I recently finished listening to John Holt’s How Children Learn, the 50th anniversary edition. It was an Audible purchase I made on a whim, but I’m glad I did. Holt (not the reggae singer) was a disillusioned public school teacher who wrote a book previous to this called How Children Fail, which sparked a debate in the 1960’s. By the time he had released his second book, (this one) he was already expressing disappointment in how little had changed in the public school system after a promising upheaval.

I was so inspired by what he had to say, which mostly amounted to close observation of young children who have not yet been schooled, or who have had little schooling. It is literally a study in how children learn. I am eager to read How Children Fail to see how he approaches that subject. His insight is life changing, both as I reflect on my own education and what I know of my husband’s, and as I evaluate my preconceived notions of what my own children should be doing as I am homeschooling them. His insight into the type of research that was being done on children at the time (upon which many of our current practices and values are based) is pure gold.

My takeaway was that people mostly teach themselves anything they want to learn, and that they mostly do it in spite of what someone else is trying to teach them, unless the teaching is very pointed and practical for their needs at any given moment. Holt was dismayed at the increase in testing 30 years ago, despite his work as a teacher trying to help the system move the other way. I wonder what he would think now? His conviction is that all school mostly does is grind any spark of creativity out of kids, so that as adults they have stopped trying to learn anything. Unless they are very stubborn and exceptional people.

Don’t take my word for it. Definitely read him for yourself.

I think what he’s saying is true. What he writes resonates with what I’ve read of Charlotte Mason and with my own experience, especially in learning to teach my children.

Sometimes, like the other day when I went to get my hair cut, people are astonished when I tell them I have four children. “That’s so many kids! Oh my gosh.” My hairstylist wasn’t chiding, but she was genuinely taken aback. 

I wonder what she would have said if I’d told her I wasn’t necessarily done. 

It’s a hard pill for some of my family members who know it to swallow as well. My last pregnancy was very difficult, as was the treatment and induction at the hospital, and the recovery. If things had gone differently, I could have died. It was not a great situation. 

I understand their concern. They treat me like the adult I am, and we’re not at odds about it. There’s a legitimate question that I ask too: where’s the line? How much danger do you allow yourself to be in for the sake of bearing another child? The answer to that question for you probably rests on what you believe about reality, as does mine. 

The comments and advice I get, as well as the soul-searching conversations I’ve had about homeschooling are in a similar vein. I am around plenty of other children, and I know mine are all extremely strong willed. They all act like first-borns, which shouldn’t surprise me since they have two pretty fiery first-borns as parents. God help them. They are – some more than others – utterly exhausting at times. There are some personality traits that are a cross to bear, some learning difficulties that have me stumped. 

It’s hard, hard work being a mother. I can’t even tell you what it is to try to figure out their learning needs because I have so little with which to compare it. It’s more than hard. I have doubted myself and my choices for as long as I have been making them. Should we get him evaluated? Should we get put him in preschool? Should we put him in kindergarten? Should we this, should we that? Am I ruining his life by keeping him at home with me? Setting him up for failure whenever he joins the world? 

When everyone around you is doing the same, different thing from what you believe to be right (Some of it, right for us. Some of it, I will admit, I think is just right, period), it can be confusing. And when the answer everyone seems to want to give you is to send him to school, to stop making such a big deal of it, to just admit you’re not a teacher and those are the only moms who are successful at homeschooling, it can feel crippling.

But I am stubborn and headstrong. It’s a thing I didn’t know about myself until lately. I’m proud of it, in this instance.

I remember so vividly the time in my friend Emily’s life when she had four small children, whom she was homeschooling. Brilliant Emily, with an Ivy League education, who could have made more money and had more prestige in her lifetime than I will ever see. She had chosen, instead, a life of bearing children (Emily has 8 of them now!), and she was in a health crisis. They were paying me to make dinner for them so she could have some space to focus on her health. It was such a sweet time for me, and Emily is a kindred spirit. 

I remember her telling me how the people close to her were telling her to stop having children. They couldn’t understand why she would persist. You’re sick, they would say to her, you’re depressed. It’s obvious what you should do. 

