Homeschooling and psychologists
Jun. 9th, 2006 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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jezebelesque's rant about vaccinating kids...
I sometimes wonder if the reason why we seem to be short on really great artists/writers/composers, etc. is because they weren't given the right environment to learn in or they were medicated into a lethargy. I'm not bashing medication for depression if all other lines of treatment have been attempted and nothing else has worked, or severe mental illnesses like psychosis or schizophrenia, but I think, as a for-instance, ADHD *is* over-diagnosed and over-medicated, and I'm afraid of the same being done with Asperger's Syndrome (I have a rant planned about idiotic teenagers who wish they had AS and how they wouldn't want it if they *did* have it, but that's for another day). I mean, think about it. Imagine Emily Dickinson the great American poetess (my mom's favorite poetess and one of my favorites, too), if she were born sometime in the late 20th century; she lead a quiet, sequestered life, tending her garden and jotting down poems, but in this age, some smart-ass psychologist would be telling her, "Emily! You gotta get out more! You gotta have a social life! Join this-that-the-other club!"
Some great writer -- I think it was James Thurber the humorist -- once said that the majority of writing consists of "applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair". Considering the kind of introspective, noticing-neat-transitory-things-in-nature kind of poetry that Miss Dickinson wrote, she had to have her time to actually *NOTICE* stuff like this in order to be able to write about it. I'm not saying that this is the only way to write, but this is something I can relate to completely, and I hate it when professionals act like this way of writing/living is somehow wrong or that it's what's making me depressed. Cases in point: the nurse practitioner and the first counsellor I was seeing at Catholic Charities. These two quacks couldn't seem to get past the fact that I'd been educated differently from the majority of kids these days, when homeschooling was something that people made use of a *lot* in the 19th century. I grew up reading Laura Ingalls-Wilder's largely auto-biographical novels, in which she described how she and her sisters often did much of their schoolwork at home since the weather was too harsh for them to go out to school. Thomas Edison, who designed and patented the first practical versions of many electrical devices, was thrown out of school repeatedly since the teachers found him "stubborn and inattentive"; his mother finally took him out and helped him with his studies herself. Abraham Lincoln couldn't afford the tuition for law school, so he read every law book he could beg or borrow. Jane Austen never had *any* formal education. Kate Greenaway the illustrator (and one of my favorite artists) was sickly as a child and was taught at home with the help of a tutor. You have to work with what works for you and no one should tell you that there's something wrong about it, just because it doesn't work for them, or they can't get their head around it. I mean, hey, there's diversity in everything else -- races, colors, creeds, ethnic backgrounds, languages, etc -- what about educational backgrounds? Sadly, off the top of my head, I can only think of three health care professionals who weren't at some point down on the fact that I'd been homeschooled: one is the therapist I'm seeing now, the other is my current doctor, a lovely lady from Ireland; the third was a male doctor I'd seen about some mysterious pains I'd been having in my right side that turned out to be stress-related. There's over 3 millon homeschooled children in this country, and we're still considered wierd; granted, the attitude of the public has changed -- I can remember the days when my mother told me to try keeping the fact that I was hometaught low-key, and I in my innocence ignored her, to my chagrin when my peers would come out with idiotic things like "Isn't homeschooling illegal?"; now, if I tell people I was taught at home, I get answers like "Cool, my cousin/my niece/my next-door neighbor's kids/my galpal's kids are taught at home, too!"; I even knew a 13 year old who told me (then-age 18 and about to graduate with honors from Our Lady of the Rosary School in Bardstown, Kentucky) point-blank "I'd like to be teached [sic] at home" -- but the professionals seem to be taking their dear sweet time catching up with the non-professionals.
I don't want to seem, though, like I'm demonizing people who go to regular school and I'm putting all homeschoolers on a pedestal. I know some lazy-ass homeschoolers and some public-schoolers who are smarter than whips. It's a discipline: you have to stick with a plan of some kind, or it gets too informal. We'd set things up like a regular school, with a set schedule, plus we were using curricula from an actual school, albeit a correspondence-type school. And since we always worked with Catholic schools, I even wore a uniform of a sort: a white blouse with a plaid skirt.
And it's not like I was locked in the closet or something: I had outside activities including, at various times in my life: ballet lessons, art class, drama class, choir practise, Irish step dancing lessons, Camp Fire Girls meetings and events, attempts at 4-H meetings and a few more that have slipped my mind for the moment. I had socialization, I just wasn't thrown in with nine bzillion noisy kids every day of my life. And considering how I'm wired, that might have proved beyond problematic. I'd have been one of the outsiders, one of "the geeks" who get bullied by the popular kids, because I'd be the one who actually *CARED* about getting good grades or even about studying at all.
