Back in 1975, before the homeschooling movement got going, the New York Times published a piece, Home Is Where the School Is, about a family that had decided to keep their four kids out of school:
Each person has his own definition of a good school. For me, a good school has come to mean one that encourages children to learn and to love learning in a happy, relaxed atmosphere. A good school is not one that maintains strict discipline, is not one that boasts a high reading score on all grade levels, is not one that sends at high percentage of its students on to bigger and better schools. A good school is a community of teachers and students engaged in an exhilarating search for knowledge and self-awareness. Whether or not a school is good has nothing to do with test scores or the number of degrees shared by the faculty. It has to do with the teachers’ attitudes toward students and their perception of what education is all about. I would send my children to a school that fostered a family feeling. However, I have not been in one American public school that comes close to my definition.
This lack of good schools has sent some friends to the suburbs with great reluctance, and has caused others to spend an inordinate amount of money on private schools. I have rejected these two “solutions” to the problem because I want to live in the city and bocause schools in the suburbs are not any better than their city Cousins. Safer, perhaps, but I would not want my children to attend them, either. As for private schools, my husband, Jack, and I cannot afford them, and if we could I would like to think that we would still not send our children to them.
The action we have taken is, of course, illegal,* but a social worker from the St. Louis Board of Education who was sent to investigate our children’s absence from school told us she thought we had the right to educate our children ourselves and would support us in our effort to do so. In addition, she felt our children were happy and well-adjusted and obviously receiving an excellent education at home, and she recommended to the local school principal that we be left alone, in part because we were going to Mexico for a brief period. We had to1d the social worker during a long, friendly talk that we would refuse to send the children to school if we were ordered to do so and that we were prepared to go to court. Jack and I felt that we would be dishonest toward ourselves and our children if we were to do otherwise.
The mother cites Summerhill, by A.S. Neill, How Children Learn, by John Holt, and De-Schooling Society, by Ivan Illich, as pushing her toward something like unschooling.
One of her daughters tells her story of life with home-schooling anarchists for parents — and the transition to “real” school:
Our transition to formal schooling happened to coincide with the moment St. Louis was trying to address the problem of its segregated school system. To avoid forced busing, the city decided to open several magnet schools with specialized curricula to attract students of all races from around the city. To my parents (perhaps conveniently), these schools sounded as if they offered the kind of progressive learning atmosphere they had been seeking. They quickly enrolled us. James and I were to attend the school dedicated to math and science; Mary and John the one focused on performing arts. We had no transcripts but were readily accepted. These brave new academic worlds needed white faces to succeed.
The night before our first day of school, instead of staying up worrying about what it would be like, we looked forward to it as “the latest adventure,” John recalls, “like moving to Mexico or England.” That sentiment was shared by James: “I was cocksure of myself because I thought what we had done was very cool.”
One early September morning, our parents dropped us off in front of our respective schools. They didn’t walk us into the building. They didn’t introduce us to our new teachers. They didn’t even tell us what grade we were in. John remembers it this way: “Luckily, Mary and I deduced that, because I was 10, I would go into the lowest grade (fifth), and as an 11-year-old, she would go into the next (sixth).” As the youngest, only 5 that fall, I burst into tears when I was separated from my brother James. I hadn’t been warned that we’d be in different classes. When I questioned my mother about why she left us to puzzle all this out on our own, she defended herself, saying, “I assumed you’d know what to do.”
Going from yoga and tea (with parents) to gym and a packed lunchroom was a shock to our systems. And feeling lost wasn’t the hardest part. Looking like Goodwill poster children was. “I thought I looked great in my huaraches and striped, fiesta-themed peasant pants,” Mary says. “But everyone else in the sixth grade was wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jeans. I was not too naïve to realize I needed to get some jeans. Quick.”
