Article
by Maya Schenwar, Illustrated by Aya Kakeda, appeared in issue Lost & Found; published in
2008; filed under Social commentary;
tagged children, education, homeschooling, radical parenting.
Radical “unschooling” moms are changing the
stay-at-home landscape
Not long ago, homeschooling was thought of as the
domain of hippie earth mothers letting their kids “do their own thing” or
creationist Christians shielding their kids from monkey science and premarital
sex. As recently as 1980, homeschooling was illegal in 30 states. Despite the
fact that such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Atwood, Sandra Day O’Connor,
and, um, Jennifer Love Hewitt were products of a home education, the practice
is still often seen as strange and even detrimental.
These days, homeschooling is legal across the
country, and parents are homeschooling for secular reasons as well as
faith-based ones: quality of education, freedom to travel, their kids’ special
needs, or simply a frustration with the educational system. Most significantly,
many progressive parents are taking their kids’ education into their own hands
to instill open-mindedness and social consciousness along with reading,
science, and math.
For these parents, “unschooling” is an attractive
option. In this approach to homeschooling, kids choose what they’ll study and
investigate their questions outside the confines of a classroom. In traditional
homeschooling, parents play the role of teachers, determining the curriculum,
handing out assignments, and administering tests. Unschooling parents, on the
other hand, act as facilitators, guiding their kids’ explorations. Even though
the diy approach may appeal to progressives who identify with the
anti-establishment ethos of the punk movement, homeschooling still raises
tricky questions for progressive mothers.
Namely, this one: Can women trade their careers for
their families without sacrificing a few of their feminist values—the very
values that inspired many of them to homeschool in the first place? It’s no
wonder that punk feminist moms like Kim Campbell, who has homeschooled her kids
for seven years, occasionally feel like walking oxymorons.
Despite her indie values, Campbell worries that her
economic dependence on her husband could set a bad example for her daughter. “The
first half year that we homeschooled, I had a complete identity crisis over the
matter,” she says. “At the time I knew that I was making a great decision, but
I couldn’t figure out how to square it with what I’d always considered my
feminist sensibilities.” For Campbell and a growing contingent of other
feminist unschoolers across the country, educating their kids has also been a
process of figuring out how homeschooling jibes with their feminism.
Nina Packebush, a Washington state mom of three and
self-described “radical parent,” started teaching her son at home because he
was dyslexic and had ADHD, and his school wasn’t providing the personal
attention he needed. As Packebush sought out teaching resources, she discovered
a gaping hole in standard history textbooks.
“I noticed that women and people of color were
virtually nonexistent,” Packebush says. “Don’t even try to find any mention of
lgbt people in history. One thing led to another, and soon I was homeschooling
because I was a feminist.” When her youngest child reached school age,
Packebush chose to keep her out of the classroom solely because of its
gender-biased curriculum.
Instead of using the standard Houghton Mifflin
textbooks, Packebush provides a variety of mass-market books, like Freedom’s
Children, for her kids. Beyond that, she follows where her kids’ interests
lead; unschooling emphasizes that learning opportunities can pop up at any
time. When Packebush’s older daughter became interested in zine-making, it
became their curriculum. Packebush even started up her own zine, The Edgy-Catin’
Mama.
Sarah Schira, who maintains TheDenimJumper.com, a
website for “sassy secular homeschoolers,” says that simply hanging out is one
of the best routes to consciousness building. “One of the strengths of
homeschooling is the incredible amount of time we spend together,” she says. “We
listen to the news on the radio all the time, and they hear our reactions, the
political discussions it raises. We talk a lot about societal institutions and
the role that larger, almost invisible factors play in shaping events and free
choice.”
Spending an “incredible amount of time” with your
kids is great when they’re 8 and 10, like Schira’s. But what about when they’re
12…or 17? Can homeschoolers encourage the development of their kids’ social
consciousness without dictating it? It seems that the answer comes back to
unschooling and the notion of parents as facilitators, not commanders-in-chief.
Granted, kids will always be influenced by their parents’ views, but if parents
stress self-realization as a family value, kids may be more motivated to apply
their lessons and grapple with important issues on their own terms.
That doesn’t mean that freedom can’t be a hard pill
to swallow, even for a radical parent. At 18, Packebush’s son Jason announced
that he planned to become a porn star and asked what she’d do to stop him. “Well,
I won’t see your movies,” she replied, biting back cries of rage. Eventually,
Jason lost interest in the porn-star dream, and Packebush chalked up a couple
of coolness points. “It’s important to trust your kids,” she says, “even if
they choose something that hits you right in the guts.”
As challenging and rewarding as homeschooling may be,
some don’t see it as real work. A slew of recent books, including Leslie
Bennetts’s bestseller The Feminine Mistake, argue that while stay-at-home moms,
like homeschoolers, may believe they are choosing to leave the workforce, their
decisions are actually influenced by insidious patriarchal forces. Many
homeschooling moms counter that removing themselves from the marketplace means
freeing themselves from its many sexist influences. If they have the financial
means—or the ingenuity—to opt out, they’d rather live outside the workforce.