Here’s what I think it often amounts to, this good faith permission to give up: it’s a denial of suffering. It’s a denial of the truth that we all must suffer some things. We all die, we all suffer. It’s a denial of the good of suffering; that it produces patience, perseverance, character, hope. 

And I think, ultimately, that kind of advice will backfire. What kind of language will it give you or your friends, what kind of symbolism, not to mention experience and fortitude for when you must suffer because you have no choice? And if you can’t even sit with someone who is suffering these relatively small discomforts for the sake of something bigger, how will you sit with someone who is suffering senselessly? What language will you have to give them? What symbols can you point them to to show them their suffering has meaning? How will you help them bear it? 

Also, how could you possibly hope to stand for what you believe in yourself if it means you will suffer? 

It’s not always so cut and dry, I realize. My friends who perhaps haven’t wanted to see me suffer through the process of homeschooling may not agree with my conclusions about education, and therefore think I am suffering unneccesarily. Or they are also afraid for my children because they think I may fail them. I wouldn’t fault them for that, it’s a mark of character. Or they could be simply tired of hearing me process the same fears over and over, or rightly see that I am complaining but don’t know how to tell me that’s really my problem. 

Our culture is against most kinds of suffering. We’re all for suffering the lack of a personal life and sleep to pursue an exciting or important career. And certain factions are still all about physical suffering for the sake of a better body or a better race time. Winning, in other words, is still seen as a good reason to suffer in our culture. But for other things? No, we have therapy for that. We have drugs. We have schools and daycares and contraception. We have self acceptance.  

Fewer and fewer people see suffering for the sake of bearing another child as anything but lunacy, except for in a few situations. Nobody thinks the mother who has four children already, and who is likely to be in danger if she gets pregnant again, is doing anything noble by having a 5th child. I am likely to suffer, if I do, both in body and in spirit from the knowledge that many people think I am crazy or don’t approve. My friends and family won’t stop loving me, but they may not understand. Even if this is so, I still count myself very lucky.

It’s similar with my decision to keep homeschooling, especially when my kids don’t hit the “right” benchmarks at the right times; when they compare unfavorably with my peers’ kids in the wrong ways. And on top of that I am tired, I am sometimes confused, we don’t have a second income, and I am overweight because I am neglecting myself. Making changes to any of those things while also caring for a baby (and other children) is nigh on impossible.

My friend Emily persisted. She does persist. And I’ll tell you this: because she allowed herself to suffer rather than use an easy out, she has a depth and a wealth to give to me and to the world. Her season of bearing and raising children is relatively short in the span of her life. But think of all she has learned how to give when that’s done! It has changed her, irrevocably, for the better. Not to mention, in this case, the many beautiful souls her suffering has brought into the world. 

I think maybe we see someone suffering like that and think it’s going to break them. Maybe they’ll get divorced. Maybe they’ll get sick.  It’s a real fear in this broken world. But maybe it’s because we have so little imagination for suffering – for what comes after. Yes, it does make some people brittle. It does lasting, terrible effects in some cases. I don’t think I have all the answers for suffering. 

I guess I’m just saying that sometimes the most helpful thing is not advice or a solution. Sometimes, when you see someone suffering – even if it’s for something that makes no sense to you, and especially if it’s someone you love – the best thing you can do is allow them to suffer. Allow that they are suffering, and there’s no way through it but through it. When you want to give someone an out, it may be more for your sake than for theirs because it’s hard to watch someone suffer. It also takes humility.

I’ve seen in several places recently, a false and damaging idea repeated about what courage is and how it works. It goes something like this: there is some man or woman out in the world who, being placed in a sphere of influence or at an intersection with a group of people who disagree with him, holds an unpopular opinion and refuses to back down. The commentator upon this scene gives the opinion that this person ought to have shown courage by capitulating to the group, or that the group in fact showed courage by standing up for what’s right. Inevitably, the situation ends with nothing going the dissenter’s way. He has stood for what he believes to be true to no avail. In the opinion of the observer, truth and righteousness have prevailed and the dissenter deserves to be cast by the wayside, along with his unfortunate opinions. The courageous mob lives to fight the next battle. 

