God Doesn’t Care If You Homeschool
I have seen more pleated khakis and denim skirts than a hundred thrift stores. I have meaningfully debated head coverings on the internet. I have felt sincere unease towards pentecostals, methodists, and Catholics for not being Christian enough while feeling a deeper unease towards Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Catholics for being too Christian in precisely the wrong ways. I have failed algebra 1—twice. I have had the teacher son of a famous conservative theologian tell me the south will rise again. I have worn two polo shirts of different colors at the same time. I have told Zach Mann at youth group that Analisse Belk, a girl from class I never met in person, was my girlfriend and showed him her profile picture on an already ancient IBM Thinkpad. He said she looked hot.
I have memorized the first 10 lines of the Odyssey and can still repeat them back to you now. I have read Dante and Milton, Augustine and Boethius, can dialogue about the socratic dialogues and can spell Dostoyevsky without having to look it up, have not read Dickens (because I missed that year) or Virgil (I got bored and just pretended I read it), a skill that as an adult is probably more useful than actually ready Virgil, or, well, just about anything else.
I have sat second chair cello in the Tacoma Youth Symphony. I have conjugated the Latin verb to love a thousand times and can tell you that I have written it here in the infinitive, amare. I have tied a bowline one handed and can still recite the Scout Law. I have gotten in trouble for having Switchfoot on my zendisk MP3 player, for reading Harry Potter, and would be punished by having my books on tape returned to the library early. I have received multiple haircuts from my father with a flowbee. I can tie a tie without using youtube.
I have braved the depths of Plutarch. Meandered through the trenches of Herodotus. Have used the words “pauline” and “epistomology” and “complementarianism” and could espouse at least 3 views on the book of Revelation.
Most importantly to our discussion today, I have done all of the above by the age of 14.
French sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote the book Moral Education, which I read half of as an adult (but pretended to read the whole thing, a skill learned first from Virgil). He proposes the biggest challenge to education is the fact that it never stops: we never get the chance to say hey everyone, let’s just take a 5 year time out—because kids need to be educated now. There’s no chance to pause and figure it out. The biggest challenge we face in education is it’s persistence.
But Émile Durkheim never met Jill Boyd.
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The alarms in the Boyd house went off at 6:45 sharp. Rooms were cleaned from 6:45-7:00. Instruments—piano, violin, cello, and violin respectively—were practiced from 7:00-8:00. Chores from 8:00-8:30—cleaning the bathroom, folding laundry, sweeping, or making breakfast, which was consumed from 8:30-8:45. Monday cereal, Tuesday oatmeal, Wednesday Cereal, Thursday Toast, Friday “sugar cereal”.
“Sugar cereal” in the Boyd house is defined as any cereal in which sugar is the second listed ingredient, and always purchased at less than 10 cents / ounce, a feat to accomplish in an age before smartphone calculators. My loose understanding is that because other parents defined “sugar cereal” as cereal in which sugar was the first ingredient, we had to define it as being either of the first two ingredients to be one better.
8:45-9:00 was reserved for Bible reading, and for a short season, hymn sing in broken four part harmony, where we once attempted to sing through all 400-some hymns from the blue hymnal books. I think we only made it through the first 30, as hymns, like mystery novels at goodwill and porn on the internet, exist in a massive surplus of the consumable demand. At 9am, school begins.
What follows is a carefully constructed path through human knowledge, laid out into grids of 5, the days of the week full of math, English grammar, history, reading, drawing, and science, but the kind of science still kneeling to the book of Genesis: pages glued together to avoid mention of evolution, The Magic School Bus blacklisted for mentioning the age of the world, ideas that were not seen so much as wrong as they were offensive, an affront to truth itself.
Sentences were parsed in English, verbs conjugated in Latin, the neat calendar tables of the fridge dictating precisely when to practice multiplication tables. The early days of homeschooling were filled with songs that still haunt me as an adult—a kid with musical sensitivity not yet revealed becoming an adult who cannot escape “the Eastern border of the Uni-ted States, the Eastern border of the Uni-ted States”, words and melody winding their way through states, countries, books of the bible, any list of information that was even vaguely close to rhyming set to surprisingly memorable melodies.
Early years of fridge-charts would yield to new advances in the the world of homeschooling: co-op every Thursday, the first exposure to the world of group social dynamics and discovering girls were a source of more than annoyance—though not yet much more. Online classes where you could direct message other students. Saxon math, where the cold, unyielding voice of a 40 year old I never met would come out of the computer speaker, carefully loaded from a CD drive, explaining the basics of algebra to someone who would fail the class twice.
As an adult, most of this information is still available to me—available because we tend to fixate on the intention of education. What was attempted to be taught. What the teacher wanted us to learn. It’s way a lot of people look back on their education with an air of regret: if only they’d paid attention. If only they remembered their three years of high school French. If only they’d kept practicing guitar. If only they’d actually read Virgil.
Intention is obviously important to education. What we study matters. We may find math to be of little use as an adult, but still rightfully feel shame at the thought of sending a child into the world without first braving the depths of multiplying by 9. We may understand that while a child has no practical use for knowing about the existence of Cambodia, they’ll be outed at a dinner party if they don’t have at least a little geography up their sleeves. We may even—in a particular stroke of understanding—assign Virgil, fully knowing they very well might not read it.
