The Guardian discovers home schooling.
A few years ago I was very interested in home schooling and read a lot about it on the net. Not that I dreamt of not sending the girls to school and teaching them at home, but because before they started school I fantasized about supplementing what they would got thrust at them in school with some quality stuff. When my eldest daughter started school I had zero expectations of the system. This must be the reason I have been so pleasantly surprised. The state school they spend their days in isn’t bad at all. Its not that I think it is the best school in the world, far from it, but I’m satisfied, and I think they are happy there. They seem to be learning a thing or two, and even acquiring some skills of self-study.

In Israel, school is compulsory. The law probably has its roots in the early years, when a lot of poor, uneducated people came to live here (or lived here already) and sent their kids out to work instead of to school. They couldn’t be trusted to make their own choices for their children’s education (I know this sounds unpleasant, but I think you’ll agree that kids have rights too). There is, however, some sort of legal loophole that does allow for home schooling, in some cases, and there are apparently a handful of families who take advantage of this. I hear the authorities dislike it and give them a hard time.

Home schooling always comes over as sort of daring and pioneering, doesn’t it? As a parent, I always think that people, who educate their kids themselves, from beginning to end, must be wonderful, wise, patient people. The kind of parents we all want to be. I would lose patience and interest after about two minutes. I love working outside of the house. Housework bores me silly and (as a result?) I’m not very good at it. The idea of being stuck home with my kids, day in, day out, has very little appeal for me. I’m sure they’d be bored silly, as well. Home schooling obviously requires energies I just don’t possess. I think not being able to afford not to work is also rather relevant to the question of home schooling, too, don’t you? It’s obviously a rich person’s luxury.

Home schooling advocates often put an emphasis on the inability of regular schools to encourage a love of learning in children. They even go as far as to say that school stifles and destroys a child’s natural love of learning. They say it does bad things to a child’s character, or things to that affect, because of the unpleasant and unnatural atmosphere, lack of freedom and so on and so forth. This is all probably true, and makes me feel a pinch of guilt for ruining my girls’ minds by sending them to such a horrible institute. But maybe kids who don’t go to school are missing out as well.

They say “It takes a whole village to bring up a child”. Well these days most kids don’t live in a village or in any such close, nurturing community. (Actually, I know someone who grew up in a close, nurturing village that was sexually abused by family members and was thrown out when she finally found the courage to speak up, but you know what I mean…) Even extended families no longer live together and often don’t meet up on a regular basis. School is a regular, relatively stable society for kids. It’s their community. As I see it, the social side of school, for good and for bad, is much more important than the math and science kids learn there, especially in these days of readily available information. In school, children learn how to live in society. They learn that living with people is not easy, that it is full of challenges, but that it is also wonderful, interesting and exciting. They get the opportunity to meet people who are very different from them, and they learn to get along with them. Today, most of us work with other people. Learning to live with them and understand them, especially people we don’t particularly like or choose to be with, is a very important skill for life. Shielding children from anticipated unpleasantness of the social life in schools prevents them from gradually developing the ability to deal with such unpleasantness in adult life.

A reason many people give for home schooling is bullying and violence in schools today. But if you take your kids out of school because they are being bullied, or just because they don’t enjoy their social life there, you are not giving them the opportunity to deal with these problems. You are encouraging them to run away from difficulty. Of course, if you feel that your kid’s school cannot protect its wards from danger then this is not a suitable school for them, but is this a reason to write off the whole idea of schools?

A lot of people cite religion as a reason for home schooling. These are Christians wanting to avoid unwanted influences. This seems very strange to me, maybe because Judaism is such a very social religion. Judaism kept going in the Diaspora because Jews stuck together. Jewish men always studied together; first, as small children, in the “heder”, then, during youth, in the “yeshiva” and later on, as adults, together with the community, in the Rabbis’ “drashot”. This is still the religious Jewish way of life. Ten Jews are the minimum required to pray together.

My parents both stood out as Jews in predominantly Christian schools, when they were growing up. My mother even went to a Catholic convent during the war. Rather than hasting their assimilation, this experience served to sharpen their Jewish sensibilities and helped turned them into avid Zionists and then Israelis. Seeing other ways of life doesn’t necessarily encourage people to emulate them, but there is always the danger.

Erm, I seem to have lost my line of thought. Is that the time? I really must go.