That said, I have considered homeschooling my second child. He is very bright but hates school. We’ve tested him for all sorts of stuff. He got into speech for next year. I also got him into the dyslexic program (he is a gifted dyslexic, which means that he performs at grade level because he can compensate enough for his weaknesses, but he should be performing at a higher level based on his IQ). I am hoping that these programs will help him. If not, I will likely pull him out and homeschool for a bit because I don’t think keeping him in school is worth the damage done by how much he hates it. I want him to continue to love learning – not shut down. But, I would likely need to find some kind of private program to help because I don’t know how to teach a child with phonoligical processing disorders.

Homeschooling was a life saver for me. I would have been incredibly miserable in high school or junior high school — it was borderline in my public elementary school, which only worked for me because the teachers and students were expected to keep up this culture of high attainment and intellectualism (it was a gifted program.) The parts of my day that I hated were the twenty minutes before school started, the twenty minutes we had for recess, the hour we had for lunch, and the two hours between the time that school ended and my dad came to pick me up. In the intervening periods we did things like bury civilizations we’d made up ourselves, then dug up a different class’ civilization and try to figure out all its secrets. I wrote a history book in a made-up language and got school credit for burying it in a hole! Yay! Unfortunately I was moved out of that district and the folks in our new town wanted me to go from 6th grade to 9th grade. Right.

Anyway, homeschooling let me have all the bits of school that I liked, and none of the stuff that kept me up till 5am worrying (I can’t be the only kid who was more anxious about recess than the math test.) I also finally had the time and energy and interest in doing things with other kids: people my age were no longer presumed monsters to be avoided at all costs, and as a bonus, if one of them decided to be horrible, I could just find a different activity to enjoy. Without them around. Ever again. Except at church, but that was only four hours a week, which beats 36+ hands down. And the adult-to-kid ratio was in my favor. Plus most of those girls did eventually apologize, albeit to my mother rather than to me.

It probably isn’t for everyone (I find a lot of the arguments less than persuasive, but I’m not a home education evangelist so I don’t have a lot invested,) but every aspect of public school that didn’t resemble homeschooling, was torture to me. As a bonus, once we started homeschooling I got to do a lot of things I really wanted to do, and some things I didn’t know I wanted to do till I had the opportunity (like volunteer at a reenactment site.) Part of me was always a little “man, I wish I could have gone to Polytechnic” and when my friends went off to the Columbus School for Girls I was jealous, but I know that it was better for me, psychologically, to be homeschooled.

Anyway, if I ever have kids, the assumption will be that we’re educating at home, and alternatives will be considered if that doesn’t work out. I’m not worried about them becoming freaks or not learning the things they need to, and if they were in public school I’d be annoyed at the amount of time they’d be wasting and the social nonsense no one should have to put up with. Torture as our only shared cultural experience? Thanks, but I’ll just be okay with being weird.