I was perhaps five years old.
I learned why my parents decided to homeschool me quite early on, and learned to parrot their rationale to others. When asked why my parents decided to homeschool me, they would typically cite, in those days, Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (KJV)
The problem with the whole thing was that the definition of “the way he should go” was, in hindsight, profoundly unclear and vague.
The brand of homeschooling I was raised under was purposeful in its vagueness. The goal was to become educated, but for what exact purpose was always elusive, at least in hindsight. Whenever I or my siblings protested or complained about our studies, my mother’s standard response was, “Fine! Drop out! Become a crackhead!”
And it was my mother driving the whole thing. Thomas Umstattd, Jr., a homeschool graduate himself, notes that fundamentalist homeschooling is matriarchal, owing largely to opinionated, activist mothers bullying their busy, overworked husbands into pursuing the lifestyle. As the husband is typically a quiet fundamentalist himself, he is sympathetic to it anyway.
But the overarching theme of my homeschool experience was to just go to school. My mother, the ever-present helicopter-mom guiding the enterprise, slowly burned out as the constant busyness of the lifestyle consumed her energies. My development of schizophrenia as a teenager likely exacerbated her eventual adoption of a new mantra: “D is for diploma!”
My mother had no vision, and my father was (and is) too busy working himself to death to supply one of his own.
My homeschooling experience was marked by orderly confusion, a sense that what my parents were doing was for the educational benefit of me and my siblings, with there also being a curious lack of interest in what precisely the end goal of the whole enterprise actually was.
My parents had rules for some things. They used to have a "Constitution for the Sweeney Home" or some such thing mounted to the wall of the kitchen. It was a small, framed, paper document, in small, unobtrusive print, which was apparently drawn up by my parents when they got married and moved into the house some thirty years ago. The one rule I recall was an unequivocal ban on all talk of divorce.
My parents had no such codified rules for their children.
Oh, there were rules alright, shifting like the sands of a beach, formulated, preached, and enforced whenever they could remember, and always vehemently and harshly. My parents are not organized people. They are not educated people. Making a sophisticated, long-term plan for how to do anything, least of all something like raising and educating their children, is beyond either of them.
They just did whatever seemed to work. This was how they (or rather, my mother) approached homeschooling.
And so there were fights, there were shouting matches, there were tantrums, and as of this writing, I, the eldest son, feel alienated from everyone around me. My next youngest sister is probably an atheist. My youngest sister is a social butterfly who caught on to my mother's burnout a few years ago and convinced her to ditch homeschooling for a hybrid program at a local community college. In terms of educational attainment, she is the most successful of all of us. I don't have anything beyond a high school diploma, for one thing.
My mother had no plan from the beginning. I recall, as a young child, attempts to set up a classroom in the basement, which did not last long. Then she taught us at the kitchen table, selecting reprehensible, vapid curriculum which taught us nothing. Then she gave up and did what, I guess, her fellow moms told her to do, which was to enroll us in a local homeschool co-op. She opted to teach us math at home, even though she was incompetent at it, as I am now today, despite fifteen years of classes, tutors, remedial courses, and tears.
And the whole time, my father just silently hovered in the background. As far as I know, he has never had an interest in how his children were educated.
He does complains a lot, however, about how my closet atheist sister openly sympathizes with the Democratic Party.
Why? Why the grief? Why the busyness? Why the meanness?
In retrospect, every decision either of my parents ever made about family life was driven by a combination of laziness and fear. Fear of government schools brainwashing their children into becoming atheists, fear of obscene, indecent books, movies, and TV shows corrupting our character, fear of letting their teenage son and daughters pursue romantic relationships of any kind for fear of STDs and unwanted pregnancies, no matter how chaste we actually were. It was all driven by fear.
And laziness. My parents are both uniformly apathetic to learning. They ostensibly want their children to be educated, but they are indifferent to educating themselves.
Or at least, my mother is.
