The homeschooling community is rife with elitism, virtue signaling, and posturing.
Consistently present in my feed are posts making statements about raising kids who are superior to their peers in distinct ways.
We’re known for our posturing about our amazing kids who can identify 686,765 plants and spend their afternoons weaving on their looms and listening to their favorite Dickens novel being read aloud by moms who have fresh sourdough in the oven and have dedicated their very lives to protecting them from coming into contact with any of the peasants outside of their very cultured and intellectually elite lives.
We somehow can’t find it within us to simply be secure enough in our own choices to not feel the need to virtue signal about them.
I think this insecurity is rooted, at least in part, by our own vision of what homeschooling is for and what it means to be successful at it.
The humans we’re at work raising and facilitating the education of are often lost as the forest among our prideful and self-promoting trees.
It is sometimes the “Raised the Most Cultured and Classical Kids in the History of Kids” Award that we’re after more than the victory of raising well rounded, richly educated humans who contain multitudes.
I prefer the latter.
We spent yesterday at a small local museum, at my kids request, and my kids were the quintessential classically educated kids, engaging in and interested in everything around them….
And then they came home and listened to modern music and discussed Fortnite celebrity collabs.
They love classical literature AND modern literature. They do handicrafts AND play video games. They love sea shanties AND Drake. They love history AND memes.
Somehow, they can love a wide variety of things on a spectrum of goodness and knowing and experiencing the things of their time doesn’t prevent them from loving things classical and cultured.
Miraculously, they can love more than one thing.
They can know many things, wonder of wonders.
They are just regular kids, not poster children for the superiority of homeschooling.
And, I think that’s actually the victory after all.
Consistently present in my feed are posts making statements about raising kids who are superior to their peers in distinct ways.
We’re known for our posturing about our amazing kids who can identify 686,765 plants and spend their afternoons weaving on their looms and listening to their favorite Dickens novel being read aloud by moms who have fresh sourdough in the oven and have dedicated their very lives to protecting them from coming into contact with any of the peasants outside of their very cultured and intellectually elite lives.
We somehow can’t find it within us to simply be secure enough in our own choices to not feel the need to virtue signal about them.
I think this insecurity is rooted, at least in part, by our own vision of what homeschooling is for and what it means to be successful at it.
The humans we’re at work raising and facilitating the education of are often lost as the forest among our prideful and self-promoting trees.
It is sometimes the “Raised the Most Cultured and Classical Kids in the History of Kids” Award that we’re after more than the victory of raising well rounded, richly educated humans who contain multitudes.
I prefer the latter.
We spent yesterday at a small local museum, at my kids request, and my kids were the quintessential classically educated kids, engaging in and interested in everything around them….
And then they came home and listened to modern music and discussed Fortnite celebrity collabs.
They love classical literature AND modern literature. They do handicrafts AND play video games. They love sea shanties AND Drake. They love history AND memes.
Somehow, they can love a wide variety of things on a spectrum of goodness and knowing and experiencing the things of their time doesn’t prevent them from loving things classical and cultured.
Miraculously, they can love more than one thing.
They can know many things, wonder of wonders.
They are just regular kids, not poster children for the superiority of homeschooling.
And, I think that’s actually the victory after all.
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