Schira says that by rejecting the idea that success is all about money, she’s
reconceptualizing what happiness means. “I have come to recognize that I don’t
want the kind of life being offered by our culture,” she says. “I don’t want
things. I don’t want status. I want interdependence, harmony, new solutions to
old problems.”
Of course, resorting to one income brings out the
five-ton mammoth in the room: most homeschoolers are women and most of their
income providers are men. Packebush, who was married when she began
homeschooling, says that even in her “hip, alternative, feminist marriage,” she
was the one doing most of the childcare and teaching. “The vast majority of the
people doing homeschooling are women,” she says.
Often, that’s because moms want to be their family’s
primary teachers. But raising radical, revolutionary children isn’t feminist if
the mom’s individuality is getting lost in the lives of her kids. It’s tough
for homeschooling mothers to maintain their free time. Forums for homeschoolers
abound with tips for dealing with burnout. The workload can be overwhelming,
and even with a “fuck money” attitude, it’s natural to feel undercompensated at
times. Homeschooling mothers must negotiate a fine line between protesting
capitalism and becoming unpaid labor.
Considering progressive parents’ efforts to break
with capitalism—spending less, living alternatively, working cooperatively—it
makes sense that many homeschoolers don’t want their kids going anywhere near
the mainstream school system. For Coleen Murphy, a New Orleans mom who was
homeschooled herself, the negative social aspects of public education are a
major reason she homeschools her two young boys.
“I see the school system as largely reinforcing the
very worst aspects of societal norms, such as classism, racism, sexism, and
good old mean-spiritedness, while limiting or removing access and opportunities
to experience the best of what happens when human beings come together—acting
with compassion; helping others because your help is needed, rather than to win
some gold stars or other false rewards; asking questions because we want to
know the answers rather than in order to display which of us knows the most how
to please authority figures.”
Along with the question of self-expression comes
gender expression and unschooled kids are prone to ignoring (or at least toning
down) the gender distinctions that rule most schools. Take Diana, a
homeschooled 17-year-old from New Haven, Connecticut, who swears by Kate
Bornstein’s book Gender Outlaw and is very grateful to have missed out on the
school social scene. “Not going to high school or middle school, I’ve never had
that onslaught of pressure to do all sorts of pointless competitive things,
like lose my virginity before I wanted to, or be sexy so men will like me, or
be queer for the enjoyment of an audience,” she says.
Avoiding homophobia is central to many parents’
decision to homeschool. Packebush thinks queer, feminist homeschooling is on
the rise because parents see it as an escape from the rampant sexism,
homophobia, and transphobia of public schools. “Gender construction is one of
the biggest reasons I keep my kids out of school.”
Unschoolers’ conceptions of gender are shaped not
only by their open-minded parents, but also by their immediate environment.
Having fewer kids around may mean less of a tendency to stereotype by gender or
other handy labels. On the other hand, most schools also bring together
individuals from different backgrounds, and although the routine clashes based
on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation can make a mainstream school a
shitty place to be, that diversity can also be instructive. It’s easy to be
color-blind when you’re not exposed to racism; it’s easy to “ignore” gender
when you’re not confronted with sexism. Getting to know a varied group of
people at a young age—and seeing how discrimination impacts everyone—could
build awareness of the conflicts inherent in our society.
For this reason, many feminist homeschoolers make a
concerted effort to expose their kids to a diverse crowd. Though many
homeschoolers roll their eyes at the most prominent pop-culture depiction of a
homeschooled kid—Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls—Jesse Cordes Selbin, a
19-year-old who was homeschooled for seven years, says she identifies with her.
Selbin spent a considerable portion of her teens in Sweden and says interacting
with a wider world helped her put the often-brutal social scene of many schools
in perspective. “My parents homeschooled me so that I could get more experience
in the world, not so that I could shelter myself from it.”
As the feminist homeschooling movement gains
momentum, mothers will increasingly be faced with tough, identity-defining
questions: Does being a feminist mean you have to have a paid job? What does it
mean to raise a feminist kid? Is there a feminist definition of success, and
should there be? It’s important to keep in mind that a homeschooling mom is
many things besides a homeschooling mom—even if she can’t stop talking about
her kid’s latest papier-mâché dinosaur. Forging these more complex identities
entails recognizing all the hats they wear besides “homeschooler.” Packebush is
a zinester, Schira is a webmaster and writer, and so on. They’re Marxists, or
anarchists, or punks, or please-don’t-define-me-the-reason-I-homeschool-is-to-get-away-from-this-label-slapping-bullshit
human beings.
As for Kim Campbell, she’s still unschooling and
still fighting critics of her decision with a vengeance. When others question
whether her decision to “stop working” is feminist, she responds, “Honey, you
don’t know from work!”
Maya Schenwar is a reporter
for Truthout.org, and was a contributing editor for Punk Planet magazine
until its recent demise. She lives in Chicago and still has nightmares about
middle school.
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