The Regrets

Part Three of how home education contributed to my spiritual journey...or, actually, how my spiritual journey caused me to rethink how we homeschooled.

[Content warning: corporal punishment]

If I could homeschool again

In Parts One and Two of this three-part series, I highlighted some of the positives of our homeschooling years. But there are regrets, too.

One of my numerous former therapists (I can only afford interns, so when they move on, I see another intern) would tell me that regret doesn’t accomplish anything. It can’t change what’s already happened. And if I’ve already done what I can to repair any damage then feeling bad about the past simply makes me feel bad in the present which, in turn, tends to only negatively affect the here and now.

Still, maybe my regrets don’t have to carry negativity with them. I can acknowledge them as simply part of my story. Just like an awareness of guilt doesn’t have to lead to a loss of self-worth. When I’ve done something hurtful, I think it’s okay for me to realize that. To sit with it. To feel it. To heal what I can, while looking for ways to cause less (ideally no) harm in the future. It can even be encouraging to respond responsibly to guilt. It can show maturity and growth.

So below are things I wish I’d not done during our homeschooling years. I don’t agonize over them. But, if I knew then what I know today, I would have made different choices.

Indoctrinating

When D and I began home educating, we taught our children both the ABCs and the books of the Bible. In my daughter’s baby book, I wrote in 1992:

Today, the boys were saying the Old Testament books of the Bible and after they finished, [our daughter, who was two and a half] asked, "Say mine?” I replied, “Sure, you can,” and she said [with a toddler’s pronunciation], “Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Malachi”!! Honest! She did leave out Zechariah, but I decided not to make a big deal of it! Ha! I was really surprised. I hugged her and told her how pleased I was she had remembered so many books (pretty neat, when I’ve never even worked with her on them and the boys only repeat them once a week or so!).

When the children were a little older, we also taught them the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Question: What is the chief end of man?

Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have shared our faith with our kids. But we did more than that. We indoctrinated our children with our religious beliefs.

I recently queried an online search engine: “What is the difference between education and indoctrination?” The response:

Education teaches individuals how to think, while indoctrination teaches them what to think by requiring the uncritical acceptance of a specific set of beliefs. The key difference is that education encourages critical analysis, questioning, and open-ended discussion, whereas indoctrination discourages dissent and debate, often presenting a single, one-sided viewpoint as unquestionable fact.

For a number of years, we definitely presented “a single, one-sided viewpoint as unquestionable fact.” Thankfully, as my own education broadened and my critical thinking skills grew, I began wanting that for our children as well. In 1996, I wrote to a long-distance homeschool friend and I said: “We want our children to think for themselves and challenge us...”

When I began intently re-examining my own beliefs in the late nineties and then left the faith three or four years later, I was determined not to re-indoctrinate my children with my new worldview. When we talked about spiritual or metaphysical subjects, I would say things like: “Some Christians believe…” and “I read that certain atheists think…” and “The way I look at it at the moment is…” I also strove to not shut down my children’s thoughts, so they could freely and honestly share their opinions. And I am happy to say that my four adult children now all have their own, and sometimes differing, views about ultimate reality and their relation to it.

Damage from their early upbringing, however, has had lasting psychological scars—especially since we had taught certain doctrines when our kids were too young to process them. Those ideas got involuntarily internalized and fused with our children’s budding identities (for example, repeatedly telling them that they were sinners and deserved eternal torment). They have all struggled, to one degree or another, with some of those inculcated views.

Spanking

I’m not going to explore in detail—in this post, at least—the biblical rationale I used in the past for corporal punishment (not “sparing the rod”) or how I eventually deconstructed it (ultimately believing that the heart of Jesus’ message is nonviolence—toward oneself, others, and the planet we live on), but I will share that all four of our children, as adults, have told me how harmful the practice was to them.

Though we tried to only spank for what we considered serious offenses (our kids would say we failed at that) and we did our best to not ever spank when angry, we did unintentionally associate hitting with “love” and that proved detrimental.

I recently came across the 1978 German Bookseller’s Peace Prize Acceptance Speech of Astrid Lindgren (author of Pippi Longstocking). In her speech, she retold a story that an “old pastor’s wife” had shared. Wikipedia summarizes it like this:

When the lady was a young mother, her son had done something that, in her opinion, required severe punishment. She asked the boy to pick up a stick and bring it to her. It took a long time until the boy came back with a stone. He was crying. When he explained that he had not found a stick, but she could throw the stone at him, the mother realized what the boy must have felt. He must have thought she just wanted to hurt him, and she could also do that with a stone. She cried and hugged the child. Later, she put the stone on a shelf. It would serve her as a warning never to use violence.

