So, I am a home schooling mother..This home school journey has been an interesting one. In a country like the US, where people are in denial about the absolutely inadequate nature of the public school system, you really have to trust in yourself to venture into schooling your child at home.
There are naysayers, family, friends, people that you thought at one time believed in you and your capacity to provide your young child with most of what they need. Then once you decide to work with your own kids a home instead of subjecting them to the school system madness, you find out who really "gets" it and who is simply not living in reality. My daughter, Ka is 7 years old. She started out at 5 years learning at home with me and through various international long term stays. When we were domestic, we had the luxury of a really sweet mainly people of color home school co-op based in Oakland, Ca. This community, It Takes a Village, provided Ka and myself with the community we needed to really thrive with the home school thing. Plus, she was young and not of mandatory school age yet so it was a little less of a stringent situation.
After Ka turned 6 we decided due to my pregnancy and instability on various levels, to turn Ka over to try the school system in Clarke County Ga...She learned and gained skills and I was somewhat pleased with her development. Yet, I felt in my heart that though she had solidified her basics, like reading for example, that the school system came with a trade off, that over time would not be worth it. Just the nature of the whole system, the odd discipline techniques, focus on desk learnng,the testing, the lack of outside activities and stringent nature of the whole experience and what that would mean over time just didn't seem worth it to me. And as a native Muurish/African or Alkebulanian woman, I knew that the school system as we know it has very little to offer a child such as mine. So, we opted on homeschooling again when she entered the 2nd grade.
One of the things I love about home schooling is how deep we are able to go with whatever we feel like going into. There are no parameters to the learning, and one subject often, usually flows into another because as our brilliant ancestors understood, all knowledge and learning is One, as is everything in creation, so things such as "Subjects" just didn't really exist.
Today, Kamania and I went to the local community center where I do volunteer peer mentoring with some pre-teen youth. I was sitting with one 5th grade girl, far wiser than her years and listening to her vent about how much her own school lacked in terms of truly providing a learning environment for herself and those kids that do want an education. We live in a nice size town/city in Georgia and though it isn't a rough urban environment, lower income folks abound in the town and as is all across the US, are predominant in any public school. She expressed her sadness at how so many of the more unruly children disrupted and made it difficult for the children hungry to learn. It hurt my heart to hear her feel so frustrated with very little options. I told her to take it as a test of her own capacity to hold her center and stay grounded in chaos and extract from the environment all that she can, despite it all. It was a powerful moment for us....
And in that moment, my daughter yells to me "Mama, look, we are picking up trash!" She was so proud to be putting into action that home school discussion we had on personal responsibility and community service that we had just 2 days prior. I was a proud Mama....
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