While we're on the subject of bullying, I got bullied at Camp Fire, by three girls each of whom were larger than I am. One of them was a heavy-set girl literally twice my then-scrawny, sixty-pound bulk. This happened on a weekly basis. If I'd had to put up with that day to day, I'd probably have cracked. I've heard of kids who begged their parents to teach them at home because they couldn't take the bullying. I read about a young man with Asperger's Syndrome who was ready to take his own life at age 12 because of the bullying he had to put up with all the time; his suicidal ideations went away after his parents took him out of school and started teaching him at home.
Also, there's this organization, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, which offers legal help to homeschooling families if the need should arise (There have been cases where some obnoxious relative/neighbor/public school official has "sicced" Child Services on otherwise healthy homeschooling families. My pet example is the Kansas family whose eight year old and six year old were outside in the yard collecting leaves for a school project one afternoon, when a social worker with a police escort swooped in and took the kids away; thankfully, the HSLDA was able to find them a good lawyer who helped them get the kids back). The day after the Columbine School massacre, their phones were swamped with calls from people wanting to know more about homeschooling, and their website's bandwidth got exceeded in a matter of a few hours. Granted, these people were in panic mode, but I hope some of them were able to make informed decisions about how their kids would be educated, and I hope that some of them made the choice to homeschool. It's not for everyone, and not everyone has the patience to do it, but I hope that more people will continue to make this choice. You really get to know your kids that way, and they can really find out who they themselves are, and what really ticks for them. I'm really glad I was hometaught, since I could go at my own pace and I had more time to examine the subjects that really caught myobssessivenessinterest. I'll be telling you all about one of those in the next entry or so...
jezebelesque's rant about vaccinating kids...I sometimes wonder if the reason why we seem to be short on really great artists/writers/composers, etc. is because they weren't given the right environment to learn in or they were medicated into a lethargy. I'm not bashing medication for depression if all other lines of treatment have been attempted and nothing else has worked, or severe mental illnesses like psychosis or schizophrenia, but I think, as a for-instance, ADHD *is* over-diagnosed and over-medicated, and I'm afraid of the same being done with Asperger's Syndrome (I have a rant planned about idiotic teenagers who wish they had AS and how they wouldn't want it if they *did* have it, but that's for another day). I mean, think about it. Imagine Emily Dickinson the great American poetess (my mom's favorite poetess and one of my favorites, too), if she were born sometime in the late 20th century; she lead a quiet, sequestered life, tending her garden and jotting down poems, but in this age, some smart-ass psychologist would be telling her, "Emily! You gotta get out more! You gotta have a social life! Join this-that-the-other club!"
Some great writer -- I think it was James Thurber the humorist -- once said that the majority of writing consists of "applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair". Considering the kind of introspective, noticing-neat-transitory-things-in-nature kind of poetry that Miss Dickinson wrote, she had to have her time to actually *NOTICE* stuff like this in order to be able to write about it. I'm not saying that this is the only way to write, but this is something I can relate to completely, and I hate it when professionals act like this way of writing/living is somehow wrong or that it's what's making me depressed. Cases in point: the nurse practitioner and the first counsellor I was seeing at Catholic Charities. These two quacks couldn't seem to get past the fact that I'd been educated differently from the majority of kids these days, when homeschooling was something that people made use of a *lot* in the 19th century. I grew up reading Laura Ingalls-Wilder's largely auto-biographical novels, in which she described how she and her sisters often did much of their schoolwork at home since the weather was too harsh for them to go out to school. Thomas Edison, who designed and patented the first practical versions of many electrical devices, was thrown out of school repeatedly since the teachers found him "stubborn and inattentive"; his mother finally took him out and helped him with his studies herself. Abraham Lincoln couldn't afford the tuition for law school, so he read every law book he could beg or borrow. Jane Austen never had *any* formal education. Kate Greenaway the illustrator (and one of my favorite artists) was sickly as a child and was taught at home with the help of a tutor. You have to work with what works for you and no one should tell you that there's something wrong about it, just because it doesn't work for them, or they can't get their head around it. I mean, hey, there's diversity in everything else -- races, colors, creeds, ethnic backgrounds, languages, etc -- what about educational backgrounds? Sadly, off the top of my head, I can only think of three health care professionals who weren't at some point down on the fact that I'd been homeschooled: one is the therapist I'm seeing now, the other is my current doctor, a lovely lady from Ireland; the third was a male doctor I'd seen about some mysterious pains I'd been having in my right side that turned out to be stress-related. There's over 3 millon homeschooled children in this country, and we're still considered wierd; granted, the attitude of the public has changed -- I can remember the days when my mother told me to try keeping the fact that I was hometaught low-key, and I in my innocence ignored her, to my chagrin when my peers would come out with idiotic things like "Isn't homeschooling illegal?"; now, if I tell people I was taught at home, I get answers like "Cool, my cousin/my niece/my next-door neighbor's kids/my galpal's kids are taught at home, too!"; I even knew a 13 year old who told me (then-age 18 and about to graduate with honors from Our Lady of the Rosary School in Bardstown, Kentucky) point-blank "I'd like to be teached [sic] at home" -- but the professionals seem to be taking their dear sweet time catching up with the non-professionals.
