My home educated daughter is ready to try school. I've always known she would. Conformist that she is, how can she go through life without this experience that 99% of children have had? Even among her home educated friends, she has difficulty holding her head up. They talk knowingly about school, agreeing that it's a waste of time. She nods, and looks uncomfortable. What's it actually like? No one can really tell her that. She has to find out for herself.
She would have gone earlier, without a doubt. At four or five or six, certainly. Perhaps at seven. Not at eight, when self doubt crept in. She thrives on new experiences and is one of the most sociable people I've ever known. She wants to be where the action is.
If she'd been strong willed and insisted on going, I would've let her. But she isn't like that. She's very susceptible to other people's opinions. Easily led. It wasn't difficult for me to propagandise. What about playing outside? What about sleepovers in the week? Did she really want to be told what to do?
And so the years passed, and school could only be imagined and glimpsed secondhand. So why didn't I want her even to set foot inside a school? Aside from the obvious, of course, that I think she's better off out of it? To anyone who understands my educational approach, it may seem strange that I dragged my heels about sending The Kid to school. Autonomy. Self-direction. Let a child choose what and how to learn. As long is she doesn't choose school. Why the hypocrisy?
Two reasons. First, the very fact that she is easily led. If she's going to absorb wholesale the opinions of whoever bends her ear the most, then I want that person to be me. That's particularly the case where the opinions may define her view of herself. There are plenty of lessons I didn't want her to learn at school: that her worth is measured in how well she can spell and add up, that she can learn only when someone teaches her, that sitting quietly is a virtue and speaking her mind is not.
Second, The Reading Question. I allowed The Kid to decide when to learn to read, as I let her decide most things related to her own learning. Like many children who have this choice, she decided that reading was not something she was up to taking on at the age of four or five. She started at the age of 6 1/2, and only recently, around her ninth birthday, became a fluent reader. It didn't come easily to her, but along the way she never lost her enthusiasm for reading or her confidence that she would master it when the time was right. School, I feared, would derail this process.
These two obstacles are past now, more or less. She's a fully formed person with her own views. She's still rather susceptible to pressure from others, but she's learning to stand up for what's right. And, critically, she can read. She may like school, she may not, but I doubt it will damage her much now - as it might well have done when she was four.
