If School Wasn't An Option
What would you do?
No one homeschools effectively because they can. They homeschool because they must.
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There’s a big push to inform parents that they can homeschool, that they can effectively teach their children. Then, that is followed up with teaching them how they can teach their own children. This post isn’t that. There are tons of resources on that.
This post offers the psychology behind homeschooling that drives people to find the “how” answers for themselves. This post answers the “why” question.
I am going to say that there are also many benefits to homeschooling which put it in the “why you might” category. This post isn’t about that either.
This post is about why parents who homeschool MUST. There’s really no nice way to say it. Most homeschoolers no longer see schooling as a reasonable, viable option. Many never did. Most homeschoolers see their first duty to protect their children and see schools today as one of the biggest threats to protect them from.
When you want to homeschool but you aren’t sure how or you don’t really have a good handle on why one would make this choice, well, you probably won’t be successful. You either won’t try or the second someone else on FB mentions the thing they did after dropping the kids off at school, you’ll start to look at their life with longing. Just like anything else you want to do successfully, it’s important to understand the mindset of people who are doing the very thing you wish to do successfully to understand what they are thinking that caused them to have success.
I know what they are thinking. I am one of those homeschool parents. Most of the time, we have eliminated the other options from our minds. If you want to be a successful homeschooler, you can’t spend your time weighing your other options or looking longingly at moms going out for coffee after dropping their kids off at school. Likewise, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you don’t look at the person with the 9-5, and tell yourself stories of all the security and comforts they attain through having a j-o-b. Instead, you realize their reality is not much different than your experience with doing things that felt absolutely wrong for you. The reality is: they are sitting at a desk most of the day, shopping on Amazon or staring at social media, pushing papers around and waiting for the clock to hit noon or 5 so they can really live. You’ve already decided that isn’t living, and you don’t want to spend the most productive hours of your life accomplishing nothing for no one but a corporate bigwig.
If you want to homeschool, you look at the reality of schools, the darker parts, the social programming and engineering of children from lovers of learning to mindless robots set up for data entry programmers to order around. You see the course of conscripted education and those elevated as leaders of it who have an agenda. For one, they convince kids that it’s noble to question their own body’s energy level, shape and design. These questions place children directly on a stark course toward medication and ultimately suicide. Schools are designed with a first priority to destroy humanity, or whatever is left of it.
If you were given the choice to drive to the grocery store with your child and calculate the savings you get by purchasing items in bulk (a homeschool math lesson) or to lock them in a prison cell with violent pedophiles, would you see that as a choice? People who homeschool successfully understand the statistics of child abuse and trusting one’s children to random strangers-or even to close friends.
Did you know that 1 in 3 girls reports being molested in America by the age of 18? 1 in 5 boys reports the same. I suspect boys report it less than girls because of the shame of speaking up. 38% of the perpetrators of molestation on boys are reportedly female. We know this is happening overwhelmingly by people the parent(s) trusted. An uncle, a friend at school, a single parent’s partner, a janitor, a person at church, an older kid in the neighborhood or a teacher. Look at that statistic. One in three children or more are being violently attacked by the age of 18. Kids are vulnerable, and their vulnerability is being exploited.
I can only come to the conclusion that too many parents are not taking their main job very seriously. Probably, they haven’t really considered these statistics. It’s ironic, too, how many moms have opinions on how to properly attach and buckle a car seat. The chances of an accident, much less one that causes harm to the child, are statistically irrelevant compared to the threat of molestation and rape.
Do you know your child’s teacher intimately? What about the rest of the school faculty your kids are exposed to on a daily basis, in bathrooms, in locker rooms? What about the other kids in the school? What about a random stranger that walks onto school property? How confident are you in the staff, not only to not perpetrate a crime (that by statistics shows that we as parents have been negligent protectors), but also in their desire, willingness, ability and plan to protect your child? Who and what do you really know?
After looking at a tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, many parents are considering for the first time, finding other arrangements for their children. It’s flashy. But, it’s rare. A school shooting like that is what most people would consider an acceptable risk and be right about it. Most news stories promote reaction (fear) over reason.
One in three children is experiencing the violence of rape every fucking day in America. This is not an acceptable risk. It’s a fucking epidemic! Where are the press agents covering that?!
This is not to say all this pedophilia is being perpetrated at schools. I’m not even saying most of it is. I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that the mindset of parents who homeschool is one with less “acceptable” blind spots.
Parents who homeschool see the school setting as a liability. It’s a loophole out of their protection. You may view the mindset of homeschool parents in their sense of duty to protect at all times as being overprotective. You might think it sounds crazy keeping kids from school because it’s a place they might be raped. But 1 in 3 kids is being raped in this country. Most molestations are perpetrated by someone the parents trusted. Apparently, it’s fucking not that crazy to consider. 1 in 3 kids are being molested in America. This is what separates homeschoolers from others. The parents who take this threat seriously suspect anyone and everyone else as a potential perpetrator. Why? Because if 1 in 3 children are being reportedly raped in America by the age of 18, that either means they are all being abused by the same person or there are a lot of fucking predators in this world.
There are a lot of predators. That’s the answer. It’s not nice to think about, but it’s reality.
A person who has sent their kids to school assuming the chances of molestation or any other forms of violence are a minimal risk versus the reward of having their children educated outside the home are prone to have more blind spots than a parent whose child has not left their side (as nature intended) since birth. We parents who homeschool don’t think of that closeness as a sacrifice. We think of it as the job description. You want to be successful at homeschooling? Stop thinking of your responsibility as a sacrifice. Throughout the course of human history, children have not spent 8 hours per day away from their parents from the age of 1, 2, 3 and so on until the recent advent of schooling. Schooling created a massive blind spot wherein parents started to outsource a majority of their child’s care and protection to relative strangers, sometimes someone they haven’t met at all until a parent/teacher conference.
A homeschool parent wouldn’t consider placing a child in that situation as anything but reckless.
The point of this submission is not to say that homeschooled children never get molested. It’s possible. However, I just can’t understand how it could be even close to as prevalent. The mindset of homeschool parents is that they are 100% responsible for their children’s safety first and foremost. Education is secondary. What education is for many homeschoolers is a completely different notion than what school confers. You can read more about that in John Holt’s book How Children Learn.
If you want to successfully homeschool, start thinking of it as the only option to protect your children. Only then, can you get a crystal clear view of the mindset of a homeschool parent to overcome any obstacles to homeschooling, to figure out how to do so no matter what, and to make whatever sacrifices you need to make without looking longingly at people with blind spots to the acceptable risk of sacrificing 1 in 3 of their kids to be protected by people they have never met before. 1 in 3.
So… school doesn’t seem like an option to me.