Why?

I hope to write many posts about why we've chosen to homeschool our two kids (A, our 4-year-old daughter, and T, our 9-month-old son). There are studies showing homeschooled kids do better academically, there are problems with the historical foundation of public schooling, and there's evidence that "socialization" is superior for homeschooled kids. I've got data to cite, I've got essays to link to, I've got arguments to make.

But today I just want to mention some personal experiences that make me glad we're homeschooling (unschooling, in fact). These add up after a while:

• On numerous occasions from 3rd to 7th grade I got in trouble for reading ahead.
• I repeatedly got in trouble for doing math problems "the wrong way," regardless of what method I had used or the fact that my answer was correct.
  
• In 3rd grade, my brother was told to re-do a writing assignment and remove the slang and the dialogue, because they had not yet been taught quote marks or apostrophes (which he had used correctly), and those were therefore not allowed.
• I was told "you can't have" 2 minus 3, which I found confusing since I knew that made negative 1.
• I failed to understand divisibility because I knew about fractions and thought, for instance, that 6 was divisible by 4 because the answer was six fourths. I was merely told that I wasn't supposed to know about fractions yet, which was hardly helpful.
  
• In 2nd grade my brother was told to re-do a spelling assignment and write one sentence per word, after he had painstakingly crafted a legitimate sentence which incorporated all ten spelling words.
• In 5th grade my teacher told us it took 1,000 years for the sun's light to reach Earth (it actually takes 8 minutes).
  
• My 5th grade teacher also said the great pyramids had been built 1,000 years ago. She was off by three millenia, give or take a few centuries.
• I learned the exact same material in math in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades. The exact same material.
• A friend was told by her 5th grade teacher that she could not become a fire fighter when she grew up because she was a girl.
  
• I was made to write a letter to my parents, along with all my 5th-grade classmates, apologizing for having cried as a baby.
• In 8th grade, on the first day of algebra class, I volunteered three answers in a row. This made me such a social pariah that not only did I not volunteer answers in math class again until college, but when called on I deliberately gave the wrong answer.
• I lied to classmates who asked my grade on math exams, downgrading my A's to B's or C's, to avoid getting nasty looks. I sometimes asked teachers not to write my grade on the front of my test.
• I could not study poetry in school as I was too uncomfortable there, poetry was too personal, and I cared about it far too much. When assigned to choose a favorite poem and read it aloud to the class, I told my teacher not to call on me as I was taking a zero for that assignment.
• My class read Great Expectations when I was 13. I thought it was boring, depressing, and took forever to read (not that I finished it), and I developed an unfair dislike of Dickens. To this day I have never read an entire Dickens novel.
  
• I was also assigned The Odyssey and The Iliad at age 13. Ask me what I think of Homer.
• In high school, my brother got in trouble for reading while he was supposed to be watching commercials on TV. Seriously. It was part of the Channel One program, in which schools sell their students' attention to advertisers, in return for AV equipment and money.
  

And so I learned that I should be careful not to get ahead of the lesson plan (I got that message from both teachers and students). That reading is almost never appropriate, and when it is, someone should read aloud, so others can follow along in unison, typically at a mind-numbing snail's pace. That being too enthusiastic is socially disastrous and unlikely to please the instructor in any case. That I hated certain authors-- not that I would hate them now, but somehow, isn't it odd, I never happen to pick up their works.

This is to say nothing of the cognitive dissonance which occurs when you traipse home to tell your parents about (say) Christopher Columbus, only to discover that your parents possess an utterly contradictory set of facts. I've checked out Columbus for myself. Turns out nothing they taught us in school was correct except the names of the ships and the year.

The social lessons were probably the worst: that girls shouldn't be too smart, shouldn't bring up odd conversation topics, should be skinny and quiet and smile all the time, shouldn't ever be angry, should know how to protect the fragile egos of adolescent boys. In short, that the female ideal is to be less. Less of everything.

It's not just what my children will learn at home that I'm looking forward to. It's what they won't learn.