The Diosa Dotada Endeavor

The past week, the entire Maximus household has been valiantly battling the February Funk. Until a day or two ago, we were enduring an extended period with a severe lack of sunshine and everyone was feeling the effects. Cold is one thing. Cold and wet is another. But cold, wet and dreary is tough to do for a week and a half. Several of our group activities were also affected and the energy at those activities just felt off. I’m happy to report though, that the sun made a reappearance this weekend and everyone is doing much better now.

Our visit to the Museum of Printing History was lovely. It fit in well with history topics we’ve been discussing at home and with the co-op’s theme for the month of authorship and book making. Our tour was conducted by Charles Criner, the Artist-in-Residence at the museum. He was one of those rare people who seems to understand and connect with kids, even when the group contains everything from three to ten year olds. The kids got to work a Columbian iron press and print their own copies of the Declaration of Independence. Athena and I also got a peek at some Mesopotamian cylinder scrolls, an ancient Asian moveable type set, a Hindu palm leaf book, and a replica of the Book of Kells and a Gutenberg press and Bible. We finished up our study of Robert Rauschenberg and the kids and I have decided that Charles Criner will be our February Artist of the Month! Huzzah for inspiration!

Athena and I have also been digging deeper into the history of the Byzantine Empire and are listening to Lars Brownworth’s work on this area and time period. We’re using his highly popular podcast called 12 Byzantine Rulers (available online and through iTunes for free) and we’ve checked out his book, Lost to the West as an audiobook. I have known about the Byzantines and about the biggest names like Constantine, Justinian, Theodora, Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia. But there is so much more to know about those key topics and more. Lars Brownworth is an outstanding historian and story-teller, so we highly recommend his work. History Club this week involved a chapter about early Byzantine history, so Athena took a look at this mosaic, rummaged around in the dress up box and came up with a costume fit for an Empress. Dressing as the strong female leader she is currently researching has become a theme in her history studies. I was duly impressed actually. She managed to find a brown satin-ish shawl that looked remarkable similar to the mosaic. I’m a bit ahead of her in my study of the Byzantines in a vain effort to keep up with her requests for information, so I can’t wait for her to get a load of Empress Irene who played such a pivotal role in Charlemagne’s rise to power!

The entire Triad seemed awfully taken with Emily Dickinson’s nature poetry last week, so I requested some titles from the library and we were all equally delighted to turn up some new treasures. A wonderful little book, The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires has been a huge hit. The book is about a tiny white mouse named Emmaline who moves into Emily Dickinson’s house and the fictional friendship that develops between the two kindred poets. Incorporating details from the poet’s life and some of her work, the story is a wonderful way for young ones to really build a relationship with one of America’s most notable poets.

In the week to come, I am hopeful for a bit more sunshine to soak in and some delightful outings to the art museum’s next homeschool workshop and a co-op field trip to a gymnastics center before my sister arrives and Percy Jackson explodes onto the big screen.

For those of you who may be interested, I have an article addressing Robin West’s “The Harms of Homeschooling” coming out in the next issue of Home Education Magazine. You can see the preview link here. Also Home Education Magazine now has a Facebook fan page, so for those of you who are into that sort of thing, be sure to check it out!

While I was intending on writing our weekly updates at the ends of our weeks, I keep finding myself composing them in the middle.  Wednesdays seem to be a good day for me to take a breath, organize myself, review and plan.  We pick up organic food at a co-op every other Wednesday, but beyond that, this day has typically been our relaxed at-home day for almost two years now.  So here I am clickity-clacking another Wednesday update post.

Our small homeschooling co-op had what I thought was a fantastic session last week.  Everyone; kids, parents, and parents who were facilitating that day, just really seemed to be in the zone.  Everything looked to me as if it was flowing so nicely.  Apollo and Artemis explored the concept that stories have a beginning, middle and end.  Their facilitator used The Itsy, Bitsy Spider to illustrate the concept.  Then they became author-illustrators themselves and bound and created their own foam-covered and laced books.  Athena’s group discussed the history of book binding and printing.  They created balsam wood plates to make printings and also took a stab at the role of the author-illustrator.  Athena wrote her own version of The Adventures of Cinderella and enjoyed looking at the variety of examples of book binding her facilitators brought.

Our fantabulous history club got going again, venturing into the beginnings of medieval history.  Learning about and embracing the Celtic warrior ethos was beyond popular with Athena.   She’s a early Celtic warrior, not the late Celts we were studying about, but Athena is a huge fan of Boudiccia.  So painting her hair and face blue, using blue fabric markers to cover a blue t-shirt with Celtic symbols and crafting her own cardboard battle axe was as close to the perfect Friday as Athena could get!  At home we’re a few chapters ahead of the history club, so the activities work well as a review and a chance for me to gauge how much she’s retaining.  Which is plenty!

She recently asked me some questions about Beowulf and when she saw me doing some research for her, asked if we could read a little bit of the actual version instead of the kid versions.  So let me take this opportunity to say that I think Seamus Heaney’s translation just plain rocks!  Given her love of Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and the Iliad , I haven’t been too shocked that Athena’s found another epic poem to sink her brain into.  I’m looking forward to more medieval literary adventures with her the rest of this year because I have a passionate love of Arthurian legend myself.

Besides our usual language arts work, we began Michael Clay Thompson’s entry level poetry book The Music of the Hemispheres this week.  We read the pages that talk about phonics in an supremely more romantic way than any other material I’ve ever come across.  From the viewpoint of a poet, the phonetic sounds of our native tongue are identical to how a composer views musical notes.  They are sounds to be crafted into a musical masterpiece of words.  We’ve been indulging in the nature poetry of Emily Dickenson to examine how she used the sounds of the words she chose to paint pictures of the images and emotions she was writing about.  ”The Snake” is Athena’s favorite so far with it’s plethora of Ss sounds slithering through it.  She pointed out to me in the car yesterday that songs are like poems and the sounds of the words in songs work the same way.  Yes.  Yes, they do.  I listened to the radio for the rest of the day in a new light after that.

The other new addition to our adventures has been Mango Languages.  Patris Maximus occasionally brings up investing in Rosetta Stone, but I’m hesitant to do that because I’m not convinced Athena is ready to commit to a particular language given the expense involved.  At first she adored Spanish.  Then there was the Arabic phase.  And now she wants to learn Mandarin Chinese.  Awesome, kid.  Do your thing.  But not for hundreds of dollars per language.  Here’s where our public library system has ridden to the rescue.  We can access Mango for free through our library’s collection of database subscriptions and she can dig into any number of languages.  So this week, she and I have been exploring Mango Basic in Mandarin and it’s working well so far.  So if you’re looking for a language resource, check with your library and see if they have Mango.  If not, ask them to look into it and check out the demos.

