Back to basics

School is remarkably invisible to most people. It involves something so fundamental: you are giving your child to someone else for hours out of the day. How can that happen with so little consideration? With so little concern over the adult who will be in charge of your child, who will be their caretaker? John Gatto says this was not initially accepted as normal, that violence against schoolteachers and riots in or around schools were commonplace in the early years of compulsory schooling. For instance:

Bruce Curtis’ book Building the Education State 1836-1871 documents the intense aversion to schooling which arose across North America.... Many schools were burned to the ground and teachers run out of town by angry mobs. When students were kept after school, parents often broke into school to free them.

At Saltfleet Township in 1859 a teacher was locked in the schoolhouse by students who "threw mud and mire into his face and over his clothes," according to school records—while parents egged them on....

Or-- again from Gatto:

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated 80% of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

When you homeschool, people ask you why. Parents have raised their children to adulthood since before we were homo sapiens, but now we are asked to explain? Why shouldn't I ask other parents why they send their children away?

Not only does school now strike me as-- well, frankly, a rather bizarre arrangement (would you leave your child with a babysitter who also had 23 other children to look after?)-- but I find the tone of schoolteachers and principals to be extremely off-putting. Their tone is so often one of "We know what is best for your children, not you."

Consider this stern paragraph from a Michigan elementary school newsletter:

Our [Kindergarten] Round Up meeting will be held on Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 7:00 P.M. At this meeting you will receive pertinent information about the curriculum, kindergarten options, immunizations and complete the necessary forms. Childcare will be provided.

Translation: If you have a child who is about to turn 5, you must show up at this location, on this date, at this time, and we will take your children to another room while we make you fill out forms and pressure you about vaccinating. [This school district has printed lies on some of its websites regarding the supposedly mandatory nature of vaccines. I don't know about other states, but in Michigan vaccines are not mandatory.]

Our local school's newsletter states that "it is a district guideline that parents may not request a specific teacher for their child." You have no say over who babysits your kid, in other words.

The mental health community helps to justify the division of children and parents by inventing separation anxiety disorder, school refusal disorder, and social phobia to explain and stigmatize any resistance to separation. Regarding such diagnoses, I can only say: bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. These people never question the society, never question the schools, never take the point of view of the child. They define mental illness as "not thriving in mainstream society," as if mainstream society were natural and eternal instead of arbitrary and changing, as if our culture ought to be monolithic, as if we all should follow the same lifestyle and the same rules. I have a word for these psychiatrists, as well, and it is: Soviet.

I may start answering the "So why did you decide to homeschool?" question with "Because our species cares for its own offspring." I don't say it has to be the mom, or even the parents (we traditionally have lived in broader family clans, after all). And I am sympathetic to the economic impossibility of a parent staying home, for many families-- but then I have to ask why the "richest country on earth" (as we're always told) accepts a culture in which parents cannot afford to care for their own children?

Politicians and other leaders talk about "the children" and "family values," but let's face it. We've set up a culture which is hostile to children and then we've diagnosed the kids who can't adapt to such hostility. And then, if you try to opt out of some of this by homeschooling, people wonder why.

How about these basics: children need the care of relatives, children need joy, children need autonomy. Or, even shorter: childhood is not preparation for life, it is life.