If I had only encountered this idea in one place, I would have laughed it off, but I’ve seen it over and over in the last several months: this legend of the “courage” it takes to be on the winning side. It’s always about some current cultural battle: arguments over gay rights or white privilege, for example. Never mind how laughable it is that a pro gay rights or anti-racist agenda could conceivably be considered the underdog position in this country, just leave aside what the scene is about and focus on who is doing what in which place. Can you honestly tell me that one man, standing alone against a mob is exhibiting cowardice? Or that a mob, speaking the widely accepted cultural narrative for which they will receive no blowback whatsoever, is exhibiting courage? 

No, friend. Disagree with the man if you will, but he is no coward. It takes a lot of courage to do what he did. 

I was reminded of this the other day when this quote about Saruman came on as we were listening to the Two Towers: 

“anyway I think he has not much grit, not much plain courage alone in a tight place without a lot of slaves and machines and things, if you know what I mean.”

The hobbits are comparing Saruman and Gandalf, both wizards. Saruman has just lost his bid to try to capture the ring by sending a band of his orcs to kidnap two hobbits (whom he hopes are the hobbits with the ring, but alas, are not) and attacking the stronghold of Rohan with his enormous orc army. While Gandalf, after being sent back from the dead after his battle with the balrog under Moria, rides alone back and forth across the plains of Rohan to muster aid to Theoden, king of Rohan. 

C.S. Lewis says this about courage in the Screwtape Letters:

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”

I’ve been thinking about this idea as I’ve been thinking about courage lately; that courage is “the form of every virtue.” In this climate, it takes courage to be truthful about what you believe, if those beliefs in any way deviate from what is currently acceptable. Why does it take courage? Because right now, if you disagree with the racial narrative, for instance, you see the violence being done to others who have disagreed. You are seeing people get attacked online, and be alienated from their friends and family members. You’ve probably heard about people losing their jobs or being forced into racial sensitivity training at their place of work. If you disagree, you are probably scared. Telling the truth about what you believe, even if it’s counter-cultural, has real-world consequences. Just ask Bret Weinstein. 

Another example, nearer to my heart at the moment, is how much courage it takes sometimes to hope. We arrived in Birmingham on Thursday afternoon to the news that our dear friend Chris Scherf got a diagnosis for the cancer that has ravaged his body in a shockingly short period of time. He’s had it for a long time, according to his doctors, but it only took weeks for it to start shutting down his organs after he found out about it. Once it was advanced enough to cause pain, it was too advanced to cure. 

With the diagnosis came a great sense of hope; a crushing, unbearable hope. In fact, earlier in the day, word had come from MD Anderson hospital in Houston that they had looked at Chris’s sample and couldn’t make a diagnosis. They were basically giving up. They had a few more stains to look at but didn’t expect it to reveal anything new. The choice had been between a catch-all chemo or hospice.

A few hours later, Chris’s oncologist came rushing into his room and almost shouted the news: Follicular Dendritic Cell Sarcoma. And they had the chemo drugs to administer the next day. 

But. 

No one knows what will happen to Chris’s body on chemo. He’s weakened, frail, in pain all the time. It’s hard for him to eat. It’s easy to look at that and tell yourself it won’t work. It’s easier in this moment to abandon hope for his recovery because when you hope, you allow yourself to think about the good things he might have again and the good things he might be for the people who have depended on him. I hardly need to elucidate those for you. He’s young, he has a beautiful wife and four small children. He’s beloved by many, and wise, and gentle, and selfless. We want him to live. We petition God for his life from moment to moment. 

It makes the grief that much harder to bear if hope gets taken away. It’s easier not to hope. It takes courage to look that hope in the face, and to bear the potential pain of it. It takes courage to be more human rather than less – to look loss in the face and own your intentions, your mistakes, your bad feelings, and the truth of things – and hope for good anyway.

What Christians are doing is looking not only at this life, but beyond it. We believe that death has already been defeated. Did you know that in the account of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it says that people rose from the dead after Christ’s resurrection? I love that image. Some true thing was happening that couldn’t be contained, though it’s meant to come in its fullness later, after time. Life was bursting out from his resurrected body and it would not be denied. A higher reality than what we can see was showing through the cracks of this dark world.