I also have to mention that Athena really pushed herself at art co-op last week.  She loves art and loves to create, but has little respect for non-representational art a la Jackson Pollack (among others.)  I mean, if you want to see what I call her “stink face” just ask her how she feels about his work.  You’ll get an earful.  Well, last week we were looking at non-representational art like Pollack’s, Rothko’s and Kandinsky’s (Kandinsky is the only artist in this style she’s ever shown any toleration for!)  We were discussing how the artists used color to evoke a mood or feeling with their art.  The kids were then to choose three colors and paint their own non-representational work to express a feeling.  Athena chose boredom.  No, really.  She said she was feeling bored so she was going to paint boredom.  She got herself some red, yellow and white paint and set about to being the grumpiest artist I have ever seen.  She set her chair so it faced a (boring) wooden fence and went about flicking her paintbrush back and forth with disdain, punctuated by the occasional sigh (of boredom, I’m assuming.)  If she had said: “I don’t want to do this.” I would have told her that was fine.  I don’t force her to do the activities if she really has no interest.  But she wanted to paint.  If she had decided to ignore the assignment and paint totally representational art, I wouldn’t have said a thing.  That would have been up to her as the artist.  But she didn’t.  She chose to tackle the assignment and push herself to dive into non-representational art.  About halfway through the project time, she stopped, cocked her head to one side and told me to be quiet.  (I had been chatting nearby with another mother!  Busted!)  When I stopped and listened, I heard what she heard.  Of all things, in the middle of the afternoon, she had heard an owl!  The owl continued to call to her for a few more moments and then was quiet again.  Athena knows her blog name is Athena, so I said to her jokingly, “Your patron Goddess is talking to you!”  And she said to me, “I know.  She says stop being bored and be happy.  I’m going to paint happy on top of boredom.”  To which I said what I always say in situations like that.  I said, “Rock on with your bad self!”  And she did.  Her painting is lovely and even more importantly, she is really proud of it; proud of the painting and the process she went through as an artist.  She didn’t walk away.  She challenged herself and created something uniquely her.  This is a big step for her and her perfectionist streak.  I was delighted.  But much more importantly, so was she!

In addition to all of that craziness, we also dove back into Grammar Island, used ketchup to trigger the release of electrons from aluminum atoms, reviewed two column addition and subtraction, completed the yellow wedge of our color wheel project, spent hours creating story problems with plastic frogs on a log, played computer games, watched Disney’s Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone, rode bikes with friends and hit an afternoon story time at the library.

The rest of this week entails a trip to the Museum of Printing History, art co-op, chemistry experiments involving metals, playing with conjunctions, and reading the ninety some odd books we came home from the library with yesterday!  See you next Wednesday at the latest, I guess.

Some folks might wonder what led me to get as fired up as I did about the recent West article.  I mean, after all, the piece was relatively short and I think we can agree also poorly written.  Why even take it seriously?

Well, for two reasons.  First of all, Professor West admits that she’s working on something larger.  She has stated that this little jab at American home educators is really the tip of her proverbial legal iceberg.  Which leads me to my second motivation in calling attention to whatever Professor West is truly up to.  His name is Graham Badman.  And last year he published a report entitled, “Review of elective home education in England.” The report has thrown the British government and England’s home educators into the fiercest legislative battle that country has seen on the issue of homeschool freedoms to date.  In addition to reading the report itself, which you can access without registering at the link above, you can also find a collection of links to the various official letters and other government publications related to the Badman Review at the DCSF’s Every Child Matters site.

The report is frock with eerie similarities to the West article, even though it is significantly longer.  For example, check out this quote from Section 3 of the Badman Review:

As my introductory comments make clear, I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime that there is a correct balance between the rights of parents and the rights of the child either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm. That being said I am not in anyway arguing that elective home education is intrinsically wrong or that within the elective home education community there is not exemplary practice. Indeed, there is a strong argument to commission further research to better inform understanding of “personalisation” as an element of student progression and achievement. I shall return to this issue later.

3.2 The question is simply a matter of balance and securing the right regulatory regime within a framework of legislation that protects the rights of all children, even if in transaction such regulation is only necessary to protect a minority.

Sound familiar?  A lot like the West article  (and other US academics.)  We’re not saying some of you guys aren’t doing a bang up job and all, but we’re sure you “responsible” homeschoolers wont mind if we reasonably regulate (the heck out of) you for the sake of those other poor, persecuted children, right?  The report is also chock full of the usual fear-laden claims against the liberties of religiously motivated English home educators, despite the evidence that those home educating in the UK for primarily religious reasons are a significant minority in that country.  Nice to know we aren’t the only country continuously laboring under exhaustingly stale stereotypes about our home educating population’s primary motivations.  There is also the illustrious Section 8 on “Safeguarding” that once again attempts to link home educators with child abusers without a shred of evidence to support the idea that home educated children are at high risk for abuse than their government school attending counterparts or that ANY of the proposed regulatory measures would prevent abuse or lower child abuse rates.  Hmm.  Where have I read equally poorly supported and inflammatory claims like that before?

All in all, Badman makes twenty-eight recommendations to the British government to do away with their previously “liberal” approach to what they call EHE, or elective home education in England.  Without any of that pesky stuff called data to back up his claims that these measures will improve anything for anyone, he suggests that the government execute a hasty about face and start repressing every English home educator they can possibly get their hands on.

How you ask?  (I suspect, once again, much of this will sound familiar…)  Annual registration that includes a home visit combined with curricular reviews by local authorities, for one.  And more specifically and narrowly determine definitions of what (according to the government, of course) constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education.  Oh, let’s not forget the suggestion that local authorities require parents to delcare their reasons for home educating so that the government can “analyse” them.  (To me, this sounds a great deal like Robert Reich’s party line about the ultimate goal of regulating home education being to herd these kids back into a government classroom in the end.)  Also, toss into the mix the “right” of local authorties to have “access to the home” and to “speak to each child alone,” along with the demand for proof of progress based on the curricular review performed during annual registration.

Another fantastic addition to these recommendations is the suggestion that schools be forbidden to suggest home education as a possible method of education for children experiencing severe difficulty based on an educational or behavioral issue.  I have to wonder how the home educating parents of highly and profoundly gifted children in England feel about this gem right here, considering that it is not uncommon for parents of PG kids to be told that home education might actually be the best option when the schools are ill prepared to provide a “sufficient” education for these children.  And once again, the gifted and special needs communities are equally mistreated with Badman’s recommendation for special reviews for special needs children being withdrawn from government schools to ensure the parents’ meet the burden of proof that their home education plans can provide a “sufficient” program of studies.  Why do you think these parents are pulling their kids out in the first place?  Who is really failing to provide these children with a decent educational experience?

