- Don’t waste your time.
Some friends invited us over. Luckily for me I was driving so didn’t drink much, because they kept pouring the wine. Some neighbors were visiting them. I walked into the room, saw them and thought: religious crackpots. Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists. (No offense to my Witness & Adventist readers!).
But it was far worse.
It was a family: father, mother, son and daughter. Only the father talked. And talked and talked. Being on the quiet side myself, the dominantly verbose irk me. As he talked, I realized they weren’t necessarily religious nuts, they were something even rarer.
Crackpot world view, I thought. Luddite, politically paranoid. Anti-American (Jesus Christ did he ever get on my case).
Practically identical to me, it was spooky. At one point he mentioned that two years ago he bought his first new car ever, a Fiat Multipla. I laughed and pointed out my first ever new car, bought a year and a half ago, my Fiat Dobl
Mmmm. I don’t hold to home schooling at all. In fact, I have a rather nasty visceral reaction to it. Perhaps I would change my mind if I had kids of my own, but I doubt it. I’m certain it’s almost always one of those things that certain parents do to make a point rather than because it’s actually good for their children. Plus, the type of person who tends to do this with their kid is exactly the type of person who shouldn’t. My cousin Wanda, for instance, who is a born-again Christian idiot – I suspect, like her mother, she is mentally handicapped – who homeschooled her poor children. Two of whom ended up becoming mothers at the ages of 15 and 16. O, the horror.
In general, I have the same reaction; however I have known only two homeschooled children. One was the daughter of a teacher, both she and her mother seemed very nice and well-adjusted. I’m not sure what their reason for it was, but it forced me to reconsider the possibility that there could be merits to it. And the boy I met this weekend also seemed intelligent and fairly well-spoken; although geeky he had Beta’s full attention as well. He and his parents said he refused to attend school from day one, but didn’t say why. I think it was a mixture of his genuine desire not to go to school and his parents making a point in his case, but it seems to have turned out well.
Oh, but I did know a third case as well, ignorant religious extremists who were dismayed when their daughter ran away to join the military at 17 and started wearing makeup.
I would have been glad to have been home-schooled. After my first day of first grade I explained that I didn’t have to go back again because I already knew that stuff. My parents eventually had to explain that if I didn’t go back to school either they or I would end up in jail. I started crying, and I’ve been a mess ever since.