My father has a huge collection of books in our basement. Bible commentaries, biographies, history books, books on apologetics, the odd science fiction novel... I won't complain about that. If nothing else, I became educated via my homeschool experience because of my father's quiet, personal inner life. It infected me, his son, and as I write this, I too have a huge collection of my own books, and yearn to just spend a few months doing nothing but reading.
My mother listens to audiobooks, mostly detective stories, murder mysteries, romance novels, and the odd Christian devotional nonfiction title written by the likes of Max Lucado. She does not read. She has no patience for the printed page. It's a miracle that this woman taught me to read and write herself, and that she got me into the habit of reading the Bible.
I attribute a large part of my phonics education to a kindly old woman, a family friend, who used to babysit me when I was a child. That woman, whom I'll call V, taught me to love reading. V had books on her house's shelf too, wonderful illustrated children's books about history and literature and science which I adored. V also homeschooled her children, she being the mother of a large family even more fundamentalist than mine. I will speak no more of her for the sake of her privacy.
A perverse quirk about homeschooling is that homeschool children tend to be hyperliterate, but homeschool parents tend to be subliterate. It's a classic case of leaders not practicing what they preach.
Even my dad is too worn out from staring at computer screens and barking at employees all day to read anything anymore. He watches YouTube videos.
My parents lacked (and lack) curiosity. They lack vision. They had no plan for their future or for their kids' future. They just did whatever.
My father is obsessed with the Book of Proverbs. He is convinced that it is a the greatest book of business advice ever written. He listens to excerpts of it from an online audiobook every morning.
How could he have missed Proverbs 29:18?
"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." (KJV)
Perhaps he got the "keepeth the law, happy is he" part. But not the first clause. My father is very big on keeping the law, and even acting happy at home. But he has no vision, and even now, his family is perishing.
I have schizophrenia. I have a high school diploma, and numerous failed attempts to attend college. My father does not give a flying duck. He's too busy trying to keep the family shop above water. My mother does not understand why I am unhappy still living at home while approaching the age of thirty. She gives me blank looks and talks to me the same sing-song voice she reserves for her first grade Sunday School students when I bemoan my lifelong lack of romance.
My mother still thinks of me as that five-year-old child in whom she instilled a Bible verse she cannot quote, hasn't read in years, and doesn't understand. I turned twenty-eight last October. It doesn't matter.
My parents don't want me to graduate. Ever. An empty house with just the two of them would destroy what little life they have left. They'd have to start talking to each other again, and they don't want that.
To clarify, I do not regret my homeschool experience. I regret plenty of things I have done but nothing which has happened to me.
The alternative to undisciplined homeschooling would have been disciplined public schooling, which would have been its own type of torture. If I'd gone to public school, I likely would have had my faith beaten out of me, I would have been exposed to all the evils my parents homeschooled us in order to avoid, and I also would have become a dull, uncurious ignoramus.
Plenty of my public school friends turned out just fine in life. But they are uniformly spiritual and philosophical derelicts, as shallow and subliterate as my parents, and much more boring.
I was educated in a disorderly fashion, but at least I was educated. My father abdicated his duties as a teacher and leader early on, but at least he was there. My mother's stupidity as an educational manager was successful enough to turn me into an impoverished intellectual, my middle sister into an impoverished gig-worker, and my youngest sister into a well-adjusted debutante.
But is any of that what my parents wanted for us? I have no idea. To the best of my knowledge, my parents have no idea whatsoever what they want for their children. They only know what they don't want.
The problem with what what Thomas Umstattd, Jr. calls "Fundamentalist Homeschooling" is that it is motivated by reactionism, by fear. The Fundamentalist Homeschool mother and father are motivated by fear and hatred of the culture around them, of what they see in the newspapers and TV, and now on the internet, and they desperately want to escape that, to go back to an earlier, simpler time when all was well.
It's not that there's anything wrong with homeschooling. It's just that there are plenty of ways to do it wrong. I believe it is wrong to be driven by fear.