In his conclusion, Badman also takes one last swing at English home educating families.  And once again, most American home educators have heard this song and dance before.  He calls into question the value of “autonomous learning” despite the previous existence of favorable academic findings in his own country.  He also off-handedly attempts to dismiss all previous findings in any country (believe it or not) that home educated children perform just as well as, if not better than their government school attending peers and that home educated children grow into successful, satisfied and productive adults.

Okay.  So what?  He published a trashy, unsupported opinion piece on home education.  Yes, he did.  And unlike the relatively benign nature of the recent West article in the United States,  the British government took it and ran with it, causing English home educators to scramble in concerted efforts to control the damage. Education Otherwise, a member-supported advocacy organization is maintaining a site at Freedom for Children to Grow that outlines and updates the most current situation.  A piece of legislation called the Children, Schools and Families Bill is now on the table and contains many of the regulatory recommendations from the Badman Review.  For a great recap of the situation, check out Kelly Green and Gold’s update, which got positive feedback from English home educators deep in the legislative fray. As she reminds us all over here in North America: “If any government successfully destroys the self-determination of children and families, then all families, everywhere, are threatened.”  No joke.  You can start with that post from January 4th, but she’s got more quality content before and after that post on the evolving situation.  I’ll warn you though.  It ain’t pretty.

So, should we American home educators sit around waiting for our own Badman to emerge from the shadows and wreck his (or her) own brand of havoc here?

Or should we learn to be the well-informed advocates the previous generation of American home educators were, regardless of demographic background or educational philosophy, and eloquently take to task those like Professor West– who would see our children “safely” back under predominately state control– whenever and wherever we find them and their poorly supported accusations?

I’m guessing you can already suss out what my vociferous answer to that line of questioning would be.

We made it through a week without Patris Maximus fairly smoothly.  Sleep schedules were a bit wonky, but the kids handled his absence without trauma or drama and I was grateful for that.  We got together with our tiny chemistry group and the kids played a board game exploring valence numbers.  After that, they got started on the exciting project of creating Periodic Table pillowcases.  Using fabric markers, the moms traced the outline of the table on their pillowcases and they colored the spaces in, color-coding the various families as they went.  Athena still has to write in the atomic symbols and numbers for each element, but her table is fully color coded.  She’s very excited to finish it up, heat set it and get it on her pillow post haste.

We returned to MFAH for one of their homeschool workshops, this time focusing on Korean art.  The kids watched a short slide presentation on Korea, went a toured the ancient Korean gallery and then returned to the contemporary Korean art exhibit we visited on Free First Sunday.  Athena and Artemis were very excited about getting to see Fallen Star 1/5 again.  On the drive in to the museum, Athena asked me what the significance of the 1/5 part of the piece’s title was.  She wanted to know whether it was a fraction or a date or something different altogether.  We asked the museum staff and found out that it is sort of a fraction.  Fallen Star is the first of five installation pieces, so it is one of five works.  All four of us completed the sculpture project inspired by the contemporary exhibit before sharing lunch at the museum restaurant and heading home.

We hosted a read-in for our co-op on Wednesday and I was incredibly pleased how that played out, especially considering that almost all the kids attending were not independent readers.  There was a really great ebb and flow to the period of different parents reading different books aloud, kids exploring books on their own, snack breaks, ring around the rosey breaks, visiting together and general reading goodness!  We capped the day off with a mom/kid potluck dinner for a few other families whose husbands were out of town or working late that day.  Why eat, drink and clean up alone?

We got a fair amount of our standard school work done in and around various activities and Friday night, we headed out to a friend’s parents’ beach house.  There are advantages to living in southeast Texas sometimes.  The kids had a wonderful time romping around the house and the beach.  It was a nice break from the everyday and a great way to spend the weekend with friends.  We left there Sunday afternoon and drove straight to the airport to retrieve Patris Maximus.  The entire Triad of Chaos had about a bazillion things to tell him on the drive home.  We were all happy to get home, get the car unloaded and crash.

This week we’ve taken the first half of the week to rest and had several low key days at home.  All three kids are now on the backside of small colds, so it has been good to rest them before our end of the week activities.  We have co-op and Odyssey of the Mind tomorrow, followed by history club and art co-op on Friday.   Then I’m looking forward to a relaxed weekend as a family.

I’m also hoping to get another advocacy related post up here later this week addressing the situation in the United Kingdom that a few UK readers mentioned in their comments to my posts on the West article.  Their struggle (and to a lesser extent, what is going on in New Hampshire for the third year in a row)  is a major motivating factor in my responses to Robin West.  So keep an eye out for that post sometime this weekend, if not before.

Returning to a more structured rhythm after December’s festivities is always an interesting experience.  The Triad of Chaos and Patris Maximus usually reach an impasse in their ability to pleasantly spend large quantities of time together at some point towards the end of his vacation time.  All four of them heave a collective sigh of relief that first morning he heads back to the office.  We had a lovely chunk of time together, but everyone was ready to get back to business this week. 

Athena’s Girl Scout troop had our annual cookie sale planning and goal setting session on Monday.  The girls also worked on SWAPs and other ideas for Thinking Day where they will be presenting a booth on scouting in India.  Athena is very excited about the potential of representing India.  She and her fellow scouts had some very interesting ideas about what to include.  After reading about the role of the Ganges River in the Hindu tradition, they proposed the idea of a wading pool that attendees at Thinking Day could release flowers into. 

Our co-op got our next session started on Thursday with a unit on fables and fairy tales.  Artemis and Apollo participated in a unit study about the tale of the Gingerbread Boy, complete with gingerbread cookies for snack.  There’s been lots of “You can’t catch me!” being hollered at high speeds around the house this weekend.  Athena’s unit focused on several fairy tales, including a thoroughly enjoyable crown and magic wand making project.  I actually facilitated the oldest group this week for the first time.  I was a tad nervous about how it would go, but the two ten year olds and the eight year old who joined me seemed decidedly engaged in our discussion about the five basic elements of a story and how they help you think about what you are reading.  We used The Twelve Dancing Princesses as our main fairy tale for the exercises. 

