Homeschoolers play in the dirt

Addressing the school social worker’s rant

This weekend my grandson came over to the house to play. Almost two years old, little Isaiah has a firmly set mission in life: To find whatever trouble he can, and thoroughly get into it. In our yard, he made a bee-line for the leaky water hose.

“You see what he’s doing?” I asked my daughter.

Moriah shrugged. “It’s just water . . . and mud. He’ll come clean.”

Isaiah picked up the hose and leaned over for a better look, inadvertently squirting himself in the face. He looked up at us, streams of water pouring from his fine blond hair. We were smiling, so he smiled back. He stared at the stream for a moment, and then started lapping at it like a puppy. We laughed while he drenched himself, eventually muddy up to his knees.

According to Catoosa County school social worker Sue Mason, we laughed because we are homeschoolers. We don’t know that children are not supposed to play in the dirt. In her scathing two-part article “My thoughts on homeschooling” and “Homeschooling: the dark side,” Mason presents an alternate reality in which parents homeschool their children just to sleep late and avoid responsibility while their children play in the dirt. I suppose she has never seen all those children on the school playground at recess, playing in the dirt.

I was reluctant to leave the county paper lying around, with columns like these. My teens were really miffed to discover that other homeschooled kids are allowed to sleep late and play in the dirt all day. They had some hard questions about why I made them come to history class at 7:00 a.m. for so many years.

Mason attempts to deflect any objections to her column with the caveat that there are some good homeschool families, and she is not talking about them. Yet, for the length of two articles she goes on about homeschool families who live in trailers, are unemployed, and allow their children to play in the dirt all day long.

In seventeen years of homeschooling, I have never met the homeschool families Mason describes. In fact, Mason’s first homeschool column does not feature a single homeschool family. Instead, she writes about public school parents who cannot make it to school on time, who pay the cable bill but neglect the power bill, and who buy tattoos instead of shoes. If these accusations are drawn from actual cases in our county, Mason should be under fire for printing them in the county paper rather than adhering to confidentiality. If they are not actual scenarios, then they are just lies.

If the stories are true, they are stories of public school parents. When these parents are threatened with court action for their children’s tardies, they remind the county social worker that public education is not mandatory; they can always homeschool their children if they so choose. Mason thinks it is terrible that parents have this freedom and “there is nothing I can do.”

Is it really a bad thing that parents have a way to push back? They are our children, after all. The public school system sometimes behaves like a bureaucratic bully, running over individuals. I have a daughter in public school this year. She's a straight-A high school student working a year ahead of others her age. I still have to stand up for her to get her needs met. I am nice about it, but it goes without saying that if the school system does not offer this brilliant student the opportunities she deserves, they will lose her back to homeschooling.

Homeschooling is not a privilege. Rather, the public school is the one enjoying the privilege of having my talented daughter among their students. Granted, it is not too much to ask that she be to school on time! And she is. But the principle is the same: Families who do not get what they need and want from the public school system have the right to use private or homeschooling instead.

If a particular family needs a different schedule than the public school offers, homeschooling is one way to do that. So long as the child is learning, why should it matter whether classes are held during the morning, afternoon or evening? Learning is organic, and is not really confined to hours or classrooms.What we sometimes forget in this whole discussion is that homeschooling isn't some novel idea. As in the breastfeeding/formula debate, homeschooling IS normal and has been practiced for thousands of years. Sending your kids off to school is the novel idea.

Even today, every parent on the planet homeschools for the first weeks, months or years of the child’s life. We teach our children to walk and talk, processes far more complex than anything learned in grades K-12, and no one suggests that ordinary parents are incapable of teaching their own children to do these things.

The school social worker does not like that public education is not mandatory. Education is mandatory, but not public education. Before homeschooling became popular again, parents did not know they had that option. Parents like the ones she describes (that is, poor) could not afford private education, so they were at the mercy of the public school system. Now, suddenly, parents who are pushed around are pushing back. They are saying, "No, you can't bully me, because the truth is my child doesn't have to be in your school in the first place." And on that score, they are correct.

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Why I'm still here

And why I’m not alone

I finally took the social networking plunge. I depend daily on Internet searches and email, and obtain most of my news about the world online. Like many people, I haven’t opened a paper phone book in years. I order videos from NetFlix, and watch my favorite TV shows online. And I blog. Of course I blog. Still, I’ve long been hesitant to throw my social fortunes to the winds of MySpace and FaceBook.