I love Tolkien’s stories because they are full of people who have courage. Sometimes all it takes is for one man to stand against whatever is coming, knowing it could mean destruction, to give everyone around him the courage to keep going. I’m not saying Christ was doing something metaphorical. I believe He is God, and that He is alive. I believe He was ushering a higher reality into the darkness of our present world. But whatever else it was, his death took courage and all courageous deeds mirror and complete His.

Our dear friends are exhibiting great courage right now. They are staring suffering and death in the face and believing it will not end them. In fact, they are – like my favorite Tolkien characters – unchanged in their personalities, humility and humor as they endure this suffering and fear. I don’t want to suffer, but when I do, I hope to face it like this.

Two prophets

Two widows

Two boys who died

Two men of God, spread cruciform upon the dead – hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth on mouth

Breathing back the breath of life

To bring hope back from the dead.

Two desperate women, standing aside, praying for a miracle

What does it mean? 

That it was repeated, twice in a row

Elijah and Elisha

I can see his sensitive hand, still

The curious Asian curve of thumb

I can feel its heavy, warm weight in my own

I’d never held his hands

(Of course I’d never held his hands)

I think about how stark it is to die (and we are always dying)

Boundaries blur and are erased

Frailty exposed to the outside world – the mess too big to contain

We rubbed his twitching feet, we held his warm, dead hands, we kissed his distended head, we whispered in his ear

All the things we wish we would have said when he could hear us

(you are my best friend, too)

Would he have wanted it, then?

Did it matter?

In the end, I felt Jesus spread himself on top of Ray like a prophet 

I whispered it in his ear

Jesus is here. He is right on top of you. Can you feel him breathing your breath?

So near. (too near?)

In the end, we cannot keep our selves from him

He is near. 

Eye to eye, hand to hand, mouth on mouth

Breathing in death, breathing out life

In the end, even our deaths are his

What does it mean?

In our most frail. When bodies uncoil.

When we are unable to contain the blood, the piss, the spit, and the shit

He is most near. 

To bring back hope from the dead.

It’s late October, 2020. A nail biter of an election looms. We’ve been boxed out of the public sector for months, unable to go to many of our favorite places because of COVID restrictions. Many of our rights have been taken away for months on end. Our churches are closed or tightly restricted. People who formerly got along are fighting. There is violence all over the country. There’s an ideological war going on constantly. The days are getting darker.

This week, one of our best friends is in the hospital, with cancer, and his body is shutting down. He’s actually, with his wife, the legal guardian of our children in our will should we both die – a relic from when we had only one child and lived in the same state that we have yet to rectify. He’s far away, lost in a stupor of pain, unable to text or speak on the phone. Turning over in bed is painful for him. We can hold onto him only through our prayers, in our shared connection with Christ, and through his wife my dear friend Sarah. 

Four years ago at this time we were facing another contentious election. Another best friend – the godfather of our children – was in the hospital, with a cancer diagnosis that left little hope of his survival. The last time he “liked” an instagram photo of mine was on Halloween. He died on Thanksgiving Day 2016. It feels eerily, horribly familiar. While Chris’s cancer isn’t the same as Ray’s, and we expect and hope for healing and a long life so Chris can father his children, some days are very dark indeed. 

I know you all feel it right now, even if no one you love is dying. It’s a dark time indeed. Personally, I don’t think any big problems will be solved with this election. I hope some of them will, but I’m afraid of what the alternate reality holds. I’ve never lived through such a scary or helpless-feeling period of time. I know it’s the same for everyone else. 

This time last year I found out about this podcast – Amon Sul – from a fellow Tolkien nerd. He said, “it’s Orthodox priests talking about Tolkien” and I had never heard a lovelier sentence come out of anyone’s mouth. While it isn’t strictly Orthodox priests (Father Andrew has guests from the Orthodox church, academia, and even the military on the show), it’s seriously some of the most beautiful theological, symbological, and literary talk available in the world. Every episode is like:  ‘’Ah! the green smell! It is better than much sleep.”