At home, I was amazed at how much language arts and mathematics happened this week.  I was thinking that we’d ease back in with the fun stuff- history, art and science.  But Athena scooped up her Explode the Code workbook and barely put it down all week.  Consonant blends have really clicked for her now.  So has two column addition and subtraction.  Athena tore through the few pages of math I had planned for the week.  Artemis brought me the 1A volume of Winnie Tan’s Earlybird Kindergarten Mathematics, the previous version of Singapore Math’s Kindergarten program.  She found it on the section of bookshelves where Athena’s math materials are kept and wanted me to help her with it.  Athena was about the same age when she started that series of workbooks, so I said sure.  She brought it to me every day this week, packed in her backpack when we left the house on Thursday and has finished about half the book in a week.  Apollo spent the week carrying around the magnet kit for the most part.  I informally tested both of them on uppercase letter recognition this week.  Apollo knows more of the letter names than Artemis, but she knows all 26 basic letter sounds.  We also began our study of artist, Robert Rauschenberg, and our color wheel project.  All of the kids really enjoyed filling in their red wedge on their huge mixed media color wheels using paint, soft and oil pastels, crayon, crepe paper streamers, yarn, foil and wrapping paper.  Next week, they’re going to finish their yellow wedges and do a pop culture image collage painting. 

Patris Maximus is on a business trip this coming week, so life will be a little different with the kids and I being on our own.  But we have chemistry club, a workshop at the art museum, a visit to the children’s museum, a good ole’ fashioned read-in (at our house,) a potluck dinner, an Odyssey of the Mind team meeting, a park day and art co-op to keep us occupied while he’s gone.  It feels good to be back in the flow of every day low sugar content life.

Today was First Free Sunday at MFAH and the theme this month was “Step Into Art.” The activities and highlighted pieces were all three dimensional art, loosely defined as installation art. From the brochure handed out at the museum today, installation art is “a work of art created for a specific place, meant to be viewed not as individual parts, but as an entire environment.”   Three installation art pieces were highlighted today; two by Korean artists featured in a fantastic exhibit of contemporary Korean art which runs through February 14th. 

When we walked into the lobby today, the first Creation Station was inspired by a piece found in the chilly sculpture garden with the cheery title, HappyHappyby sculptor, Choi Jeong-Hwa.  Follow the link and you can see the sculptor with his work, commissioned by MFAH specifically for this exhibit.  After checking out the piece and reading a bit about installation art, the Triad of Chaos (and Patris Maximus) all found spots around the table to sift through stacks of tiny plastic cups and rolls of tape in different colors and widths.  I adore the opportunity to stand back and observe when they begin a project like this.  To watch the different manners in which they approach the task gives me a brief window into their instinctual creative problem solving methodologies.  Apollo just throws himself into three dimensional art, building away, casting aside whatever doesn’t work and plunging on until something clicks for him and he begins to be suddenly, delightfully satisfied withhis work.  Athena is always methodical.  Lay out the materials.  Take stock of the options.  Select the best supplies for the intended product.  Begin at the beginning.  Proceed until the end.  Deal witheach challenge as it presents itself, carefully and thoughtfully until solved.  Then press on until the piece is complete exactly as she first envisioned it in her mind.  Artemis falls somewhere in the middle of those two.  You can tell she has a general concept in mind, but it is almost as if she is having a conversation with the materials as she works.  Will you work here?  Can you do this for me? she seems to say.  No?  Okay, I understand.  How about like this instead? She ebbs and flows with her work, but not with the reckless abandon of her twin brother, with more purpose.  Just purpose without the rigidity of her older sister.  It’s breathtaking to watch all three of them unfold their work before you. 

Once they were finished with their work, we made a quick stop for lemonade and headed upstairs to take a peak at the second featured piece, Fallen Star 1/5 by Korean sculptor, Do Ho Suh.  Again, follow the link to see the piece.  This link includes a video of the sculptor working on the piece.  According to today’s museum brochure, the artist “recreated the traditional Korean house where he grew up and showed it crashing into a  house in Rhode Island, where he lived as an adult art student.  Moving from Korea to the United States was a big change for him.”  I should say so.  The piece is impressive, not just in its detail, but in its openness, its honesty.  You can plainly see the person he was as an art student in the apartment he most likely occupied within the larger house.  The entire family was really taken with this work, but all for different reasons.  Both Patris Maximus and Athena– the practical thinkers in the family– could not believe the artist had invested that much detail into the Rhode Island house just to smash it up with the Korean house.  They both fixated on the destruction.  Apollo was taken with the fact that the house was exactly sawed in half to give the viewer the inside scoop on everything, including the contents of the apartments’ refrigerators.  “Look! That side matches this side.  It’s all cut in half,” he kept saying.  Artemis said very, very little, but walked all the way around the piece twice.  I would love to know what her tiny brain was thinking, but whatever the piece said to her was between them alone, an intimate conversation between two artists, I think.

We took a huge risk this time and tried something very new with the kids.  We offered them the option of trying out the Family Flick, a movie related to the theme that is shown for free in the auditorium of the museum.  This month it was a movie called, Rivers and Tides about Scottish sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy.  Click on his name to see the Google Image Search results of his work.  It is just breathtaking.  The Triad of Chaos was stunned silent.  For about two minutes.  Then they burst into a flurry of whispered questions and running commentary.  Luckily, so did the children of the families sitting to the front, back, left and right of us.  No one seemed to mind.  Apollo sat next to Patris Maximus, so I missed most of his reaction to the film and to Goldsworthy’s work.  But Artemis sat in my lap and Athena to my right.  The three of us took turns sharing our utter delight and fascination with his work.  He creates sculptures outdoors, using his bare hands and materials he finds in the surrounding area.  At one point, Athena grabbed my arm and witha wide-eyed exclamation, whispered at me “He’s just like the Celts and the Ancient Americans.  He makes land art!”  I was just as excited to see her make the connection between last year’s art history studies and this contemporary experience as she was to make it.  She did, however, become increasingly frustrated that his work was always being destroyed by natural forces.  Exasperated little sighs to my right marked the end of many scenes.  Artemis seemed to find a kindred spirit on the screen.  At one point in the film, Andy Goldsworthy talked about getting to know the land and the materials he was working with for each sculpture.  While much of that and other monologues may have gone over her head, she giggled when he smiled directly into the camera while standing on the icy shores of Nova Scotia, working on this piece and said “Good art makes you warm.”  (Those are broken bits of icicles that he chewed– yes, chewed– into the perfect sized pieces before using his bare fingers to re-attach them to each other in below freezing temperatures prior to sunrise, effectively create an ice sculpture out of that bit of jutting rock that was illuminated beautifully by the rising sun.) Each time the film captured the effects of weather, tides, currents, or other natural phenomenon on his recently created art, Athena would sigh irritably and Artemis would look up at me, smile and say, “He’s going to make more art.”  The movie was ninety minutes long.  They managed to go sixty minutes before needing a potty break and another hands-on experience.  I was impressed and pleased even though I would have loved to have seen the last thirty minutes.

