Homemade Love
Ken and Cathy King live with their children Billy, 10, Kenny, 6, and Edwin, 2, at Frog Holler, an organic farm near Brooklyn, MI, they started fifteen years ago. Ken and Billy make the 30-mile trip into town each Saturday to sell their produce at the Farmer's Market. Outside of the weekly trip to market, the Kings rarely leave the farm.
Instead of getting up each morning and catching a bus to school, the children spend each day playing, working and learning with their parents. Ken and Cathy believe in home education.
When they talk about what they believe in, Ken and Cathy have a way of shyly qualifying their intentions, saying, "we sound so conservative." In fact the daily work of educating their children at home is quite radical. As Gandhi said, "If we are to attain real peace in the world, we will have to begin with the children." Below the Kings talk about home education.
Education along with government is one of the most conservative forces in our society. I like this quote from Raimundo Pannikar who says that "the function of education in America is to impart purposefulness to life, a certain notion of success, which I take not only as an assault on the etymology of the word, but also as counterproductive to the purpose of education which ought to be to free the person from many sorts of conditions." What education does in this country is condition people, indoctrinate and institutionalize them, instead of freeing them.
School is competition and rational understanding and rational tools. What this civilization needs is one person whose ears are open to that other reality, the other half of the person that's been repressed while these rational institutions control life. How can you educate someone to hear this way? It's not like educating someone to be an electromagnetic engineer. Once you've made this assessment of life you can't send a kid to school and kill their spirit.
Kids embody flexibility and potential for change, and to (see KINGS page7)
KINGS
(from page 1)
leave this intact you have to work harder than if you were trying to shape them. Society's out there pounding all the time, trying to get a hold of their minds and spirits. The point is to keep their minds and spirits free. Paradoxically this involves a lot of discipline.
I read something recently in a book by an Australian woman who crossed the desert with camels ('Tracks" by Robyn Davidson). She says that " . . . to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing."
Lots of new age parents treat home education in the same way people think you can just throw out a bunch of seeds and grow plants. The plants won't grow, and kids won't either; they need lots of attention, nurturing, and care. The discipline involved in this is personal and spiritual. When we try to exercise freedom we find that we're more restricted than we think. By a certain cultivation of personal habits, people find freedom.
As far as each day goes, we don't use a rational approach or think so much in terms of content. For example, I'll be sitting around with some kids. A kid gets loud, not doing anything wrong, not anything to hurt anyone, it's just not such an aesthetic situation. But it's not wrong. Most parents don't do anything until a kid gets sassy or breaks something, and then parents step in and say the kid's done something wrong and cut back on the kid's freedom. I think that there's a proper way to be - I say that with all caution and reserve - it's almost old fashioned. I would say, sit up straight, be a little more proper, use some self-discipline. I could explain "sit up straight" rationally, maybe it's because I believe in yoga, that the energy flows better if you sit up straight, but more basically I believe in a certain sense of propriety.
It seems with this that the kids are basically happy and free, because they don't have to wander into a situation where they need to have their freedom so abruptly curtailed. Why wait for something "wrong" to happen? It seems to me that this sort of sudden discipline leads to fascist or puritanical discipline. Sometimes I remember that saying "children should be seen and not heard." It's awful, but I've come close to saying it. Everybody has to exercise a certain kind of restraint, but not have it exercised for them. For example, if we have twelve people at the table eating, everyone can't be talking and grabbing food at once. We all live in a certain environment, and that affects our freedom. To develop the moral energy to deal with this environment, people need time and space. But the kids get wild once in a while; we all do.
I feel a criticism people might have about home education is that we are just imposing our perspective on the kids, that the parents' world is the kids' only world. My response to this is that all kinds of cultural and societal forces are trying to get a hook in the kids by the time they're two. Plenty of people have visions for kids, not just their parents. Someone's going to shape them and we've all seen the result of some of that. So I'm very protective. As for having the "right" vision myself, that's the other pole. A lot of humility has to go along with what we're doing and I don't know if it's always there. But I don't think it's wrong to try to instill such a vision. I understand its limitations but I don't know what else to do. I think it would be a mistake not to try. There will be a certain amount of failure, and that's where the kid will pick up the slack. You have to have faith in the kid too.
It's a daily, moment by moment process of trying to purify our intentions, not just in terms of parenting but for those of us trying to create change in the world, and we accept that responsibility as parents too. If I can accept that it's alright to have a vision, it seems consistent to apply it to parenting.
What makes us a little different from other parents we see is that we're not afraid to parent, to take responsibility and work, instead of abnegating responsibility to society, to schools and groups. We're not afraid to discipline either. Under the guise of freedom a lot of parents in our generation have been afraid to discipline.
Another criticism levied at home education is that it doesn't expose kids to the "real world." Our response to this is that we're trying to take responsibility for what the "real" world is in a holistic way, to discipline ourselves to do it in every way we can. To work for peace or holistic health and then send your kids to school seems inconsistent.
This is such a holistic thing, what we're doing. The kids grow up a lot and then regress, it seems like a natural thing. In school there's so much peer pressure, there's no room for regressing, you have to "keep up." At market Billy can handle the stall alone. Then he and Ken will walk across to the co-op holding hands. There's a natural maturity and a natural innocence.
[Billy rides up just then in a small pedal car with Kenny not far behind on a tricycle. As we talk they have been cruising in and out of the room, driving around the house. He overhears this comment and approaches us to say, "You know how it is being at home? I don't get put in a single slot like kids at school because of my age. This car is for 3-5 year olds but here I am, 10, and I'm riding it. I can do this and I can do what older kids do and it doesn't matter how old I am."]
Most people would accept that a child goes on a journey, maybe from innocence to knowledge and possibly to higher knowledge. The question is, what happens if a kid loses innocence at an early age? Can a person go through that and still move on to higher knowledge? I know I'm making a value judgement, and it's an aesthetic judgement, but I'm just talking from my own experience. Should a person plunge so suddenly? Where's a sense of grace and symmetry in a person's life? Does life have to be such an ultra fast-paced thing where the kids are thrown in and have to sink or swim?
When I first thought of home schooling, which was when Billy was born, I thought of myself teaching and that was a mistake. I guess we're pretty radical. When interest in something is there we pursue it and find resources to find out about things. But I'm more interested in certain values, like not being afraid to learn. I want the kids to be able to work on their own, to find personal discipline. Now I'm just here with them, not a teacher. We talk a lot.
And it might sound too simple, but proper rest and nourishment are the basis of what we do. This involves staying home a (seeKINGS, page 15)
KINGS from page7
lot, eating the same food as the kids, which I guess some people might see as a sacrifice. I guess I'd call it feminism of the hearth. It sounds antiquated but you can't measure the power and strength of the home.
To do what we're doing I'd also say that it's important or even imperative to be in the country; otherwise I would be susceptible to all the complications of living in the city. I'd almost call it an absolute that kids start in a simple environment.
Being a good parent is living right and you can't hardly talk about it, it gets away from you. You do it and try to catch yourslf at mistakes. Home education is living and learning; we're all learning. As soon as education is different from life, it's an institution.