In one of the most recent episodes, Dr. Lisa Coutras does a deep dive into the story of Turin Turambar, which, if you have read the Silmarillion, you know is a very dark story. It is a story Dr. Coutras says she finds beautiful, which is odd, but the reason is so moving. She loves the story because it’s a profound example of what she loves – and what I love – about Tolkien, and that is his sense of hope in the face of great darkness and impossible odds. 

In fact, after hearing that episode I started thinking about how on Henry’s and my first date, (Thai food in Glen Ellyn followed by a flute recital at Wheaton), I quoted to him a line I had read that day from the Silmarillion whilst eating lunch in my car on my break at the “I Sold it On eBay” store. And he cried. 

I don’t remember the story, and I can’t find it now, but I remember this line, “beyond all hope.” It’s so piercing you want to read it again and again. It’s the reason I read LOTR every year. Hope is the virtue uniting every one of Tolkien’s stories. Real hope. Hope in deepest darkness. Hope in the face of certain torture and death. Hope written by a man who lost his whole generation in the trenches of WWI; who was spared (I think, so he could help save a people yet unborn [me]) because he got sick and couldn’t fight. Mighty and mysterious is the hand that preserved JRR Tolkien and formed him into such a sword. Did he know he was a man like the heroes of his stories? Hope, that sees somehow beyond all hope. That somehow, we will come out into the light of day. 

Hope is elemental. There’s nothing similar to, but more pure than hope. You can’t reason your way to hope, nor prove to someone why you should hope. Sometimes you must choose to hope, as Aragorn does repeatedly in the face of impossible odds. Sometimes, hope is bestowed for a moment, as when Sam sees a star in the middle of Mordor and remembers that there is something beyond him and untouched by his troubles, and he is at peace.

 

Henry cried on our first date because he was a mere 2 years into his long battle with chronic fatigue syndrome and had already given up on getting answers. The quote reminded him that he could hope, and that hope was not wrong. I think sometimes we need permission to hope for the good things we want for the world and for our lives – health, wholeness, freedom from pain, children, friends, marriage, peace. Henry has not yet been healed of his illness (although he got a red-headed wife as a result of that date). He’s finally getting treatment that’s starting to help, but even if he wasn’t, hope never dies. In fact, that’s what sets us apart from the “heathen kings.” We hope. 

We hope for healing of many things in this world: cancer, stupid elections, broken relationships. And we hope for the day when the battle will be over, when all wrongs will be righted, all pain made meaningful, every tear wiped away. We hope in the face of darkness, beyond all hope.

To homeschool or not to homeschool? In years past, a stray encouragement on Facebook to parents who were thinking about it but not sure they could do it may have elicited little response. But because we’re having a moment right now, and it’s politically correct to say we should shove ALL kids in front of a screen all day to somehow protect the “rights” of SOME unfortunate kids who have no choice, it’s now highly contentious. Hasn’t everyone been saying for years that it’s a broken system for many kids? Has throwing my tax dollars at it changed anything in several generations? Haven’t we all been nail-biting over school shootings and bullying for a decade? I don’t get it, because all I want is to be encouraging to those few people out there who are trying something new.

I was homeschooled for eight years. I had an amazing Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. W. Then my first grade year was marked by almost daily bullying by a male teacher who disliked me. I think he was tired and I made life more difficult for him by finishing my work early and asking a lot of questions and having my own strong opinions. I remember him sending me to the sink in our room by myself to wash out his dirty microwavable soup cups. When I gashed my finger on the edge of one of the cans, I could feel the waves of guilt rolling off of him as he walked me down to the nurse’s office. He probably couldn’t even pinpoint why he disliked me. 

In second grade, I hung out with Annette – who knew how to read an analogue watch and had estimated the length of the track around the playground. She set a goal for us to run a mile every day by portioning out a certain number of laps around it to each recess period. I also played kissy-kissy with the boys. Mrs. Sebasty read us James And The Giant Peach. I could not wait until that time each day. I was also given a LOT of busy-work to do – mostly alphebetizing words – when I inevitably finished my work before many of the other kids. Annette was always bent over her own busy work as well; most likely quadratic equations.

