I grew up going to school, normal school. Public school mostly, but private school for a few years too.
My mom would drop me off first thing in the morning, sometimes before the sun came up. I would spend the next few hours sitting at a desk, bored. At lunch I would guzzle down a few cartons of milk and whatever it was that my mom packed in the crumpled-up brown paper bag that had been sitting in my locker for the past four hours.
Yes, our lives would be much easier if our kids went to school. But we wouldn’t be doing what’s right. We wouldn’t be rising to the challenge the world has presented us.
After that I would enjoy 30 minutes outside for recess and then spend the rest of the day wishing away the afternoon, dreaming of what I could be doing instead. Skateboarding, riding my bike, playing baseball, basketball, or anything else other than what I was doing.
Finally, around 3:30, my mom would come back and pick me up in front of the school. We would drive home, eat dinner together as a family, go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again. My childhood schooling was just like my wife’s and basically everyone else’s.
Cutting class
But my kids aren’t going to have that same experience or those same memories, because I’m not sending my kids to school.
We are homeschooling our kids, or rather we are just at the beginning of homeschooling our kids. They are finally old enough that people ask where they go to school. Or, if we are out and about at 10 on a Tuesday morning in October, people might ask if they have a dentist’s appointment, or if they are sick, or if school was canceled today.
“No, we homeschool.”
My wife and I always thought we would send our kids to school, because why wouldn’t we? We went to school, and we turned out fine, sort of. Back when we were in school, homeschooled kids were weird. Or at least that’s what we thought about them. Whether they actually were weird or not is another question. Maybe we were just over-socialized and too brainwashed by the system.
Maybe we were the weird ones. These days, I’m starting to think that’s it.
Hindsight is 2020
We didn’t even think about homeschooling our kids until the summer of 2020. Our kids weren’t in school yet; we didn’t even have multiple kids yet! But that was when we first started thinking about becoming those weirdos known as homeschoolers.
Why was that the moment we decidde to diverge from the “normal” school track? What was the grand impetus to think outside the box and decide to forgo the prison sentence known as public school?
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? 2020, we remember. But it wasn’t just the COVID stuff or the summer rioting and general insanity of that time.
It was everything else that had been rotting for years in the public school system. The LGBTQ alphabet soup indoctrination, the brain-numbing iPad classes that kids endure, the generally weak curriculum, and the low quality of the average gen-pop student. It’s not only the teachers or the classes that are the problem. It’s also the kids. One bad kid with an unlocked iPhone and open internet access is all it takes to screw your kid up.
A numbers game
We realized that if we send our kids to some school that doesn’t reflect our values for seven hours a day, every single day, and we somehow expect to teach our kids the values we believe over the course of the mere three hours we have together every night, we are fooling ourselves. It’s a numbers game, and we won’t be able to compete. We will lose the battle to the values they receive at school.
That was the big kicker for us. We decided to homeschool for the sake of our kids’ souls, to keep them away from the meat grinder of degenerating modern America.
Our decision to homeschool is a pragmatic one. The world is not the same as it was when we were kids. For children, it’s a worse one. We might wish it were 1994, but it’s not. We might wish that we could turn our kids over to the school system and trust that everything will be relatively fine while we go about our day at work, but we can’t.
The hard way
Our lives would be easier if we sent our kids to school. We would have more time to ourselves. The house would be so quiet most of the day. We would be able to work in peace. We would probably sit and have lunch together without being interrupted, much like we did before we had kids. We would be able to offshore our care and responsibility to someone else — the public school system.
Yes, our lives would be much easier if our kids went to school. But we wouldn’t be doing what’s right. We wouldn’t be rising to the challenge the world has presented us. We would be living in some other fantasy, thinking things are all okay, thinking it’s 1994. They’re not, and it’s not. We would be delusional, and our kids would be worse off because of it.
We can’t deny the world as it is. We have to look it square in the face. Sometimes it demands things we didn’t plan on. Sometimes it’s not the way we wish it was. “That’s how it goes when it goes that way,” as my dad used to say.
In the face of a changing world, all we can do is adapt and make the best choices we can with the information we have at the time. There’s no point in hopelessly wishing things were different from what they are. The world changed, so did our plans, and now we are homeschoolers.
The post The world changed, and now we homeschool appeared first on TheBlaze.
