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On the topic of public education, I always say, “Don’t get me started,” because I simply can’t stop once the subject comes up. The abuse of our children, the degradation of their tender minds, the standardized testing; all these and other issues within public education boil my blood. Cokes in the lobby - damn right they’re all ADHD. I would be, too!
But that rant is for another time. I want to share the OPPOSITE of forced education, to demonstrate a frightening reality.
I have homeschooled my children for the last fifteen years. I was young, and I didn’t know any better before my oldest daughter started high school. I didn’t realize I could REALLY make the choice to homeschool until the need arose with her; and assumed, like many others, that only middle-aged hippies in Vermont actually pull their kids out of school and teach them at home. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My daughter, Renee, was ADHD from the moment I began to raise her, at age seven. (I am not her birth mother, I married her dad, who had custody). Renee struggled through school, and in spite of her bright, active mind, her behavioral reports were always frustrating, and she lagged behind her classmates, unable to stay focused enough to finish a complete sentence. Her little brain was a butterfly, flitting from one thing to the next, and academic progress was always just out of her reach.
By her first year of high school, I was forced into homeschooling her. Her frustration with her lack of progress had turned her into somewhat of a “class clown.” To avoid the embarrassment of failure, she had become a silly attention-seeker, no longer even trying to pay attention and learn. I refused to give her Ritalin, and the only option seemed to be to take a drastic step and pull her out of school. Though she played on my nerves like the tension on a violin string, I did know that she could learn, and so we began.
Today Renee is in her third year of college, the only one of our grown children to embrace and love her education. She is majoring in teaching, of all things. I would say she qualifies as a success story.
But even during the early years of homeschooling, I was still doing “school at home” with Renee. We broke from the curriculum when we had to, but overall, I was dedicated to proving her worthy by showing that her test scores could compete with anyone else's. Things are different now.
We adopted our youngest two kids at ages eight and ten. Both of them were “ADHD,” and both were behind in school; understandably the victims of the social services system, too much medication, and a three year stint in foster care - not to mention the earliest traumas that led them to foster care to begin with. We had our hands full. I was told that Deborah would not complete her homework, and that her foster mother fought with her every night to finish her work sheets. Daniel was a little animal at school who could not even be contained in a classroom environment. His ADHD was coupled with supposed bipolar disorder… these two were definitely going to be homeschooled. I could not imagine fighting the fights ahead with local school officials.
It was during the process of their adoption that I began reading John Holt. Holt was a homeschooling pioneer, and his writings were shocking to me. He suggested NO curriculum whatsoever, NO testing, and certainly, as little control as possible over a child’s choices in what he learns. He assured his readers that, left to his/her own devices, every child would gain all the skills they needed (even math and science!) by natural acquisition, just by being allowed to explore the world. I was admonished to teach only when ASKED - by the child! The man was obviously off his rocker. Unfortunately, he was also dead. There were only his writings to refer to for counsel. Still… these children were different. They were “special,” in all the subtle shades that word can imply.
Imagine my dismay when the children arrived, and I learned that Daniel couldn’t read at ALL. He couldn’t even tell the sounds letters made. The only words he could read were those he had seen often enough to commit to memory, and when asked to read aloud, he would mumble his way through, quickly skimming, and with no inflection. It was easy to see that the strange