When I went back to public school as a junior in high school, my experience there was similar. My health class teacher turned the speed on my treadmill up as high as it would go when he visited my P.E. class one day, which caused me to fall and scrape my knees. They oozed and wouldn’t heal for months until I debrided them myself in the bathtub. I nievely parroted “whore corps” (a popular slur for the color guard) to the band teacher – having heard it from the little brother of one of its members – in a move that would have me moping around his office for days trying to work up the nerve to apologize. His daughter was in color guard. My crowning achievement was mis-repeating a joke my friend Lindsey told in our honors English small group of four. The one Jewish kid was arguing about the Bible passage we were reading (he had been told not to argue theology, but to discuss literature). She had said, “get this Jewish kid out of here,” and we had all laughed – him included. I quipped to the whole class when the teacher repeated this instruction: “Yeah! Get This Jew Out Of Here!” 

I will never live it down. 

The overwhelming memory of my time in school is one of dehumanization. I was already prone to anxiety and depression, but the constant repetition of my days at school, being herded like cattle from one place to another in a windowless building with thousands of other depressed kids made it much worse. I made it through despite the system, and because I already had a lot going for me. I could sing, which put me in the top choir automatically and gave me an instant group of friends. And I was a good student. I quickly learned to dumb down my vocabulary and my heightened sense of morality so I could have friends. I was still the girl who got apologized to when someone else got drunk at a choir party, but what are you gonna do? 

My 8 years of being homeschooled was far from idyllic. My mom was struggling with an undiagnosed chronic illness that kept her from sleeping or eating well and left her in pain much of the time. She got down to 80 lbs at one point. My dad was moving us around and traveling half of every month sometimes, just to get that next raise and keep the family afloat financially. They felt morally obligated to educate us themselves, despite the toll it took. It would have been far easier for her not to do it all while still paying into the public education system we weren’t using. I was lonely sometimes. We have some gaps in our education. And when they put us all back in school the same year, it needed to happen for the sanity of our family. 

I’ve known I wanted to get married and have a family for a long time. Since I was a little girl. Most of my other desires have been subservient to that one. It’s not morally better than someone else’s choice, it’s just what it is. For a long time, I didn’t think I would homeschool my kids. In my 20s and early 30s I harped on all the negatives I associated with homeschooling and how I didn’t think I was cut out to be a teacher. Then I actually had children. 

It’s hard to describe what I mean when I say that, because what I knew the moment I gave birth to my first child defies description. Maybe I’ll try to write more about it someday. From that first moment, through their early childhood when I was drowning, until this day, I have had the sense that there was no going back. Until you hold that baby you’ve just pushed out of your own body, you don’t realize what a weighty thing you are doing.  You don’t realize it in pregnancy, even. All my ideas of who I planned to become and how I was going to conduct motherhood got dismantled in that moment. A new person has just entered the world through you, and he’s a real person, not an idea. And then you give up your sleep and your body and your autonomy to keep that person alive. To me, it was crazy that I would send him away from me for 6,7,8 hours a day to be shepherded by government employees a mere 5 years later. So I could do what? 

When you spend that much time with your child, so much so that you know what they want before they can say it with words, it changes you. You want the best for him. I don’t know. I guess I was just confident enough to insist that I was the best thing I could give my child. Who else on earth would be willing to give him more than I was? 

Here’s what I did get “in homeschool:” stories. Stories, stories and more stories. My mom read The Chronicles of Narnia to us and my life changed forever. My imagination exploded. My memories of that time are filled with running around outside in the woods and in our backyard exploring. Getting muddy. Inventing stupid new games. Playing Indians. Playing dress-up. I read so many books. I was reading all the time. I was also writing, without anyone prompting me to write a word. I was drawing, and painting, and sewing. I would bake a cake in the afternoon from scratch, just because. My mom didn’t pull out the pristine baking set, don a flowery apron and gather us lovingly around to let us all “help” her bake. She didn’t have to. I knew how to read and I was interested, so I did it. I also microwaved an aluminum pan for like 5 minutes and then grabbed the handle. I did get burned, but I’m still baffled that the microwave survived it.