But this is the exact point where we, in all of our adult wisdom, having experienced education, now experience it in hindsight. We think of what we didn’t learn. Or remember in glorious strokes what we did. But we almost certainly miss the point. We miss all the things we learned without realizing it.
The most important skill I learned as a homeschooled kid was how to lie.
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I did not set out to write an opinion on childhood trauma. But it’s interesting to observe that one possible downside of homeschooling is that it’s impossible to write about one without writing about the other. The environment I was homeschooled in was fundamentally too strict for a kid to survive—so I adapted. I learned to hide what I wanted. I learned to lie.
I learned to pretend I was not curious about the outside world. I learned to look at the magazines in the checkout aisle with celebrity gossip and women in bikinis out of the corner of my eye. I learned to slide closer to the television in the lobby of the Suzuki Music Camp that was playing The Parent Trap, a movie I wasn’t allowed to watch, pretending to read while eyeing Mary Kate and Ashley. I remember nodding along when my mom proudly announced that “we don’t watch PG movies”, a stance once again taken because other parents said they didn’t watch PG-13 movies, and we had to be one better—though in this instance, a stance ridiculous, because in reality, we didn’t watch movies period.
I learned to sneak food from the pantry. To hide Harry Potter under my pillow. To watch my parents type their passwords from over their shoulder so I could play Runescape when they were gone. To hide all the music my brother pirated under the band name “Petra” on a Windows XP computer. And more than anything, I learned to stomach the shame of wanting what I wasn’t supposed to.
A reasonable adult considering homeschooling would read this and rightfully think: well I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t be that draconian or that controlling and frankly wouldn’t even know how to start putting together a chart that goes on a fridge. And that’s correct, but it’s also backwards. It’s the right point made upside down.
The point is that as much as intention of what is being taught matters, the experience of education for the student is the experience of trying to navigate an environment. To try to develop the tools to succeed in whatever world you find yourself in. Education isn’t just about what you want students to learn. What they will learn actually learn is whatever they need to survive.
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I am writing this because I am frequently asked about my experience of being homeschooled by well meaning parents who are either considering it or are embarrassed to admit they are considering it. I am not a parent. I must recuse myself of understanding the weight of that responsibility.
But weight is perhaps the right metaphor—that weight from Durkheim, the never-stopping stop watch, always reminding us, always present, never giving a moment to sit down and consider it. To be a parent is to carry the weight of responsibility for another—a responsibility that one day will transfer to their shoulders, but in the mean time, rests solely on yours, to find and build the environments in which they can be safe, in which the can learn.
We are acutely aware of what happens when parents avoid that responsibility, in part or in whole: the consequences are drastic, horrific, and obvious. But we perhaps miss what happens when parents go the opposite direction—when they take on too much responsibility for what happens in the lives of their kids. That’s the dagger that is the closest thing to advice I have to give to anyone considering homeschooling:
It just doesn’t matter that much.
The two most obvious observations of the private schools of the ultra-elite and the worst inner-city high schools is that 1. Education is a really, really good idea and 2. We clearly haven’t figured it out yet, because if we had, all the shmucks from Harvard would be a lot happier than the rest of us.
And maybe they are. Maybe somebody somewhere has figured it out and is churning out tall, intelligent adults who have never once hated their body or started looking around a dinner party wondering how soon they can leave or had a panic attack in a grocery store looking for pistachios or ever had to download a dating app or opened a new incognito tab in Google Chrome to type “how to make friends as an adult.”
Or, for that matter, sat down and written a long essay about homeschooling no one asked for.
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One day, each and every one of those kids who was either homeschooled or not homeschooled will wake up in the body of an adult who doesn’t know how they got here. They don’t realize it yet, but a scale has tipped permanently in one direction: they are now more responsible for their wellbeing than their parents are.
They may look around and ask: how the hell did I get here. Why is this happening. Why am I suddenly interested in drinking kombucha. And why the hell do I know so much Latin?
That adult won’t just inherit knowledge. They won’t just inherit intention. They’ll wake up carrying not only the consequence of their education, but the weight of importance the parent put behind it. One day, I was suddenly acutely aware that my homeschooling experience wasn’t about me. It was what my mom needed. My triumphs and my failures were not my own—they were strict reflections of my parents, of their choices, of their need for my education and upbringing to be meaningful.
Because it’s not just the sins of the father that are visited even to the 9th and 10th generation, it’s the dreams too. The desires. The little hurts we hold and cherish in our hearts, the things we wish we were not, that which we cannot forgive ourselves for, and therefore cannot tolerate in others. We give kids not just the consequences of our choices, but the weight of meaning placed on them.
A kid who wakes up one day in dire internal conflict, because they are coming into the opinion that they don’t like being homeschooled by parents who sincerely believe it was God’s intention for their life.
What now is that kid supposed to think about God?
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So here is my only advice on homeschooling: the question isn’t whether you should start homeschooling, it’s how you will know you should stop. The greatest problem of education is also it’s greatest benefit: the ongoing fluidity. You do not have to decide forever. You are allowed to change your mind.
It’s also the question I ask parents: would you be willing to homeschool even if everyone thought you were a bad parent for doing so? And more importantly, would you be willing to not homeschool even if everyone thought you were a bad parent for doing so?
If the answer is no, then homeschooling isn’t about your kids.
Because God doesn’t care if you homeschool. But you do.