We headed off to visit the third highlighted work.  It was a piece the kids always ask for every time we go to MFAH.  James Turrell’s The Light Inside, is the constantly color shifting tunnel that runs under the street and connects the two separate buildings that make up the museum.  It was commissioned specifically for MFAH and for that space.  Walking through it to the other building and taking the escalator up to the next project is always a big hit.  But this month, it was an even more engaging experience because the project that awaited them was to create mobiles inspired by Turrell’s work with colorful, reflective materials that required you to factor in the light as a part of your work.  The entire Maximus family got into this one.  Artemis and Apollo both finished their mobiles, but the rest of us took ours home when we realized that we had once again disappeared into the art museum, only to discover that it was suddenly practically dinner time.  Athena and I have already struck a deal that includes postponing language arts and math first thing tomorrow until the mobiles are done and hanging in the kitchen window.

Exhausted, happy and reflective, we piled back in the van, picked up pizza for dinner and made it back home. 

Every Sunday, MFAH holds Family Tours, Sketching in the Galleries and a family Creation Station.  These activities are free with admission and begin at 1pm.  Children 18 years old and younger with a library card get into the museum for free all day on Saturday and Sunday, so you really only need to budget for adult admission, which is $7 for non-members (members are free.)  Free First Sundays, of course, on the first Sunday of the month and there is no admission and no additional charge to enjoy the art, the hands-on materials and the family films.  We plan on trying to make it to the museum every Sunday this month and will absolutely be at February’s Free First Sunday where the theme will be “Art from Our Community.”  If you live in the greater Houston area, I strongly encourage you to take full advantage of this great local resource!

We learn year round and don’t really take more than a week off here and there in our house.  Even weeks off usually still involve plenty of reading, adventures in some sort of chemistry (even if it’s just cooking) and lots of art.  These pretty much reflect the passions of the children driving this crazy endeavor.  So even though we’ve been on holiday break for the past week, there’s been plenty of activity.  We’re back to a more formal schedule, heavier content and continued group learning opportunities on Monday, so I’ve decided to take a bit of time and evaluate.  What is working well for all of us?  What do we need to adjust a bit?  How are we growing and changing and how can we honor those changes better in our schooling ventures? 

I try to do this about three times a year.  My major evaluation and planning happens in late summer as we approach the turning of a completely new school year.  We do follow the traditional rhythm of beginning a new year in the autumn.  This is when I do the big curriculum shopping and make a loose plan for the next twelve months.  But I like to do a smaller evaluation around New Year’s and at the end of April as well.  I review the plan I made back in July and adjust wherever I think we would benefit from altering our course.

Athena is setting a faster pace through our chemistry materials than I anticipated.  Luckily, various relatives came through with an assortment of chemistry related Yuletide gifts that she went totally bonkers over and that will stretch our chemistry study a bit further.  A few topics we’ve ventured into are bleeding into physics.  In a perfect fit, our weekly co-op has planned for an entire month of physics fun in March.  And Athena has requested next school year, we shift focus to physics.  I appreciate the fact that she’s giving me eight or nine months notice on this.  (See above discussion about my planning compulsion.)  She continues to bounce between two math programs- Singapore Math and MEP- so she’s moving at a slower pace through those than I had guessed.  Plus she has some special topic workbooks she occasionally spends several days with, so her math study is really meandering along a very twisty path.  The important part of that is not the pace or even the direction.  It is the fact that she enjoys and gets great satisfaction out of her mathematical explorations.  I refuse to worry about pace right now.  We may or may not “finish” a particular level at a particular time.  She is making her way, gaining a deep understanding of fundamental mathematical principles (not just memorized algorithms)  and that’s good enough for me.  She is taking her time with history.  We spent a good bit of time using outside resources to dig into the early history and traditions of Islam.  Now we seem to be hanging out for awhile in Medieval China, Japan and Korea.  This is actually a fascinating experience for me since I have never had the opportunity to do an in-depth study of this time period in this region of the world.  As far as language arts are concerned, Athena is right where I anticipated with reading, grammar and writing.  Little adjustment needs to be made to her Program of Study for the time being.  She continues with the same resources and activities, just at her own pace, which although it differs with my estimates here and there, suites us all just fine.

Apollo and Artemis, however, present different challenges for me than they did when I planned out our school year last July and August.  The growth and development of three year olds set fairly accelerated paces in comparison to their big sister, so this isn’t totally unexpected.  Their interests in different things are deepening and geniune passions are really beginning to blossom. 

This afternoon, I asked Apollo if there was anything he really wanted to learn about next month.  “More math and magnets,” was the response I got, delivered with heavy amounts of self-assuredness and gusto.  No problem, kid.  About two months ago, on a whim, I pulled out the Saxon K Teacher’s Manual I picked up who-knows-where for about $5 years ago.  Turns out, Apollo really enjoys spending about fifteen minutes with me doing the step by step manipulative based activities contained in it.  I picked up Saxon K before I knew anything about any other homeschool math options and really didn’t think I’d go back to it.  But being a big curriculum hoarder, I had yet to get rid of it.  Good thing, because apparently Apollo wants more.  I can cover his magnet request pretty easily also.  I was thinking of digging Mudpies to Magnets, back out anyway so a bit more science for him should be pretty easy to handle. 

Artemis needs more art opportunities from me.  Yes, more art.  Since the Peacock Incident, the girl is on a tear.  She scored multiple art related gifts which helped bolster our supplies and also set a certain amount of material aside for just her use which will protect it from her enthusiastic siblings.  I’m planning on setting up a basket (where I haven’t worked out yet) just for her art supplies that she can access at any time.  My dear artist/art educator friend has agreed to be my educational consultant for Artemis.  She is continuing her work with Artemis during our little art co-op and scouting more curriculum resources for me.  I am extremely grateful.  My parents sent Artemis a fantastic book called, Looking at Pictures, which she has already curled up in my lap with several times.  Plus, poking around the blogosphere for more artsy goodness, I found Mommies Little Artist.  This is an outstanding blog full of high quality art ideas suitable for young kids.  Artemis and I are both looking forward to the January project focusing on the color wheel and checking out the January Artist of the Month.  We are registered for the homeschool art workshops at MFAH and we are planning on making Sundays a weekly venture to the art museum whenever possible, to visit the family Creation Station.