I learned to play the piano and take care of horses. I sang in church choir and learned to play the guitar. I wrote a song or two. Those years, despite being sometimes lonely and sometimes sad and angsty, were filled with room to breathe. There was quiet and order in our house, and there was enough to do and to think about without a lot of lessons or homework. Even if I didn’t get the perfect education (what constitutes the perfect education?), I did get those priceless gifts. Not to mention, the gift of parents who stayed married and who lived according to a creed they believed outranked themselves.

I ended up being one of 12 valedictorians at my public high school. It’s silly, and I shouldn’t have been there because I wasn’t getting A’s in calculus like the other kids, but that’s just to illustrate that I kept up pretty well when I went back. I also had plenty of friends, just so you know. And then I went on to get into a very competitive college (their most competitive program, in the most competitive slot if you want to know) and aaaaaaalmost pulled off a Cum Laude (damn C in Philosophy 101. Boy problems). I wasn’t actually trying for any certain grade either. 

But you know what I would really be proud of, if I had done it? Starting my own successful business. We have come to have all these marks of success that are laid out on well-tended paths, and those are fine. It’s hard to become a doctor or a lawyer in many ways. But it takes guts to be different. It takes a lot of stamina to keep doing something people don’t understand and won’t support you in. It’s hard to stand out and flap in the breeze, not knowing if you’ll actually achieve what you’re trying to achieve; but that you believe you should be doing because it’s what you were made for. 

My mom was doing something remarkable, and I know she blames herself for the bad parts of it. I don’t think she realizes how profoundly her choice to homeschool me has shaped the way I think about the world. When I say we can be innovators I don’t mean that every family has to homeschool. It’s not feasible for my neighbor – a single mom of 5 kids who works nights as a nurse’s aid – to homeschool her kids. I know they’re unavoidably alone most of the day right now for school, and I feel for them. Some of them, the younger ones, come over to play with my kids almost every day and I’m so thankful for that.

What I mean is what I quoted in a previous post: “Genius is as ordinary as dirt.” Homeschooling is one way of getting out of the way of the genius that’s inside every human child, and/or helping it to come out. I remain firmly convinced that even such simple changes as more free play and more time outside and in nature can work wonders for kids who are having a hard time academically or emotionally. I spent enough time in and then out of school to know that most of it is busy work. No offense to the great teachers out there, but a lot of the time I spent in school was social time, or filling-up-time time. What if (just as one example) kids could interact with nature in a meaningful and personal way every day, rather than spend so much time inside and bored? And what if some of those same kids could be left with enough time outside of formal study to think about and pursue their own ideas? It’s the “accidents” of the school systems that have given us our most celebrated geniuses like Einstein. What if we are missing out on a hundred such geniuses who could have helped solve our environmental crises because we’re insisting this broken system is the only system? 

When I encourage parents who have thought about homeschooling to do it, and tell them it’s not as hard as you think it is, I am trying to “be the change,” and all that. I’m telling you from the mere first steps past the other side that you CAN do it – whether it’s homeschooling your own kids or forming a small school for your neighborhood, or helping an inner-city mom who has just HAD IT to take back the power. (I know someone who is doing this, and I am beyond amazed by the few Black mamas I know out there who are going against what all of their friends and families are doing to homeschool their children. That’s true pioneering and it’s fearsome to behold.)

I’m here to tell whoever wants to hear it that it’s worth it. Once you’ve done something hard and scary and lived through the self-doubt and the criticism and you’ve prevailed (sometimes all that means is not giving up), you feel powerful. You feel more human. You feel like you can do what you were made to do. That’s the thing I want more parents and more kids to experience. Yes, you can get a better education through homeschooling than in public school. You can also get a worse one (just saying). But the best thing about it, in my opinion, is the thing it will teach you and your kids when you do it: 

You can change your life. You can create new things. You have the power to work hard and be diligent and all sorts of opportunities will open to you. There are countless examples of this throughout history. You can innovate. You can think for yourself. There is genius inside of you, and you are not like anyone else. And yes, the world needs you. It needs the fullness of all you can be. 

*homeschool is not magic, but it can be pretty remarkable.