Guest Post -- My Homeschooling Roots

I am so excited to have our first guest post here at TRBAH. This essay is written by my dear friend, Charlotte Raby. Charlotte is a homeschooling mom of two brilliant girls and is also the author of A Breed Apart, 2002 Clara Award, http://www.readerseden.com/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=105.

I have been a die-hard homeschooling mom for many years. Yet I don't know how the initial urge came upon me or how it settled into conviction nearly ten years before my children were born. I had accredited it to a friend who said, while in the midst of planning her wedding, that she would home school her future children. Suddenly, I knew without a doubt that I would, too, and became utterly committed in that instant. But how could that be? I had never heard of homeschooling.
Or had I?
It makes sense that somehow, the homeschooling idea had been planted long before and that my friend's comment triggered recognition of my deep rooted belief. Yet, the impetus of what has structured my family's lives for the last twelve years has remained a mystery until now.
Recently, one of my daughters came home from an activity humming a tune that she had learned from her friends, and which she said she couldn't get out of her head. I knew the song very well and sang it for her. She wanted to know more about its source, so my husband and I shared with our two daughters one of our favorite childhood television shows --The Addams Family. As we laughed together, I was a little disconcerted to find myself feeling a communion with the kooky Addams Family. I dismissed it as a wistful nostalgia that one often feels when revisiting their past. However, as the feeling continued to grow, a truant officer arrived at the Addams' home to explain why Gomez had to send his children to school. Gomez replied, "Why have children if you're just going to send them away? I'm against the whole thing!" And then it hit me: the Addams Family homeschooled!
It got better. The parallels of their life style and attitudes to those of modern homeschooling families are uncanny. Truly. My husband asked if I was sure that I wanted to equate homeschoolers to the Addams Family, and I understood his meaning. Like the Addams Family, homeschooling families are considered the fringe of normal society, those strange people with unfathomable motives and ideas who spend every waking moment with their children, who are shunned and feared by others.
But, that's just the point.
Sending their children to school never occurred to the Addams Family as it also often never enters the minds of their modern counterparts. That we will keep our children at home is understood from the beginning, or becomes a strong desire as the time to send them away looms ever nearer. As Gomez said, "I don't think I can stand to be away from them, Morticia!" Maintaining family connections throughout the day feels right. Indeed, Gomez explained to the officer how Mamá (the grandmother) educated the children, especially in music, art, ballet, and history, while Uncle Fester worked with them in science. Most modern homeschooling families emphasize many of the under-funded and more humane aspects of society, like the arts and the sciences. True, we do it without dynamite and daggers (well, most of us do, anyway), but the fact is that homeschooling is a family affair.
Just as Morticia, an accomplished horticulturalist, includes her children in the feeding and care of her poisonous and carnivorous plants, and Gomez includes them in planning toy-train crashes and the mechanics of dungeon torture devices, homeschooling parents include their children in all aspects of their own daily lives and hobbies. In addition to regular academic subjects, homeschooled children are exposed at an early age to all of the humanities, in-depth science, a multitude of field trips and experts, museums, finance, logic, cooking, sewing, robotics, gardening, Latin, Chinese. And all of this is usually done before the end-of-day bell rings in traditional schools, but often naturally continues into the evenings and weekends.
The home of the Addams Family is a natural history museum, with a two-headed turtle, a preserved Hun warrior and giant Kodiak bear, and other taxidermy specimens and items of interest. Wednesday, their six year old daughter, breeds thoroughbred spiders, and Pugsly builds things. A typical homeschooling family's home looks much the same, with most surfaces covered by the children's various projects, such as breeding worms, dioramas, hundreds of books, bugs, rocks, written reports, musical instruments, owl pellets, goat hearts, mummifying chickens. The kitchen counter holds their experiments on gases; the dining room table displays their physics experiment on magnetic motors. And of course, all of this is mixed in with their parents' paraphernalia of various hobbies and interests.
The Addams Family enjoys their evenings together in the family room, at work on their own projects, communicating openly. Morticia might be knitting while Gomez has a drink and cigar with the newspaper; the children play on the carpet and Lurch plays the harpsichord. A homeschooling family looks much the same. The mother might be knitting while the father will have a drink with the paper; the children play on the carpet and play the harpsichord.
Both families often allow their children to seek out their own activities and gifts, without being bound to traditional roles and modes of thinking. When it comes right down to it, the Addams Family is bonded, loving, communicative, and supportive. The adults love their kids, they love being with them as much as possible, and they love talking with them. The family enjoys a hands-on approach to nearly all of their learning endeavors. I felt such a strong sense of connection to little Wednesday, when she learned about Marie Antoinette from Mamá and had Pugsly chop off her doll's head before they ran gleefully out to the cemetery to bury her.
Mystery solved.
I can't wait to find out what I learned from The Munsters!