Education's Merry Jester
The Wild Card We Call Homeschooling
This fall Laura was invited to speak at the first Orthodoxy and Education Conference, hosted by the St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture. Here, on our substack, we are publishing her talk in 4 parts (to allow for time for busy moms to read and reflect), but if you would like to listen to the whole talk at one go, you can find it here, on Ancient Faith Radio.
Part 1
Education has been on my mind for a long time. As a student, I have a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a minor in Philosophy. I even pursued most of a degree in science education, but changed majors right before my pro-sem. As an educator, I have been home educating my children for the past 18 years, primarily inspired by the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason, and my oldest is now in his senior year of high school. I think watching human beings grow and develop is one of the most fascinating things there is — even the blossoming awareness of a newborn infant is something to marvel at, let alone the expansion of consciousness that happens during the developmental years. I have six children, and with each of them, I have wondered, “What exactly is happening to their consciousness throughout their years of growth and development? What is happening when they are being “educated”? What role am I playing as parent and educator as these young people discover the world and participate in it with their own awareness?”
It’s less that I have answers to these questions, and more that these questions continue to fill me with awe. What an awesome undertaking it is to raise and educate a child!
So often public discourse sets us all [homeschool parents, public and private school teachers and administrators] at odds with one another, but the truth is we all care about kids, we know that they are our future, and we want to offer them good things from the feast that is education. The idea of that feast is something I’m going to be returning to, again and again. But, more importantly, as Orthodox Christians, too, we are seeking ways to transmit the faith and to serve the children whom Christ loves and calls us to be like. There are so many good things we want to give them, and so many lessons for us all to learn.
Too often home education is cast as a negative response or rebuttal to the perceived failures and weaknesses of institutional educational options. It is a choice of last resort when the public school is too secular, too dangerous, too watered down, and a choice of last resort when private schools are financially or geographically infeasible. The very existence is home education is often considered pugnacious to people who have invested time and energy into institutional schooling methods, as a challenge to accepted ways of educating and sometimes even as a perceived insult. It certainly doesn’t need to be that way.
It’s true, some people who homeschool do so out of a perceived necessity, a scarcity mindset: “If only there were a perfect Orthodox school for all of our Orthodox kids…” you might hear someone say, as if this would solve the pesky problem of home education and release parents from an unwanted burden.
But what if there were no burden to loose?
I am an adult convert to Orthodoxy, raised in several different Protestant denominations, and I was introduced to the Orthodox Church and began attending when I was 20 and still in college. At the time, I read a lot of books, like a lot of us did, and asked a lot of questions of my very patient priest, Fr. Dmitri Oselinsky. But here’s the kicker: The pressing reasons I became Orthodox so many years ago are not the same reasons that I stay Orthodox today. Those old reasons, largely responses to my own motley Protestant upbringing, were very meaningful at the time, but ultimately I learned that I wasn’t even asking the right questions about faith and life in Christ. I knew I was missing something, but I had no context for the fullness of faith that the Orthodox Church had to offer. Coming from the western world, and the conflicts and dialectics between Protestantism and Catholicism, I believe it took me the better part of ten years to learn to think about the Christian life outside of that box. Only after a decade of living the liturgical life of the Church was I truly set free from trying to mediate the divorce of my spiritual parentage.
In much the same way, my initial motivations for homeschooling are not the reasons I continue to home educate my children today. Yes, originally I was concerned about the quality of my public schools, the characters of the children my own children would be interacting with, the lack of spiritual formation and academic rigor. And, quite honestly, I was not in a financial position where private school was an option, even if I had returned full-time to the secular work force.
But, you see, after a few years of time spent in home education, I began to realize that, just as with my faith journey, I had been asking the wrong questions and focusing on things that didn’t matter as much as I thought they did.
The truth is that homeschooling out of fear may be where some people start, but it must not be the place where people stay. There are obvious strengths in institutional schooling, and I have met many young people, both public and private schooled, who have shown me that the human race is in no worse hands than it was in previous generations. Yes, even if they use screens, or have or have not read a word of philosophy by the time they graduate. The human race continues to wrestle with the forces of this world. This generation is no exception, either in evil or in good.
One of the most important lessons that being a home educator has taught me, through experience, is that the content of the education is secondary to the relationships we are developing.
Relationships with my children, with God, with others around us — with the community, with the church, even with saints and angels — but also with ideas. You see, we are constantly relating to ideas, either making them part of us, and therefore part of the community of saints — or rejecting them as either unworthy — OR — and this is something I believed is underexplored — just not one of the ideas that is meant to currently belong to us. We aren’t God, after all — we aren’t meant to relate omnisciently or omnipresently to everything. So that means that for each of us, Good Ideas come to relate to us at the right place and right time. If this is true, then force-feeding ideas or “speeding up” education as a matter of course is really kind of a nonsense issue.
We do all of this relating in the context of living a life of learning as Charlotte Mason defined it: An atmosphere, a discipline, a life. I’m going to talk more about that phrase in my second session. But because of all of this, I came to a conclusion that might be shocking to some people: Even if the perfect Orthodox school opened up in my own town, offering all of my children a free ride, I would still choose to home educate my children.
Before I go any further, no, I don’t mean that everyone should home school, or that home education is somehow “better” than other forms of education. Neither of those things are true.
What I do mean is that home education is always, and always will be, an acceptable option, not just an option of last resort. It is so because it is a unique form of education, one that allows for a particular lifestyle and set of insights.
Part 2 of the talk, coming soon!