For most of my life, I've felt protective of the right of the parent to determine a child's education. I think this protectiveness comes from the fact that in U.S. law, the right to homeschool flows from the government's acknowledgement of that right of the parent. The state has an interest in seeing that children are educated, but that interest does not overshadow the fundamental right of the parent to educate their child as they see fit. This is why homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, though regulated to different degrees in different states.
For me, homeschooling meant freedom. I asked my parents' permission to homeschool. My parents told the state that my education was going in a different direction from the government-designed program. Then my parents
let me design my own program. As an adult, I realize that many critics of homeschooling are concerned about the amount of time they imagine a homeschooled student spends with their parent. Where's the room for separation? In my case, neither parent quit their job for me to homeschool, so plenty of space remained between my parents and me. Though I definitely communicated with them about what I studied, I was truly self-directed.
So I've felt strongly about the rights of the parent, but also about the value of letting the student be as self-directed as possible. Now that I'm starting an alternative school, I'm meeting all sorts of people who feel the parent should not be responsible for the child's education, because children need a place to go without their parents. I think this idea is using a different definition of "responsible for" than the one I do. In my mind, here's the model: An individual parent has the right and the responsibility to educate their child. They execute that right in a variety of ways, perhaps by sending their child to public school, selecting a private school, or developing a homeschool. In each of these models (to greater and lesser degrees), the parent delegates some of the job to someone else. But they retain their rights, and if school is going poorly for their child, they can choose a different option (ideally, anyway). So a parent choosing a democratic free school isn't saying, "I'm not responsible for my child's education." They're saying that as the steward of their child, this is the education they have chosen for that child.
That's the model (and I suspect I subconsciously adopted it because it's the legal model in the U.S.), but what I really believe is more nuanced. I believe that the role of the parent is one of ever-decreasing responsibility. A child is born and we do everything for them. For Ladybug, I held her while she slept because she couldn't even do
that without me. Before she was born, I
breathed for her, for goodness sake. Little by little, over the course of a couple decades, a parent hands over the reigns. The freedoms and responsibilities are transferred to the child. I imagine a spectrum that, taken as a whole, represents full-fledged adult responsibility and freedom. The parent begins by being responsible for most of this spectrum, and the child's portion of it grows over time. But, like I concluded in
this post, the process is messy and nonlinear, more nonlinear than the spectrum example really depicts.
What does this mean for education? That in each parent-child relationship, you have an intricate and individualized division of labor. Together, depending on how much of the spectrum the child is overseeing, the parent and child select an education for that child. They may pick over and over again, rejecting what doesn't work, honing what does. I know from forums that homeschooling parents are constantly in that honing process, throwing out the curricula their child rejected and looking for something better.
How much of the spectrum a child "should be" responsible for, and at what age, could be the defining factor in different educational philosophies. A traditional public school grants almost no autonomy, such that the idea of choosing what you study, if it occurs at all, is a novelty on a special occasion day. Radical unschoolers and proponents of free schools are going to grant the child responsibility for the whole spectrum of activities surrounding their education. This method, while terrifying to those only familiar with the traditional model, has been an effective education for many students.
I am helping to establish a free school because I believe in the power of educational options, and that many students flourish within the free school model. But I am captivated by the notion of a school that manages to exist somewhere in the middle, ceding autonomy to students as they grow into it, on an individual basis and with respect for the role of the parent in that process.
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Edit: A note to the grammar nazis out there, including beloved English profs. I am a
huge fan of the "improper" use of the pronoun "their" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. So is everyone who speaks our evolving English language. Particularly since this is a blog written in an informal tone, I will continue to make liberal use of this form/device/error. Thanks ;)
Of course, we've been reading books about sunflowers too. Life As a Sunflower was a big hit last month. Nice photography and simple text, so that it's engaging even though it's nonfiction. Then this weekend I bought To Be Like the Sun, and I'm just in love with it. Ladybug likes it too and requested three consecutive readings today. It seems to be art meets poetry meets science meets spirituality. The text is written as a little girl addressing the sunflower seed that she is planting. She notes the white stripes on the gray seed, then tells the sunflower that although she digs the hole, the seed does the real work, sunflower work, following instructions written on its heart. Lovely.
The story takes us through the seasons, and though the words are few, each page is so rich. The girl-narrator observes that the flower bud is like hands clasped around a treasure. Ladybug and I play a hand game, making tight fists like flower buds that we open up like a blooming flower. As the flower grows, the text names the parts of the plant in a simple poetic rhythm. It encourages artistic and scientific appreciation without being didactic. Ladybug has zeroed in on the word stem when we read this page. When fall comes, leaves swirl and cardinals flock to the bird feeder stocked with sunflower seeds. So Bug talks about how cardinals love to eat sunflower seeds, and she can eat sunflower seeds too. The story ends in winter, with the little girl reflecting on the tiny seed, and how hard it worked to be like the sun. Even the end pages are fun, covered in a design of scattered sunflower seeds. Bug chose to count these, so now we've integrated math into our delightful book. I guess it has everything!