In connecting with old friends from high school, the first topic that comes up is often geography. Many of my schoolmates – especially those who showed great promise – have moved to Atlanta or some far-off metropolis to pursue a successful career. Economists and sociologists tell us to expect as much. Bedroom communities like Ringgold, Georgia, simply do not retain most of the talented young people who graduate from their schools. They go off to college and discover they have outgrown their own community. The place they called home does not offer employment opportunities that stimulate their interests and allow them to access (and afford) the lifestyle they became accustomed to at the university.

What is it, then, that holds some of us here when it would seem a relief to pack it up and move away? Some, perhaps, lack motivation. Most of us are just sentimental.

It is that curve in Chickamauga Creek that holds me, like a mother restraining a baby in the crook of her arm. I drive past it more often than not, failing to leave the comfort of my vehicle and my shoes and my dignity. I pledge to stop more often and stand on those wide, flat stones while the ice-cold water runs over the tops of my bare feet – all the while praying the moss doesn’t glide beneath my soles like a banana peel and send me flying backward to land in a splash of green water and lost dignity.

The train, too, holds me here rather than moving me on. I love to hear it thunder past the Depot on an opry night, the great wooden shutter doors trembling in their ancient track. Sometimes the musicians join the rhythm; other times they stop and listen to a mournful solo as the horn blows and the beast moves by. I place my hand flat against the stone walls and feel the pulse of that locomotive roaring northward only a few feet from my fingertips, moving us without taking us away.

I love the old things, like that hodge-podge of tin and wood over by Callaway’s store. I have been looking at that structure my whole life, and it occupies the frame of my existence. Business may take me to the shiny, neoclassic city hall, but my eye is always on that crazy quilt of tin sheets. I’m remembering a hundred indistinguishable Saturdays when my father backed up to their pickup-height loading dock, and familiar men with friendly faces tossed sweet corn into the back of our old Dodge while I went inside to ask a question about my horse or my lamb or my dog.

Yes, it’s really the people who keep me here. I do not want to live in a place where there is no one like Moses in the grocery store. He grins, golden tooth gleaming, and you know right away that a flame burns so brightly in his soul that it could never be snuffed out by bad weather or a squeaky grocery cart wheel. He sings his way through life, blessing everyone who comes near him with what he enthusiastically calls his “black magic.” Just watch sometime and see the shoppers walking into the grocery store tired, cranky and worried about what to make for dinner – then coming out with a lighter step despite the heavy sacks in their hands. Moses is not a bag boy or a grocery worker; he’s the town healer.

My family, too, is here. If I moved away, they would cook me sumptuous dinners on those holidays I breezed in from some far-away metropolis. But who would pick up popsicles and ginger ale when I am sick? Who would teach my son the patient care of tending tomatoes and rounding up cows? What would it mean to him, growing up without the pungent Georgia clay inside the grooves of his soccer cleats?

I suppose we could live someplace exciting. My five-year-old always prays “I wish we lived on the beach and never got sick.” Yet if we did, she would not know the way that wide green creek meanders lazily past our yard, and then ruffles into a hundred giggles before it disappears past the island. I could show her a picture, but somehow it just wouldn’t be the same.



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Obama inauguration offers living history lesson

Many Georgia educators let the opportunity slide

On a Sunday afternoon, I watched via Internet as Barack Obama roared toward Washington, D.C. to the take the oath of office. Styling himself as a modern Abraham Lincoln, our new president retraced the pre-inauguration train journey traveled in 1861. At every stop, huge crowds braved sub-zero temperatures to catch a glimpse of the new leader of the free world, or to shout “Yes, We Can!” as the train rolls by.

As I watched that train roll toward the capitol, I thought of my friend Martha Archie. At birth she was named Martha Moss, and she grew up here in Ringgold, where her family is well-known and well-respected in the community. She graduated in 1964, the same year as both my parents. Yet even in this small town, my parents never met Martha Moss when they were teens. As an African-American, Martha Moss could not attend Ringgold High School.

Wilson High School was the school designated for students with darker skin. Situated down the hill from Ringgold High School (now the Middle School), Wilson offered education that was supposed to be “separate but equal.”

