible.

2. When you continue to insist on the perfection of your own experiences, you are blind to your imperfections and you stay in a static state.

No person is perfect, but inflexibility and a closed view of those who aren’t like you are often a byproduct of becoming a haughty homeschool apologist.  The opposite characteristics – flexibility and openness – are two characteristics that make good friends.  If you can’t be open and flexible in your understanding of the experiences of others, you won’t be a good friend.

Any parent who homeschools their children should give them the freedom to live within their homeschool experience without having to be a homeschool booster.  If you tell people that your children are intelligent and capable of having intelligent discussions, allow them to be a part of the dialogue about the educational choice you’ve made.  Let the discussion be real, and let them tell you why the homeschooling is or isn’t working for them.

If your children really do love and buy into the homeschooling choice – then – they will be the best booster.

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?