Public School on Your Own Terms
by Sandra Dodd
There are people who are solidly homeschoolers and happy to be so. There are others who are wholly involved in and supportive of the public schools their kids attend. Then there are those with a foot in each world. Using my sister as a test case, I made a radical recommendation which she chose to implement, and it turned out well. Since then I’ve given this advice several times and haven’t been sued (yet). Nobody’s even asked for a refund!
Here is the way my sister overcame her school codependency: She divorced herself emotionally and politically from the public school.
I have one sister, three years younger than I am. I was a star pupil, junior honor society member, extracurricular queen, member of the band, all-state chorus… Younger sisters in the readership are already sympathizing with my B-student sister. She went out with the younger brothers of my boyfriends a couple of times. She could not get out of my shadow. She dropped out of high school not long before I became a teacher. I was invested in the system. She had rejected it.
Years passed, and we each had three children. While I opted not to send mine to school at all, my sister was a “room mother” and gifted-program advisory board member, and she chaperoned field trips. Her older boy wrote at the age of five. Mine didn’t READ until he was eight. The evidence that she was right and I was wrong was increasing, which must have been a great feeling for her. (It happens more and more as the years go by, and I don’t mind at all.)
Another thing was increasing, though. From once a month, to once a week, to every other day, my sister called and complained about something at school, and I would play devil’s advocate, or give her considerations the teacher had that my sister might not have known. At first I was sympathetic. Then I was apathetic. After a while I got irritated, and one day I cut her off in advance of the tale of woe, saying, “You already know what I’m going to say. You don’t HAVE to send them to school."
It was springtime. She decided to spend the summer preparing them for the idea of staying home if they wanted to, but meanwhile she needed a way for their being in school not to ruin HER life. I recommended that she just detach. She was no longer going to enable the teachers to torment her children. She quit forcing them to do homework. She quit even considering punishing them for bad grades or rewarding them for good grades. Their grades were theirs, and not a reflection on the family, and not an indicator of learning. They were just grades, a contest, a competition like who sold the most candy bars, only my sister quit buying the candy bars, as it were. She quit helping with the homework.
The year after that, her daughter who is the oldest of three stayed home instead of going to 4th grade. The boys went to school. When they felt ill they were allowed to stay home without having to have fever or puke to earn the privilege. They became more honest. Sometimes they just said, “I don’t want to go to school today.” She would say, “You don’t have to then. I wish you just would never go again.” So their first reward was renewed and increased honesty. (When I called my sister to read this to her for verification, she asked me to add that if she had it to do over she wouldn’t be so honest as to announce to the principal, “School is optional at our house.” She advises you to make assorted excuses like the other parents do.)
The second year the daughter went back because she had missed her friends. The dynamics of that school year, though, were phenomenal. Neither my sister nor I had foreseen the extent to which this detachment would free the entire family, and hadn’t considered the effect on the relationship between the children and their teachers. No longer were these children in school against their will, their parents having submitted them to a lock-up situation. On one hand they had teachers who wanted them to stay in school. On the other hand they had parents who wanted them to stay home. How much more “wanted” could they feel? Each moment they were in school they were aware, and the teacher was aware, that they were there because they, the children, WANTED to be there! These factors changed the way the kids responded to assignments, to interpersonal problems, and to threats from the teacher (which have little power without the backing of the parents.)
In late winter, the daughter contracted a staph pneumonia and was in a hospital ninety miles from home for a couple of weeks. After that she didn’t want to return to school (and her recovery was better served by staying home, too). One of her brothers left school at that time as well, and next year all three plan to stay home When school starts and they don’t go, how different it will be for them than it is in those families in which the children pine for school but their parents forbid them to go.
There are different reasons for homeschooling. School might not be an option at all in a family in which religious or social considerations take precedence. In families in which student-directed learning is the primary focus, children taking control of their own learning by deciding whether to pursue it at home or at school can be liberating for all involved, and educational in the extreme for their teachers.
Although the ideal might be children who have never gone to school a day in their lives, reality isn’t always ideal. If your children press you to let them go to school, this detachment option might be a way for you to have your cake and eat it too. The philosophies of choice, freedom, child-led learning, “bliss-led learning,” and personal responsibility can be honored and spread to new audiences by parents treating children as humans with rights and responsibilities whether they are sixteen, twelve, or eight years old.
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