why?

Disclaimer: I hope I can post this with the disclaimer that the last thing I would want to do is to judge the educational choices any of my dear friends or family have made or are going to make for their children... I am just seeking here to expose the strange workings of my mind regarding this issue and to share some thoughts I have. I hope this post will be taken that way, and that no one will take any offense. Each of you that I know that read this blog, I respect the choices you have made for your children and I believe you've made those choices in good conscience and that you are thus doing what is right for your family. I'm just working these thoughts out of my head as I wrestle with the choices I've made and am making.

I have had a question tumbling around in my head for the last several days, that has tumbled around in my head off and on for a couple of years now. The question is this: Why do we send our children to school?

It is especially important to me to answer this question, since I home school. I need to have a purpose, a philosophy behind why I teach, what I teach, and the way I teach. But I would think it is relevant to every parent, really, as they make the decision to send their child into whatever educational environment as the child comes of age.

I remember as a child trying to get out of going to school, asking why I had to go and hearing the ultimate answer, after all the other answers were worn out - the one answer that I couldn't argue with: "Because it is against the law for you not to go to school." (Lucky for Mom, I didn't know about home schooling then!) I even enjoyed learning and the school environment for the most part, but I just didn't feel like getting out of bed or interacting with other people or whatever other reason a child might have for not wanting to go to school on a particular day. So I imagine children who don't enjoy learning or have other issues with school itself pester their parents with this question even more. In fact, I know several friends whose children beg to be home schooled despite their parents desire or belief that other educational options are best for them. I'm sure I would have been one of those kids if I had known about home schooling back then.

But anyway, back to my nagging question. Why do we send our children to school? To learn, obviously. Yet, as I am assembling documents to keep myself informed on standards for education, re-reading expectations and skills for my child to have mastered by the end of Kindergarten and then by the end of First Grade, I realize that intense formal education is not required to meet these goals. Some instruction is required, of course, and practice as well, in the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics, but not as many hours a day as we require our children to spend in school. In fact, most of the standards listed on these documents, I believe many of us were lucky enough to learn at home rather than in the classroom. We received valuable reinforcement and practice in classroom time, but we first heard them from parents who naturally answered our questions and showed us how.

A related question is this: Why did we decide age five or six was the right age to scoot children out of the nest and make them start "furthering themselves?" The prevailing opinion seems to place a lot of emphasis on the importance of the preschool years, even going so far as to assert that a child is best off at home with a parent during those crucial first five formative years - to the chagrin of many mothers who need to or want to go back to work. If the attachment to a parent - a consistent, responsive, reliable caregiver - is so important for the first five years, why do our priorities shift when the child turns five or six, and we decide it is now most important to have them in a structured, group learning environment for the majority of their waking hours? Why is the influence or presence of the parent no longer the top priority? What is it about school that trumps the importance of the relationship between parent and child? If unstructured play time and learning through play and exploration and life experience are so important and valuable during the preschool years, why not during the grade school years?

I guess some would say it is because a child cannot learn the things we believe they need to learn simply through play or exploration or life experience. Furthermore, the child reaches a point of maturity around age five or six that allows them to focus and tackle the job of learning. They reach a point of development where they enjoy and find satisfaction in engaging in the work of learning.

I would certainly agree with the last two statements, as I have read the child development theories on this and have seen it in my own child. But I don't find that the first statement is true. It is clear to me that children can continue to learn tremendous amounts within the context of their daily lives, even the subjects many think of as bookish and requiring a lot of seat work, with far fewer hours of formal study than school dictates. So I guess that is why it doesn't make sense to me that someone long ago decided school, as we currently know it, was the answer. I see why we choose it now - it is established, proven and convenient. And I guess it has been long enough established that most people don't question it.

There don't seem to be a lot of other people out there that think the same way about this as me. I know I am in the minority, and I get strange looks if I bring these sort of thoughts up for discussion. Everyone else seems to "get it" - it just makes sense that you send your child to school when they are five or six or younger. But it hasn't made sense to me so far. Even now that Jacob has reached a maturity level that allows me to picture how he would make it through the long school day and even benefit from all that it offers, I stumble over all the ideology that made me quit my job in the first place. I want to be the primary influence for my children. I want to be there when they ask life's important questions. I want to be the one experiencing life every day with them. And they seem to want to still be here with me, too. Though with Ethan's outgoing personality, he may be begging to go to school when the time comes, so we'll have to see how that goes! I don't home school primarily because I am worried about the quality of the schools or the dangers of the schools or what might be taught that would threaten our family's faith. I do it for this other reason, the ideology of attachment, I guess. (Maybe I am actually a closet practitioner of "attachment parenting"? They are also known for home schooling...)

It is interesting and often times troubling to me that the same people who would never have told me to "just go back to work!" when I was struggling with the challenges of staying home with my one-year-old or two-year-old will so readily and at times callously tell me to "you just need to send him to school!" when I struggle with challenges of being home with a four-year-old and six-year-old. When the child was one or two, they would encourage me about how worthwhile what I was doing was, how much of a difference it was going to make to the child, how it wouldn't last forever, how this type of behavior or struggle was normal and that a certain idea might help to work it out. Now, I often can't voice the difficulty or challenges of my position because I am instantly under criticism for my choice to home school. I try not to hold it against those who respond to me this way, because I know my choice seems absurd to them and it makes perfect sense to them that I would send my kids to school as soon as they are old enough. But it is still troubling when it occurs.

I guess my problem, since I home school mainly for attachment reasons, is that if I decide it is good to send the older boys to school, then why is it important for me to be home with Samuel? Sure, I love squeezing his squishy legs 100 times a day and kissing his squishy cheeks 200 times a day, and it would be heartbreaking not to be able to do that, but we could sure use the extra money I could make by working. Every second I have not been working, we have really needed the money I could have made by working. But the gut feeling that it was better for our family for me to be home drove us to keep me at home, despite the at times staggering financial effects. So, that is why these questions of "Why school?" and "Why age five?" are important to me - because they seem so inextricably linked, to me, to the question of "Why not daycare?"

The conclusion for me must be that I stay at home, and the kids - all of them - with me, for now. There may be a day when I recant this all, and it suddenly makes sense to send the older children to school for seven hours or more a day. There have definitely been days, even weeks, that I have wished desperately for the break. But my gut feeling, my belief that it is important to be home, and them home with me, has yet prevailed. I know there is a time when they will naturally want to pull away from us in order to form their own identity more clearly, a drive that seems to be most prevalent in adolescence. Maybe that is the time when it makes sense to me that the child would begin spending most of their waking hours apart from a parent, to work through these important issues of self-identity. But for now, I simply know we aren't there yet. And that is enough for now.