We were decorating a float for the Christmas parade the first time I heard of Wilson High School. Martha pointed out where Wilson High was housed, in what is now the ROTC building. Standing in the frigid wind with balloons in both hands, I cast my gaze from one school toward the other, and tried to imagine how two worlds could be so close and yet so segregated.

I should have realized there would have been two schools in my hometown, just as there were all across the South. I knew my parents lived through segregation and desegregation. My mother had told me about the separate drinking fountains in public places. As a child too young to understand, my mother had begged to drink from the fountain labeled “COLORED.” She thought the water would be tinted all the colors of the rainbow.

It is easier to imagine those things happened in Chattanooga, or down in Atlanta, or somewhere off in Alabama or Mississippi. We tend to downplay the history of racial tensions in our own hometowns. Certainly we would rather focus on the positive, like the gymnasium at Ringgold High School which is named after a black athlete. Neither do we like to remember that the KKK marched these streets not so long ago, and that black families in Ringgold were threatened in the 1960’s and even subjected to domestic terrorism that killed a mother in her bed.

We thirty-somethings do not go back that far. It’s difficult for us to comprehend how bad things really were. Today students of every skin tone mingle in the school yards. We have a city council that cares about all citizens, enough to remove a symbol that offends the black community. Then we see Barack Obama waving from the train car, and placing his hand on Lincoln’s inaugural Bible.

“Young people don’t understand how significant this is,” Martha told me the night of the parade. “They don’t remember what it was like, when you couldn’t even walk into a place and eat dinner.”

One reason young people don’t remember is because we, as a society, do not teach them. During all my years in Ringgold High School, no one ever spoke of Wilson High School. It was as if the black school had never existed, never left any imprint on this community, and did not even deserve acknowledgement.

No wonder American education lacks relevancy. We focus on the distant past that can be sanitized and analyzed, while ignoring the messy situations and overlapping voices that form real human history.

Students learn about Columbus every single year, but rarely are they taught about Clinton or Bush. Other powerful political figures like Nancy Pelosi, Karl Rove, Jesse Jackson and Dick Cheney hardly enter the classroom conversation, even though they have an enormous impact on our society and our world. Students learn how to calculate the height of a flag pole by measuring its shadow, but not how the World Trade Towers could have been protected from terrorism. They learn that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not just slavery, but they do not learn how to articulate both sides of the Iraq controversy.

Individual teachers cannot be blamed for a problem that is systematic. Georgia public education requires that every student in Georgia pass the same end-of-course tests. The advantage of the testing is that it standardizes Georgia education so that a diploma from one school is roughly equal to a diploma from another. The disadvantage is that it pressures teachers to neglect creativity and relevancy in favor of homogeny and “teaching to the test.” Standardization seeks to make all students the same, not better.

Students need to learn what is going on in the world right now. They need to read newspapers in the classroom. They need to have sources like National Geographic at their disposal –not just buried in the library, but open on their desks. NPR and CNN should be played in the classroom from time to time.

The inauguration of Barack Obama was a watershed moment in American history. Whether you love him or hate him, he has changed the face of American politics forever. In Washington, millions gathered to experience it.

Around the country, many homeschool parents seized the opportunity to teach their children about the political process all year long. They printed maps for their children to color as the state-by-state election results came in. They took their children on the campaign trail for one of the candidates. Not constrained by having to board a school bus at dawn, many homeschooled students stayed up to watch the election results rolling in at midnight. On January 20th, most of those families turned on the TV to witness America once again transfer power without violence.

Likewise, in a few public and private school classrooms, resourceful teachers do make a point of teaching students about politics without indoctrinating them. On Tuesday, some of those teachers recognized the importance of the moment, and turned on the TV. Sadly, others did not. In fact, some Georgia schools were forced by parents to offer an alternative activity, because parents protested that the inauguration was not educational. Other schools just failed to see the significance of the event and did not plan accordingly.

Nothing else that happened on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, held more educational significance than the inauguration of a new American President. How could printed words in a textbook compare to watching history unfold before us? The speeches delivered at the inauguration contained compelling history lessons, even as they became part of that recorded history. Art, music, poetry, prose and architecture were on display. Most of the important political figures whose names are not being taught at these schools were standing in the audience with their families. The event presented a massive array of teaching opportunities on politics, history, culture, literature, science and math.

Of my six children, only one attends public school. She is the only one who was prevented from watching the inauguration. Next election, I will be keeping my children home so they can learn.

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