Our outside activities continue for the next several months.  We have our weekly co-op, our little art co-op, our second year with the coolest history club on the planet, park days, playgroup, Girl Scouts and volunteering at the produce co-op along with whatever other opportunies pop up.  I actually anticipate that we will be scaling back on outside activities begining this spring and extending into the following year.  Patris Maximus may be taking a company assignment out of state.  The Triad of Chaos and I will stay here, but visit him regularly for extended periods of time, taking various detours and side trips along the way.  This may very well preclude us being as actively involved in so many group learning opportunities for a year or so.  It will be a different experience, but a great adventure all at the same time. 

Please, stop back by to see how these various adjustments work out for us and to see if I stir up any other kerfuffles in the virtual world of homeschooling advocacy.  I’m planning on trying to get back into a Weekly Update rhythm when we return to our version of a normal routine next week.

Both Robin West and Rob Reich entered the conversation on Milton Gaither’s blog, Homeschool Research Notes.  I linked to it one post back.  Ms. West has also responded to my last email and I’ve done a bit of research on her own academic history.  Her Masters of Law is from Stanford, so she has obviously been significantly influenced by Reich’s work.  For more information on his work, try searching the Gaither blog for critical analysis and checking out the list of published works on Reich’s Stanford page.

In Ms. West’s response to me, she admits that the ongoing situation in Texas, with our State Board of Education is a mess and that she can see the point I am making about how the regulatory measures she is proposing would be detrimental to our home education program.  She also acknowledged she “overstated” the historical trends across the nation.  I am not totally confident she understands that thoroughly yet because of her comment on Mr. Gaither’s blog pasted below.  She also ceded that the courts have upheld a parent’s right to direct their children’s education should the choose to do so, but once again pushed the idea that it is not a parent’s “obligation” to do so, but the State’s.  She cites Brown v. Board of Education to support that assertion and claims that the states that have deregulated homeschooling have committed a “breach of that obligation.” 

I still take issue with this idea that all states have deregulated home education.  In Texas and Oklahoma, in particular, the provision that allows for the freedom to home educate one’s children is written into the state constitution itself.  Any attempt to increase regulation of homeschooling would be a violation of those documents.  Any attempt to regulate homeschooling in those states at the federal level would be a clear violation of the Tenth Amendment.  Texas and Oklahoma never regulated home education in the first place, hence no deregulation.  In other states, where the courts deemed home education to already be allowable under the existing compulsory education laws, there was no specific “deregulation” either. 

Ms. West is working on a larger project that uses her revisionist history of the legal status of home education to bolster claims that increased regulation across the board is needed.

She entered the discussion on Mr. Gaither’s blog with the following comment:  

 Many thanks, Milton, and commentators, for your comments and criticisms. My essay in PPP was a short pullout of a long project that is very much in progress, on the history and foundation of the Right to Homeschool. I argue in the large piece that the right does exist, in spite of the courts’ refusal to acknowledge it, on both first amendment free exercise and “parents rights” grounds, but that it is not absolute and that the practice requires reasonable and responsible regulation.

The legal history of this IS complicated, and I am happy to accept Milton’s nuanced corrections. Nevertheless, the general movement here is unmistakable: Homeschooling at the discretion of the parent, for any reason and with no certification requirement, went from illegal to legal through about a twenty year period at the end of the twentieth century. What began as a secular movement became overwhelmingly religious, and is now tending back toward secular – in percentages that I clearly had wrong, just judging from my email.

I appreciate that Milton acknowledges that I am not opposed to homeschooling. The benefits of homeschooling, I believe, are well demonstrated and self evident: close one to one teaching by devoted parents. The harms, i believe, are a result of under-regulation, not of homeschooling itself. They could be addressed with responsible regulation that would not be overly intrusive on homeschooling families – as they are in some states that still regulate.

Milton also agrees that there should be some testing, albeit minimal, and that the potential for hiding abuse and avoidance of immunization requirements is serious, and needs to be somehow addressed, although he’s not clear how. That’s quite a bit of common ground. And perhaps the ethical and economic points regarding devout homeschoolers need to be treated quite separately from the more general homeschooling debate.
On testing: once a year might be too severe, but once a childhood can’t possibly be sufficient!

 Here again, unlike her concessions to me, in my dialog with her, she insists that homeschooling was illegal across the nation until the 1980s.  I think I have already sufficiently illustrated that this is a negligent over-simplification of a much more complex history that is unique in each state.  I also find it fascinating that she is willing to concede that home education’s benefits are  ”well demonstrated and self evident” in this comment, but she still wants us heavily regulated.  If our results speak for themselves without regulation, what evidence is there that we need improvement via increased regulation?  I love how she mentions that she seems to have underestimated the population of secularly focused home educators.  All in all, via my discussions with her and her comments in more public forums, she continues to give ground when pressed, but also continues to cling to her misconceptions.  I again, encourage all homeschooling families to engage her in respectful, enlightening dialog.

Also on Mr. Gaither’s blog, Rob Reich has surfaced with this comment:

Glad to see Robin West entering into conversation here. As someone who has also sought to engage homeschooler advocates, I know how even small criticisms can open one up to a flood of email, much of it thoughtful but a small amount spiteful, closed-minded, and even hate-filled.

I would not give as much ground as West does in her reply. Social scientists know so very, very little about homeschoolers: about their religious motivations (if any), about the academic performance of homeschooled children, about the trajectory of homeschooled students after grade 10 or grade 12.

Lack of evidence on these matters is not itself any strong reason to regulate, as if a desire for social science evidence were itself a reason to impose regulations. But it does mean that appeals to claims such as “homeschooling works!” and “West should focus her attention on public schools!” are misplaced.

I hope that the vast majority of email Ms. West is receiving is the thoughtful discourse I have been observing on various listservs and blogs and not the hateful, counterproductive kind.  I took particular issue with Mr. Reich’s second paragraph, especially considering he and his opinions on home education are well published and prolific.  I replied at that site with the following:

I disagree with Mr. Reich’s statement that “Social scientists know so very, very little about homeschoolers: about their religious motivations (if any), about the academic performance of homeschooled children, about the trajectory of homeschooled students after grade 10 or grade 12.”

There are many sources for this information, from my initial research. Perhaps not the same volume as there is for children in public education, but there is data available.

I also must add that when a social scientist or other researcher/scholar begins by publishing an academically weak piece pushing vicious stereotypes that is filled with insults aimed at mothers and children, that researcher is going to have an understandably hard time gaining the cooperation and trust of the homeschooling community to collect social data. If someone at the grocery store punches me in the gut and kicks my kids while I’m there, you better believe I’ll be finding a new grocery store to go to from now on and publicly sharing my distrust of and concern about that location with the rest of my community.