Overprotecting

In a previous post, I told how we censored—or tried to censor—the music the kids listened to and the media they consumed (and how I used liquid Wite-Out to cover up topless Ancient Egyptians in our Usborne history books).

My daughter also remembers a trip to a local art museum. She said that we told her and her brothers to avoid a certain section where a certain painting hung that featured certain body parts that we certainly didn’t want them to see (we used different verbiage, of course).

Also, when we watched Star Wars: Return of the Jedi on VHS at home, we fast-forwarded through the part where Princess Leia dons a resin and urethane bikini—not because of the portrayal of sexual slavery but because we thought it showed too much skin.

I even wrote timestamps on the box that housed our Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing tape (I still have the tape), so I’d know where to jump past a few bare bottoms in a bathhouse and a brief sensual scene on a balcony.

Once grown, the kids have shared some ways that they navigated our censorship. I mentioned a couple of their solutions in my post linked above. Another example: my daughter said that, at the art museum, she made sure to find that certain work of art in the provided audio guide and she covertly listened to the background information about it over and over.

What I discovered: our emphasis on avoiding “sinful” content caused a hyper-fixation of that content—which was the very opposite of our goal. Like the time D was watching Terminator 2 in the living room and our daughter (age ten at the time) joined him. Usually, he would have her go play in another room, but that time he didn’t. I walked in from the kitchen, saw what was on the screen, and said, “You shouldn’t let her watch that. It has bad language” (again, note that I was worried more about a few cuss words than I was the intense violence). D replied, “She doesn’t know what they mean. They go right over her head.” And our daughter now says he was correct until that brief exchange. From then on, she paid close attention to words she didn’t understand because she wanted to know what the “bad” ones were.

As our children got older, we became less overprotective (also talked about here and here). So when our daughter was 15 and wanted to see The Hours (a film about author, Virginia Woolf, which contained mature themes), we watched it together and I’m glad we did. It opened the door to a number of important conversations.

If I could have a redo, though, I would be more relaxed from the beginning—which is not to say I wouldn’t be protective at all (I would not purposefully show young children The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). But, if the kids did stumble upon mature material, I would hope not to freak out about it.

Homeschooling too long

In 2003, when D and I separated permanently, our oldest child was 18, had already graduated from our homeschool high school, and was set to attend a local college that fall. Our second son, age 16, was well into his Teenage Liberation Handbook stage, and needed less from me. But our daughter, age 13, and our youngest son, 12, still needed concentrated time and attention, and I couldn’t give it to them because I had to find employment—first as a part-time receptionist then, a few months later and at the same company, as a full-time accounts receivable clerk.

But I was afraid to put our youngest two children in public school (there was no way we could afford private). By that time, it wasn’t due to religious reasons; it was mostly because I was afraid they’d be picked on for being different (not many middle schoolers quote Shakespeare for fun) or would be branded as “behind” because they learned at their own pace.

Once I started working outside the home, however, I was not able to adequately provide my kids with the learning atmosphere they deserved. Others may be able to successfully do both. I could not.

Even so, I didn’t put them in school, and we floundered through the next few years. Granted, if they had gone to school, I might now regret the consequences of that decision. All I know is that both our daughter and youngest son have had to work hard as adults to make up for academic skills they did not get at home.

On a positive note…

To end this look at our homeschool experience, I’ll share a memory that I do not regret.

When our second son was in his teens, he was already a guitarist, drummer, and composer. He (and I) felt he was destined for a career in music. But then, he decided he’d rather focus almost solely on sword fighting. I thought, “Sword fighting?! What kind of future is there in that?” I was conflicted about encouraging him.

One night we had a long talk. My son shared that he would always love music but, in that moment, the thing he was most passionate about, the thing he wanted to throw himself into was 17th Century swordsmanship. I had to remind myself that my parenting philosophy was “provide don’t push.” I would make resources available, help when help was asked for, and give moral support.

So, instead of music theory, he studied Paradoxes of Defense by George Silver and compared the techniques of the English and Italian schools in the 1600’s. He also took acting lessons and learned stage fighting.

After graduating high school, our second son was hired at a local museum to write and perform narratives based on historical figures and give demonstrations of sword fighting in the Late Middle Ages. That led to developing educational programs for secondary students, as well as becoming the Fight Director for our state’s Shakespeare company. He has now been a beloved actor and fight choreographer in our city for over 20 years. I’m glad I didn’t stand in his way.

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