Introduction rant

Welcome to my first edition of the Free Range Family Blog. After feeling my last nerve finally snap upon receiving unsolicited, heated and vulgarly phrased advice telling me exactly what some stranger thought of my family and my parenting choices via the internet, I have decided to lift my voice with the rest of the few but valiant unschooling bloggers. I realize that this may do little to educate the general public or to dispel misconceptions or battle stereotypes. Still, it may entertain other unschoolers. That in itself is enough of a reason for me to tell the world about my family an our adventures together.

To begin, readers should know that I have not been a life long unschooler. My husband and I began our parenting adventure with a lot of advice from Dr. and Martha Sears. We loved attachment parenting. It fit with what we knew about human development. It felt right and it worked. Still, we fell into the kind of family dynamic that society and family told us was normal. To make a long painful story short, that did not work for anyone involved. We brought our daughter home from school in the middle of the third grade, after school officials told us we couldn’t do that. (They were wrong.) My child had been medicated since kindergarten at the strong insistence of school officials. My husband has a background in mental health and behavior management so we pushed for non-chemical interventions and were repeatedly told there were none available. It was a painful experience in which we were lied to, belittled, subtly threatened and discouraged. Our child was diagnosed ADD and we were assured that if she only tried and took enough pills, she would be a model student. After all, she was clearly a bright child. Yet in the third grade she could not read, spell or do simple math. She took uppers in the morning and afternoon and downers to sleep at night. (This is what I like to call the Judy Garland diet. Later we would discover that our child was most likely dyslexic and no pill was ever going change that. What she needed was a different way to learn.) We had enough. We decided that we might not be able to do better than the school, but we certainly could not do worse. We brought her home and we all went through a long process of deprogramming as it dawned on us how dysfunctional our own school experiences had been and how useless all the work and heartache of the past few years had been. It was like leaving a cult. I feel I should have had a sponsor. Those who have had this experience will understand. Family and friends began to ask us bizarre and ironic questions. A family member who worked night shifts told me my daughter would never have a job as an adult if I did not force her to get up by six every morning. The fact that he himself did not, never crossed his mind. We were given gloom and doom scenarios by earnest and well meaning people all along the way. Here are a few and my responses.

Your kid won’t be normal.

No shit. Have you met her parents? This kid never had a snowball’s chance in hell at being an average bear and that was never our goal as parents. Besides, who’s normal are we talking about? Are we talking local west Kentucky public school normal? Are you talking about the pregnant 14 year olds, the cutters, the Jesus Camp kids or the girls with eating disorders that dress like hookers and date meth cookers? That menagerie of mediocrity is all represented in our public school population. I met an honor student from one of our high schools who told me that she thought Haiti was a mythical place, like Mount Olympus. I corrected her and she actually thought I was joking.

Public school is nothing like High School the Musical. If you believe it is you probably also think The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is exactly what real prostitution is like and Sesame Street depicts real inner city living.

You cannot give her a well rounded education. You’d need degrees in everything!

Incorrect. Public school teachers do not all have specialized degrees in anything other than being a public school teacher. My Psychology and World Civilizations teacher in high school was primarily a football coach. Teachers are often assigned the classes they will teach based on who is available and I’ve heard teachers complain that these class assignments are sometimes given to them in late summer giving them little opportunity to prepare. It frightens me that people don’t know this. Also, there is no rule that says I must teach my child everything she wants to learn. She wanted to dance. We hooked her up with the traveling Moscow Ballet and paid for some lessons at a local studio. She wanted to sew, we brought in a professional tailor and an experienced seamstress to give lessons. But mostly we rely on learning to be a natural process that human beings are built to do. We don’t teach. We facilitate learning. It is actually a fairly easy gig and a lot of fun.

That poor child will never go to prom!!!

As I recall, prom sucked. The music was top 40 trash, my dress was gaudy and most people went for the drunken after parties and dry humping, not for the dance. My husband actually attended one prom with me and we remember laughing as we slow danced to, “The Thunder Rolled” a Garth Brookes song about spouse abuse and infidelity. We left and rented some movies instead of drinking up any more “romance” and “glamour”. The theme was Arabian Nights and there was a stuffed camel in the foyer. Nothing says “pinnacle of youth” like a stuffed camel and Garth Brookes, does it? Yeah, somehow my child will just have to survive the disappointment.

How will she achieve anything is she does not have to compete?

Competition can be fun, but it is not why people learn or how they find the person they want to be. Competition is a poor motivator for those things. We possess a natural urge to learn and to master the skills our environments require. Besides, my kid does not respond to competition. She’s rather learn Judo than play soccer because she’s more into challenging herself than someone else. That’s just who she is and no method of schooling is going to change that.

How will she learn to tolerate bullying?

She won’t and that is a good thing. Why would I want her to learn to stay in an abusive situation or a hostile workplace? We don’t need anymore adults who won’t walk away from violent and belittling circumstances. Such a lesson is unnatural and immoral. Children should not be allowed to be abusers or be abused.


How will she make friends and have a social life?

The same way adults do. You meet a variety of people of different ages and you talk to them in the real world. Being planted silently in rows like so many turnips is not the first step to a happy social life.

Won’t she be sheltered and grow up without appreciation of diversity?

Absolutely not. My child goes to Pride picnics. We live in a racially diverse neighborhood. We’re all about diversity. We’re frighteningly close to a Benaton ad. Our family interacts with a wide swath of the population. She is not restricted by age, social status, race, gender, religion etc. in who she spends her time with. Meanwhile traditional schools either by accident or design do segregate by some of those categories.

Aren’t all you homeschoolers religious zealots?

Some are. I mean, I’ve never known any to fly planes into buildings or anything, but I’ve known some homeschoolers to burn Christmas trees in protest of symbols of secular Christmas. I admit that is weird. So are some publicly schooled kids’ families. The method of education is not what makes them weird and I support their right to be whatever they feel they should be. But the majority of those who have turned away from traditional schooling are not so far out. Many are quite conservative religiously and very passionate about their faith. We are not. My hubby is an agnostic deist. I’m an atheist and we all share a natural worldview. We sometimes attend Pagan camp outs and have a plethora of religious friends who disagree with us religiously and often politically, but whom we love very much and cherish as a part of our family. In other words, we don’t treat mythology as science, we don’t do purity balls and I’m not afraid my kid will catch the gay.


I’d love to rant more but I have to wrap this up and prepare for tonight. You see, while I’ve been typing my husband and child have been working on one of our cars out in the heat. They replaced a tire and a starter. But we’re meeting a group of friends for dinner and then proceeding on to Drafenville to be extras in a Zombie movie! We’ll be up all night doing the step slide shuffle and I have to refresh them and limber up so that we’re our best as we presumably chase a young heroine through the brush to a deserted farm house. I’m not too worried; she’ll probably twist her ankle an fall. They always do. But, better safe than sorry, we should practice.

So until next time….Grrrrrr Argh…..