Spread the news--stay home!

I love this Bravewriter post so much that I'm not only going to put it in my shared items sidebar, I'm going to make a post about it, however brief.

Back in the early days of home education, I read a long treatise on why parents ought to stay home, in the house, with their kids. The writer talked about rhythms and routines, modeling all kinds of life skills (plumbing and baking, creating a shopping list and sewing on buttons, filling the bird feeders and using the drill). She urged long sessions of reading aloud and leaving time for dress-ups and Legos, lying on a couch bored, face painting and knitting. She emphasized how busy-ness leads to a habit of breaking concentration, of not deeply investing in any one moment, project, or playtime because inside the child knows that that activity is about to be interrupted by another trip out the door.

With little kids, I had no trouble taking the “stay-at-home” advice to heart, though. We had one vehicle that I didn’t get to drive on week days, we didn’t own a TV, and the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented. So we stayed in, or we played on the front steps. But the pace of life, even with small kids, was slow. There were hours wasted on diaper changes, walks around the cul-de-sac, making muffins and taking naps. We read tons of picture books (took a laundry basket to the library and loaded up) and made play-doh from scratch.

And then, the world sped up. Cell phones, cable TV, Netflix (DVDs sent right to your door!), the Internet, two cars! The next thing I knew, the options of what I could do in and outside my tiny condominium with or for my kids flooded my life. Some of you only know homeschooling within that context of high-speed, 24/7 connections to All the Great Things to Do Every Day! You see and hear ads, you join email lists, you get calls from friends at any time of day. And of course, homeschooling itself has exploded in popularity in the last 20 years so there are more ways to spend your time and money than ever before (and plenty of advice that if you don’t do X, your child won’t be ready for Y!).

If you choose to homeschool, let’s put the home before school. What is home exactly?

If you choose to homeschool, let's put the home before school. That's exactly what I am trying to convey in almost every post in my blog, however inarticulately. As we've started high school, the home part of homeschooling feels beleaguered like never before. Sometimes I feel like our family is in a small dingey in an open sea. Actually, we're in a small apartment in the middle of a competitive city, but the effect is the same. Despite feeling threatened at times by the prevailing culture, I pray that I'll be able to provide some sense of refuge, some sense of space and leisure, some sense of home. And I find that more often that not, that sense of refuge comes not from doing more, but from doing less. It's harder to do less! But it's worth it.

Spread the news.