Maybe if social researchers started from a place of honest academic curiosity as opposed to beginning from the “Homeschoolers Suck” corner, they’d be able to collect that data they seem to bemoan they don’t have enough of.

There is also an outstanding comment after Mr. Reich’s and mine, from another homeschooling parent, that equates current trends in methodology and analysis of social research aimed at home educating populations to observation and analysis of indigenous populations elsewhere in the world.  The gist of that comment was that if homeschoolers were a foreign indigenous population, researchers like Reich and West would be easily considered to be “violating all kinds of ethical research guidelines.”  I thought that was brilliant.

Other bloggers are beginning to pick up on this conversation, several of whom have linked here.  So check the comments on the last two posts to see the trackbacks and read the articulate opinions of others on these issues. 

Thank you all for your own thoughtful feedback.  The comments have been fascinating and thought provoking to read.  I am proud to be a member of an enormously diverse, extremely driven and wonderfully intelligent nationwide community.  A community that demands responsible academic research and publications from those that would attempt to deny us freedoms that are our to exercise under existing statutes, state constitutions and case law.

Ms. West, who is a faculty member at Georgetown Law, replied quite promptly to my response to her journal article. She informed me that her study of home education is part of a larger project she is working on and said she would look into some of the sources I provided her. She acknowledged that Texas did not fit in her alleged pattern of criminalization of home education, but still asserted that the basic pattern remained. I poked around a bit, educated myself on the history of home education in other states and discovered that she is still wrong. I’ve addressed that in my next response to her below. And I’m not the only one who thinks so, as you will see. She, then assured me that she actually knows real life home educators and has a “quite positive perception” of homeschooling. How this is possible when her article stated she believes we are either all conservative Christian extremists living under tarps in parking lots or over-educated (how can someone be over educated, by the way?) bored rich housewives, is beyond me, but that’s what she says.  She went on to push her case for heavy regulation of homeschoolers to ensure the protection of an unknown number of potentially abused children.  She also clearly feels that the education of a child is primarily a government responsibility and not a parental one.

Needless to say, I was incapable of leaving this alone. Especially after she left the door open for me by inviting me to keep the conversation going if I would like to. I would. And I did.

This has been fascinating for me to look into and I actually highly recommend other homeschooling parents do, as well. You come to appreciate the tradition of home education in the best interests of your children when you know the history of how we got where we are, nationwide. Plus, as I told, Ms. West, this will make a fantastic jumping off point for an outstanding civics study at some point and time for my own children.

*****************************************

Ms. West,

I am extremely curious about this larger project you are working on. Would you care to elaborate on it at all? Is the focus the justification of strict regulation of home educating families based on the concerns alleged in your UMD piece or a different slant to researching the home educating population in the United States?

I’d like to continue discussing three main issues right now. Two directly address large sections of your original article and some of your response to me. The third is an issue that I feel passionately about that clearly colors my opinions on the other two issues that I feel is often severely neglected by those researching home education and home education regulation. The first two issues are the question of the history of homeschooling’s legality across the country and the proposal of strict homeschool regulation. The third is the particularly alarming situation playing out in Texas with our lackluster, to say the least, State Board of Education.

First off, I strongly recommend you examine the work of Milton Gaither. Mr. Gaither is a published author who conducts scholarly research into American home education. He actually has his own critique of your UMD piece on his blog and points out the severe weaknesses of your historical grasp of the legal history of American homeschooling. You state in your original piece “Dating from the mid 19th century, with the advent of mandatory attendance laws, until three quarters of the way through the 20th century, it was a crime to keep one’s children home from school.” This is directly after a statement that posits home education “over the past thirty years would have been illegal everywhere.” I have already shared with you that this is completely untrue in the state of Texas where home education has never been criminalized. He also shares that, “In fact, prior to the movement activism of the mid 1980s, fourteen state compulsory education statutes said nothing at all about home based education, fifteen explicitly accepted it in one form or another, and the remaining twenty-one states allowed for ‘equivalent instruction elsewhere’ than public schools or ‘instruction by a private tutor.’” This is a dramatically different picture that the one you attempted to paint in your article which severely undermines you argument that home education needed to be legalized and deregulated in every state in the first place.

I would also like to clarify that Texas did not have to, as you said in your email response to me, come to “full legalization through judicial decisionmaking.” Home education was already legal and fully protected prior to the judicial challenge of the Leeper case via the Texas State Constitution which prohibits any state regulation of any school not funded via public funds.

One day’s worth of research on my part and I was able to turn up all sorts of information relating to this issue that illustrates many states do not follow the oversimplified pattern you propose they all do of criminalizing homeschooling via mandatory attendance laws at the turn of the last century, then legalizing them in the 1980s. For example, in the state of Oklahoma, the state constitution, drafted in 1907, allows for homeschooling as a legal and bona fide method of home education. No further legislation has needed to be passed to legalize what was already an accepted alternative in education. Judicial challenges to the status of home education still occurred, however. But in three major cases, the already legal status of homeschooling was continuously confirmed. (School Board District No. 18 v. Thompson, 1909, Sheppard v. Oklahoma, 1957, and Synder v. Asbery, 1993) In the case occurring in 1909, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that “the home is considered the key stone of the governmental structure.” and that “parents rule supreme during the minority of their children.” The state’s Supreme Court stated that parents could absolutely “withdraw them entirely from public school and send them to private schools, or provide for them other means of education.” In 1907. Seven and a half decades before you state “in the 1980s, all fifty state legislatures… legalized homeschooling.” There is also case law in Illinois that set a precedent for legal home education thirty years prior to the period of time you propose all states decriminalized it. People v. Levisen, 1950 was the landmark case in the Illinois Supreme Court that ruled homeschooling parents had not violated the state’s compulsory education laws. Since the Levisen case, no other legislative or judicial challenges have been made to the legal status of homeschooling in Illinois. In 1904, in the state of Indiana, the Indiana Appellate Court heard State v. Peterman and ruled similarly to how the Illinois court would rule almost a half century later. They also found that home education did not violate the already existing compulsory attendance laws. A school was determined to be “a place where instruction is imparted to the young” and the ruling states that they did not “think that the number of persons, whether one or many, make a place where instruction is imparted any less or more a school.”