Everything about the single-file, cliquey public-school system was counter to our counter-lifestyle. “I was in math class,” John recalls, “sitting at a desk wondering, Am I going to have to sit in this same spot every single day from now on? The teacher was grilling kids on decimals, which I did not understand. To me it just looked like a dot! Then the teacher asked me to recite the nine multiplication table. I answered, totally nonchalantly, ‘I don’t know it.’ The teacher paused, eyes zeroing in on me, and said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna have fun with you.’ ” Slowly the meaning of being unable to recite lines from “Star Wars” (we’d never seen Hollywood movies) and not having feathered hair began to sink in. We were weirdos.
In 1978, NPR interviewed my mother about her home-schooling experiment when a multistate teachers strike left thousands of parents wondering what to do with their homebound children. After asking, “I’m curious about how you basically stood it all day,” Cokie Roberts repeatedly pressed my mother about our socialization. To gain independence and prepare children for the realities of adulthood, didn’t they need to be with their peers and suffer all the harsh experiences that entails?
“I don’t know if children should be put through bad school situations just so they can be socialized,” my mom replied. It was a noble sentiment, but unfortunately bad situations were exactly what was in store for us, especially for John and James. “I was very green, and a few days into school this kid pushed me so hard I fell over a desk,” John remembers. “I just couldn’t understand. Why would a kid want to fight me? At home, James and I were like two peas in a pod.”
At my schoolyard, James, in third grade, was instantly picked on. Within the first week, he recalls, “an older kid kicked me in the butt really hard. The other boys were laughing. A girl finally told me someone put a ‘kick me’ sign on my back. I never heard of that, teasing and pranks.” James was also taken to the back of the bus and “punched incessantly” for the better part of grade school. “Oh, God, it was awful.” James never told my parents. He just “took it.” Was Cokie Roberts right? James thinks so. “I wasn’t around kids,” he says. “The four of us were never threatened, so I didn’t learn how to stick up for myself.”
My mother worried that when we went to school, she would lose her identity. But she flourished in her new job as an editor at St. Louis magazine. We were the ones who lost ours. Mary never told anyone she’d been home-schooled. “By sixth grade I knew that kids weren’t, especially back then. When you’re a kid, you don’t want to be different, you want to fit in.” Mary conformed quickly and even liked the rules, like having to “write your name at the top of paper.” John was picked on until he fought back, pushing his tormentor over a desk. James learned how to fit in by observing the other kids and copying what they did. “It was a chameleon act. I was never the most popular, but I eventually made friends.”
Academically, my siblings were all over the map. Mary, the avid reader, did well without much effort. “And if I didn’t understand something, I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand and ask.” John was taken under the wing of Mr. I’m Gonna Have Fun With You, who drilled him on math one on one until John caught up. James excelled in subjects like science and history but had a hard time with reading. “It was very stressful,” he remembers. “I couldn’t get it.” Yet according to my mother’s Times article, “the amazing thing about my experience with James learning to read is that it is painless.” Was this an extension of her policy to “criticize the children infrequently”?
James now wishes our parents had made reading a priority for him. “It would have made my life a lot easier,” he recalls. “Struggling wasn’t fun. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do better in school.” I can vividly remember him in the sixth grade, crying about his drama class. “Because when I read aloud,” James says, “I would trip up over simple words.” But he did have the wherewithal to seek help. In eighth grade, James was so concerned about his atrocious spelling that he asked a teacher what he could do. She gave him a third-grade spelling book and told him to start on Page 1.
These academic shortcomings can be traced to my mom’s desire for educational spontaneity. At first, as she wrote, she was “careful to keep exactly to the schedule.” But she soon relaxed. “Classes were canceled whenever something interesting materialized. How to open an art-house movie theater was a course,” she said. “That’s what you did for months instead of having classes.” While watching “The Blue Angel” is fun, inasmuch as a psychosexual German film can be for a child, it doesn’t help prepare you for the realities of a typical classroom or provide you with building blocks for the fundamentals.
James has conflicting feelings about my parents’ teaching style. He acknowledges that his own son, Zac, who was introduced to formal education early, has many of his own learning difficulties. But his approach is the opposite of my parents’. “I’m on top of Zac,” James told me. “I don’t want him to fall behind like I did.”