Civic Choices

By Missy

Several months ago, my older children saw a bumper sticker on another homeschooler’s car: "Treat your children the way you want to be treated."

It has become a tenet in our home, although I think its true meaning has been rather liberally interpreted. (ex: Chinese food. If Mom wants to be treated to Chinese food, the kids should be treated to Chinese food.)

While I appreciate their creative self-promotion, I do also honor the original intent of the message. I want my kids to expect respect from others; I don’t require blind deference to authority. Their rights, their choices, their lives deserve the same protection and regard as mine and anyone else’s.

My kids have a great gift for indignation. They can create entire crusades to forward their most recent cause and I respect that energy and passion. I think that the effective defense of personal rights and freedoms is one of the most important skills an individual can develop and I want to give them the tools needed to be heard.

We’ve only just started to get involved in local campaigns, attending a few meet-and-greets, going to debates, working the polls. Civics in action.

My children know that, in very recent history, the right to vote would have been denied to them. They know that people died in the struggle to secure that right and that the absence of that right is the absence of a voice.

My husband teaches civics and our home is filled with constant discussions about national and world events and how those events impact us and impact our freedoms and how our laws and our government impact others around the world. My husband is a pretty solid independent; to his frequent amusement and occasional frustration, I am what he and my father have described as a flaming liberal. Our discussions get very...passionate… sometimes, but there’s a lot we agree on.

We agree that all children should have access to a free, appropriate education.

We also agree that the current educational system is not appropriate nor effective.

We agree that we’re not going to sacrifice our children to a broken system just to show our support.

And, we agree that we can still work for reform even if our children are not inside the system.

I have heard many people within the Democratic party assert their absolute support for public education. They send their children to public schools to show that support. Many come from a long line of educators and feel that they would betray both their family and the system if they were to pull their children out. Others simply believe in public education as part of a political platform, even as they acknowledge that it’s failing.

My children are not a sacrifice. I’m not going to place them on some sort of crumbling altar to show a symbolic support for a system that isn’t working.

But I can work from the outside. I can send emails, I can write op-eds and letters to the editor. I can use the power of my vote and the strength of a campaign to fight. I can stage the battle on my own terms, without losing my children.

I can advocate for the rights of other children without threatening the rights of my own.

I also believe, selfishly, that we—as a homeschool community—should use whatever individual activism skills we possess to ensure that our own rights are protected. Just as I’m not willing to put my children inside a broken system, I want to maintain our current right to homeschool.

I don’t want our lives to be under constant government scrutiny and I worry that, every time a school system creates an unchallenged regulation that requires more than state law, it will spread, stretching across county lines to other school systems and ultimately seeping into our homes. School systems compare policies and tend to err on the side of stringency, and, if homeschoolers choose to simply jump through the excess hoops without question, they will add more hoops.

Inaction gives school officials a power outside of the law and, frankly, I don’t want to give the government any more leverage than it’s already taking. So, selfishly, to protect our own homeschooling freedoms, I will protest.

My children have watched me pick my battles and they’ve joined me as I’ve stepped forward and exercised my rights. They know that, in the past, freedoms weren’t guaranteed to everyone and that the only way to maintain those freedoms is to remain proactive.

They’re now choosing their own battles. My daughter supports freedom in the arts. She abhors censorship and believes that schools need to encourage more creativity and independent thought. She remembers, from her own time in school, being directed to stay within very strict parameters, even when there was no reason for the limitations, and she frequently got redirected when she wiggled outside of the boundaries.

My 6-year-old son is more concerned with his right to play. He hunts down missing basketball hoops and has started encouraging his public schooled friends and their parents to actively fight against the movement to take away recess. He also, though, attempts every few months to talk with his friends about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks; his grandparents went to segregated schools and he wants other kids to know that laws weren’t always fair and wants his friends to share in his indignation. But, his friends are little more interested in finding the basketball hoops; larger injustices are too far outside their current reality.

And my 3-year-old? His battles change by the minute. Today, he wants to be a tow truck (no, not a driver. A truck) when he grows up so he can save cars.

Missy's homeschooling journey began when she realized that the walls surrounding her daughter's classroom were too narrow; there was no room for exploration, no space for stretching. Now, she and her three children stretch and explore the world together. My blog: caffeinatedjive

Comments

[Steph]

Lovely post! Your children sound like kindred spirits of my oldest; she too has a very well developed sense of personal indignation and is passionate in defending a cause. I agree with your thoughts on public education and home schooling. I am a strong supporter of public education, but I will not squander the opportunity to do what I believe is best for my precious little ones to demonstrate that support (nor would I see any point in doing so).

[Jamie]

I have frequently made the same "my children are not a sacrifice" for a failing educational system. This is a really lovely, lovely article. Thanks

[missyridgecarter]

Thank you, Jamie and Steph! The schools in Virginia are just finishing their annual testing (SOLs) and, even with a month left of school, everyone is burned out. Somehow, education reform just leads to less innovation, less freedom, less individualized learning opportunities and a more narrow curriculum. Public education shouldn't automatically mean an assembly-line approach...