As far as your proposed regulatory standards, first off, I still take issue with this idea that there is a primary responsibility on the state’s part to ensure a child’s education and welfare that justifies heavy regulatory intervention. You claim the states have committed “total abdication of responsibility” for home educated children’s education and welfare. I claim the states do not have the primary responsibility for the education and welfare of any children. That responsibility has always rest with every child’s parents. Even though there is no US Supreme Court decision confirming a specific “right to homeschool,” I find this to be somewhat misleading since there are Supreme Court rulings that put forth the primacy of a parent’s right and responsibility to provide for child’s welfare and determine how that child is educated, not the state, in cases not directly related to home education. You actually cite one such case at the end of your UMD piece; Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972. This case actually has basically nothing to do with the legality or constitutionality of home education, specifically. The Amish families in question were supporters of public education, but only until the completion of eighth grade, after which they felt no further formal education was needed for their children, institutional or otherwise. So the crux of the case addressed their right to make that determination primarily based on First Amendment claims which were upheld. But the Court did state in the opinion written by Chief Justice Burger that “This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.” Admittedly, his opinion also asserts that “the power of the parent…, may be subject to limitation… if it appears that parental decisions will jeopardize the health or safety of the child or have a potential for significant social burdens.” This statement makes me curious if this is why you cited this case in support of your claims. However, there is no significant data to illustrate that homeschoolers represent a consistent danger to home educated children’s health or safety across the board or that we are creating “significant social burdens.” If anything, I believe a case could be made with data to support it that would illustrate examples of public educational institutions doing just those things– endangering the health and safety of children and creating significant social burdens. I thought it was also interesting to review the majority opinions from Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925 and Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923. In the Pierce case, Justice McReynolds finds the Oregon legislation in question “interfere[d] with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” Also very useful was the statement in the same ruling that “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” Now, this case specifically addresses private education in an institutional setting, but I still find the verbiage to be very telling, especially the phrase excluding “any general power of the State to standardize its children” as this reads to me as evidence against the primacy of a core state responsibility for a child’s education. The opinion continues with the following statement: “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” Here the Court clearly places the responsibility for a child’s education and welfare primarily on the parents, not the government.

In addition to a lack of responsibility on the part of the State to completely control a child’s education, the regulatory tools you propose in your piece are wholly unproductive, wildly expensive and seriously unnecessary, some of which I already addressed with you previously. All of your alleged harms of home education come from a place of automatic distrust of parents. The Supreme Court, however, seems to feel differently and gives parents the initial benefit of the doubt. For example, the ruling in Parham v. J.R, 1979, which was actually a due process case addressing flaws in Georgia’s mental health statutes concerning minor and cites Yoder, Pierce and Meyer, states that “The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.” This seems to me to be a compelling example of case law arguing against heavy handed, state regulation of parents making independent decisions about their children’s education and welfare. I also appreciate Chief Justice Burger’s statement that our judicial system “has recognized that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.”

Concerning the risk of child abuse in home educating families, in a Florida survey conducted by their State Department of Education in 1996, forty-two percent of the respondents cited concerns with the public school environment as their reason for home education. Do parents that are concerned enough about violence, drugs and adverse peer cultures to fully assume the responsibility of their children’s educations really sound like a high population of potential child abusers and neglectors? There is no data that successfully links home education with child abuse. They are two separate issues. The primary connections made are by sensationalized media reports of the most tragic cases. Home educated children may not be under the observation of a classroom teacher, but they do still come into regular contact with other members of the community that are also required by law to disclose suspected abuse. The off chance that home visits, curricular reviews and standardized testing might help catch the occasional child abuse case, which is in no way guaranteed, is not justification alone for such policies. Any discussion of attempts to link child abuse to home education must also examine exactly what percentage of anti-homeschooling cases alleging child abuse were actually found to bear enough evidence to successfully support the claim versus being a thinly veiled attempt by the local school authorities to bully a home educating family back into the classroom. I have no statistical data that examines that question unfortunately, but there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that points to the need to differentiate between cases of true abuse hiding under the claim of home education and cases where local or state authorities were clearly overstepping their legal bounds. Tragic cases are out there, I know. But there are tragic cases in the non-homeschooling population also, yet no one is proposing home visits for public and private school families or families with children who have yet to reach school age.

I’d like to take a minute to explain to you why I feel home visits, curricular reviews and standardized testing would be problematic to our own home education program in our family. This may be a perspective you have yet to consider since your focus seems to be on aggressively criticizing conservative Christian homeschoolers. As I mentioned previously, we are neither conservative, nor Christian. But we live in a state that is chock full of them with a State Board of Education that is heavily saturated with conservative Biblical literalists pushing a disturbing agenda further into Texas public education with each passing session. Last year, they successfully hacked away at Texas science standards, weakening them substantially especially in Life Science where they predictably objected to any evolutionary content. This year, they are at it again with the social studies standards and are attempting to manipulate the standards to reflect their religious and political agenda. Members of the SBOE have issued statements calling for the removal of Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education from the Texas curriculum and thereby from the material students could be subject to standardized testing on. There are other notable historical figures they have taken aim at also, all of which do not fit their narrow definition of good role models of American citizenship like Rush Limbaugh who apparently does. Their goal is to produce a state curriculum that reflects a conservative Christian agenda. It is already required to teach the Bible in Texas public high schools with no provisions to ensure it is taught in a scholarly and critical fashion as a culturally significant, historical work of literature. Schools are free to implement this requirement however they see fit. As a non-conservative, non-Christian family, there is no way I would want to submit my chosen home education curriculum for review against these blatantly agenda-laden state standards. Nor would I want to subject my children to annual testing that required me to teach them this garbage to ensure they passed well enough to allow us to continue home educating. And I certainly have no intention of giving up my Fourth Amendment rights to guard against unreasonable search and seizure by being required to allow government officials to enter my home looking for issues without any probable cause whatsoever. I feel the efforts of those most critical of home education would be better suited addressing the massive flaws in public education as a larger number of children are falling victim to that educational path’s shortcomings that the three percent of the American school-age population that is homeschooled.

I understand that your intent may be noble at its root, but that does not mean your proposals aren’t discriminatory and overly litigious towards the vast majority of the home educating population who, as you freely admit, are doing a more than adequate job. Would government home visits, state mandated curricular reviews and annual standardized testing have improved the adult contributions of notable home educate Americans like Thomas Edison or Andrew Wyeth or for that matter, pretty much all of the Founding Fathers? I firmly believe Confucius is right on this one. You don’t use a cannon to kill a mosquito.

This has been profoundly educational for me to look into this situation more deeply and for that I am grateful to you for presenting the challenge. I am saving this material and am fully confident that this will create the basis for an excellent civics study for my children one of these days. Thank you for taking the time to continue to engage in a dialog about the past, present and future of American home education with me.

Sincerely,

The Very Same, Still Very Vocal Non-Religious Homeschooling Mother