Feral Fridays: Rantin' at the Homeschool Haters!

This post is written by our special guest, Wanda Vesana, guru of the new Feral Homeschooling movement. You can read more about her here. She is mom to two lovely, well-behaved and multi-talented little angels, son Silas and daughter Verna.

Blogger Karen has a post she wrote  that got me thinking.  She found a rant against homeschooling on a blog written by some smarty-pants know-it-all teacher.  And Karen went through their top-ten reasons for mocking homeschooling, and wrote a rebuttal for each point.  Now, Karen, I don't mean any offense, none at all, but really, your post was thoughtful, intelligent, and well-written. That may be why it's so popular. Nevertheless, I thought I'd write my own responses to Ms. Smarty Pants, just for kicks. To give the Feral Homeschooling take on things.  Quotes from the annoying teacher are in italics.

10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled.

Feral Homeschoolers are not exactly "geeky outsiders", from what I've seen. They tend to form howling packs.

9. Call me old-fashioned, but a students’ classroom shouldn’t also be where they eat Fruit Loops and meat loaf (not at the same time I hope). It also shouldn’t be where the family gathers to watch American Idol or to play Wii. Students–from little ones to teens–deserve a learning-focused place to study. In modern society, we call them schools.

Oh come on... what's up with the Fruit Loops and meatloaf slam?  What do you think is on the menu at school cafeterias these days? Lord, I don't know what it is. But it stinks. We were recently in a local elementary school (part of our social studies unit on discovering which of our public buildings actually have some sort of security and which don't) and walked by the candy and soda machines into the cafeteria... and found ourselves holding our noses to a really NASTY (and to me very familiar) smell. What IS that?!? Why, oh why, do all public school cafeterias smell like that, and have for untold years? And how can anyone EAT in there?! And how can anyone LEARN in that building, with that skanky, reeking stench wafting down the halls???

Anyway, we do not do school work at our kitchen table. Or eat there, for that matter. We revere Direct Experience, you know, what all those sheltered public school kids are missing while they're doing their everlasting worksheets, so we are out in the woods catching things in snares, or with our bare hands when we're lucky, skinning and gutting them, and roasting them over the campfire. Or maybe eating them raw, if we're in a hurry.  We try to keep the kitchen table clean and blood-free.

8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

Well, you may have a point there. Silas and Verna would be beacons in the darkness. As long as they didn't give the other children too many fleas. I'll have to give this some thought.

But seriously, show me a woman who says parents should make their kids into martyrs, and I'll show you a woman who is childless. Or a low-down, snaggle-toothed, scruff-bellied, ring-tailed varmint of a hypocrite!

7. God hates homeschooling. The study, done by the National Center for Education Statistics, notes that the most common reason parents gave as the most important was a desire to provide religious or moral instruction. To the homeschooling Believers out there, didn’t God say “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”? Didn’t he command, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me”? From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord to the common people. (Personally I’m agnostic, but I’m just saying…)

Look, the First Pillar of Feral Homeschooling is, the "Who cares what you think, I know I'm awesome" attitude. And now some snotty little agnostic is telling me that I should take her word for it and care what Someone thinks, Someone she doesn't actually believe in? Not bloody likely.  (Now what did I say about hypocrites?)

6. Homeschooling parent/teachers are arrogant to the point of lunacy. For real! My qualifications to teach English include a double major in English and education, two master’s degrees (education and journalism), a student teaching semester and multiple internship terms, real world experience as a writer, and years in the classroom dealing with different learning styles. So, first of all, homeschooling parent, you think you can teach English as well as me? Well, maybe you can. I’ll give you that. But there’s no way that you can teach English as well as me, and biology as well as a trained professional, and history… and Spanish… and art… and counsel for college as well as a school’s guidance counselor… and… and…

Most certified teachers focused their studies on one thing, and one thing only: crowd control. Not the particular subject that they are super passionate about (well, we can always hope- those people for whom crowd control is a passion should find their place in the corrections industry). Passionate, knowledgeable experts, joyfully passing on their enthusiasm to eager youth through teaching, are the divine exceptions, not the stereotypical teacher. My high school biology teacher, the wrestling coach, is Exibit A. He didn't know anything about biology, but he could read aloud from a textbook. Which was more than a trained monkey could do, so he got the job. The secret to great homeschooling is (as everyone who doesn't have their head firmly up their patootie knows) that one parent does not have to teach everything. Homeschooled kids do take classes outside of their living rooms. And families are free to find adults in the community who are really knowledgeable about the things their kids want to learn about, and work with them to carve out unique learning opportunities.  Like Silas' mentor, local entrepreneur Gary of The Dancing Bear Taxidermy, or Verna's idol, independent long-haul trucker Large Marge.

5. As a teacher, homeschooling kind of pisses me off. (That’s good enough for #5.)

I would say, as a homeschooler, teachers kind of piss me off, except that a good portion of my homeschooling friends ARE certified teachers. I guess they knew better than to put their own kids in that kind of environment.

4. Homeschooling could breed intolerance, and maybe even racism. Unless the student is being homeschooled at the MTV Real World house, there’s probably only one race/sexuality/background in the room. How can a young person learn to appreciate other cultures if he or she doesn’t live among them?

If we used the public school as our shining beacon of proper socialization, and had our kids on lockdown all day inside the building, this might make sense. You know, like if we segregated them by age, and made them only interact with other kids within a year of their own age, so that they learned to tune in only to a very narrowly defined peer group and ignore everyone else.  Just like they will find in real life... not!  But Feral Homeschoolers embrace the big wide world around us! We recognize no boundaries. We ignore the "No Trespassing" signs.

3. And don’t give me this “they still participate in activities with public school kids” garbage. Socialization in our grand multi-cultural experiment we call America is a process that takes more than an hour a day, a few times a week. Homeschooling, undoubtedly, leaves the child unprepared socially.

My kids are, admittedly, a bit unprepared to take the profoundly antisocial behavior they occasionally encounter from public school kids seriously. Kids that call them names tend to get the "What, are you a piece of unevolved gooey green primeval slime from the bowels of the earth?" look from them. They still have their self-esteem firmly intact.  Which I admit makes them kinda weird. And they don't care much about "fitting in" with their "peers". They are definitely marching to their own tuvan throat singers, if you know what I mean.

2. Homeschooling parents are arrogant, Part 2. According to Henry Cate, who runs the Why Homeschool blog, many highly educated, high-income parents are “probably people who are a little bit more comfortable in taking risks” in choosing a college or line of work. “The attributes that facilitate that might also facilitate them being more comfortable with home-schooling.” 

That's right, idiot, homeschoolers aren't just living to slave mindlessly for The Man. We're confident people blazing our own trails. Worship us.

1. And finally… have you met someone homeschooled? Not to hate, but they do tend to be pretty geeky***.
*** Please see the comments for thoughts on the word ‘geeky.’ But, in general, to be geeky connotes a certain inability to integrate and communicate in diverse social situations. Which, I would argue, is a likely result of being educated in an environment without peers. It’s hard to get by in such a diverse world as ours! And the more people you can hang out with the more likely you are to succeed, both in work life and real life.

I know you are, but what am I, Ms. Smarty-pants?  She obviously couldn't come up with another point, so she's just rehashing #10, "homeschooled kids are geeky".  Combined with #2, "I resent that homeschooling parents have more self-confidence than I do", the logic here is epic.  So, homeschoolers  are nervous geeks with no social skills, who are being raised by people swaggering with confidence to the point of arrogance? Whatever.  My sock monkey lifts her red bottom at you!