I don't want to seem, though, like I'm demonizing people who go to regular school and I'm putting all homeschoolers on a pedestal. I know some lazy-ass homeschoolers and some public-schoolers who are smarter than whips. It's a discipline: you have to stick with a plan of some kind, or it gets too informal. We'd set things up like a regular school, with a set schedule, plus we were using curricula from an actual school, albeit a correspondence-type school. And since we always worked with Catholic schools, I even wore a uniform of a sort: a white blouse with a plaid skirt.
And it's not like I was locked in the closet or something: I had outside activities including, at various times in my life: ballet lessons, art class, drama class, choir practise, Irish step dancing lessons, Camp Fire Girls meetings and events, attempts at 4-H meetings and a few more that have slipped my mind for the moment. I had socialization, I just wasn't thrown in with nine bzillion noisy kids every day of my life. And considering how I'm wired, that might have proved beyond problematic. I'd have been one of the outsiders, one of "the geeks" who get bullied by the popular kids, because I'd be the one who actually *CARED* about getting good grades or even about studying at all.
While we're on the subject of bullying, I got bullied at Camp Fire, by three girls each of whom were larger than I am. One of them was a heavy-set girl literally twice my then-scrawny, sixty-pound bulk. This happened on a weekly basis. If I'd had to put up with that day to day, I'd probably have cracked. I've heard of kids who begged their parents to teach them at home because they couldn't take the bullying. I read about a young man with Asperger's Syndrome who was ready to take his own life at age 12 because of the bullying he had to put up with all the time; his suicidal ideations went away after his parents took him out of school and started teaching him at home.
Also, there's this organization, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, which offers legal help to homeschooling families if the need should arise (There have been cases where some obnoxious relative/neighbor/public school official has "sicced" Child Services on otherwise healthy homeschooling families. My pet example is the Kansas family whose eight year old and six year old were outside in the yard collecting leaves for a school project one afternoon, when a social worker with a police escort swooped in and took the kids away; thankfully, the HSLDA was able to find them a good lawyer who helped them get the kids back). The day after the Columbine School massacre, their phones were swamped with calls from people wanting to know more about homeschooling, and their website's bandwidth got exceeded in a matter of a few hours. Granted, these people were in panic mode, but I hope some of them were able to make informed decisions about how their kids would be educated, and I hope that some of them made the choice to homeschool. It's not for everyone, and not everyone has the patience to do it, but I hope that more people will continue to make this choice. You really get to know your kids that way, and they can really find out who they themselves are, and what really ticks for them. I'm really glad I was hometaught, since I could go at my own pace and I had more time to examine the subjects that really caught my
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 11:10 pm (UTC)Oh, I forgot, monastic lifestyles encourage mental illnesses that can be cured by TEH HAWT SEXXORZ!!!111111 <>
no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 05:15 am (UTC)ISTM that the same thjing that drove so many fundamentalist churches to set up their own schools back in the 70s and 80s is the same thing that is driving homeschooling in the 90's and 00's: dissatisfaction with the quality of public schoool education.
My lifestyle now is very monastic. I hardly ever socialise at work. I talk almost only when I am on a call. I go to my room and hardly ever talk to my apartment mate. Life as a full fledged monastic would not be much of a change!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 05:44 am (UTC)Homeschooling is great because it gives you a lot of time for things you really want to learn and do. And I think homeschooling is great for kids who study things like music, it offers a lot of freedom.
We use HSLDA in case ignorant people try to get us in trouble.
You mentioned that a lot of great people were self-taught or homeschooled. Albert Einstein "clashed with authority and resented the school regimen, believing that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in such endeavors as strict memorization." (from wikipedia)
'Regular' schooling seems to assume that kids are all the same. They aren't and some people learn differently from others. There are probably thousands of really intelligent kids who get bad grades because they aren't getting the type of education they need.
Me personally, I get often bored with textbooks and I read them without learning. I like to learn by reading good literature. Homeschooling gives me freedom to learn in the way that suits me.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 06:43 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for this entry, it's a blessing to have someone who understands the homeschooling lifestyle :) *hugs*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 01:10 am (UTC)~Weaver