The article left a bad taste in my mouth, to be frank. Don't get me wrong, I do not live in some super duper bubble of blissful parenting all the time. Or ever really. I remember a couple of years ago I wrote an email to a friend of mine and confessed to her that I had planned my escape from what felt to be, at the time anyway, the completely overwhelming stressors of parenthood. My "plan" was to sneak into Mexico and disappear without a trace, and then spend the rest of my years running a taco stand. Of course, I was not actually going to take off to sell fried taco goodness to Mexican people, but my little escape fantasy got me through some tough days.
But, back to the part where I said that the Huff Post article left a bad taste in my mouth. The article made me feel uneasy indeed. I mean, it is ridiculous, when you stop to think about it, to be so utterly miserable over something that really is not all that complicated. People have been birthing and raising kids for centuries, so why do are we making such a fuss about it now?
My jumbled and confused thoughts regarding my unease with the article came to a head later in the day when I watched a documentary about babies around the world. The documentary compared and contrasted the ways in which babies are reared in different cultures throughout the globe. In the U.S. baby raising involves cribs and johnny jump-ups and disposable diapers and bottles and a whole host of other stuff. Life for babies in a tribal society deep in Africa could not be any more different if we tried. The documentary showed that there are two things necessary for baby raising there: a baby and a mama. Together their days are spent with baby nursing and playing on or around mom, while mom goes about her day making food, hauling wood, fetching water, and visiting with her friends. The babies in this tribal society seemed to act much like the babies featured from America, but the moms appeared to be way less stressed and much more content.
There was so many things that struck me in watching this documentary. For one, something really obvious was that the tribal mothers let their babies play in the dirt and get dirty. The babies mouthed rocks and sand, and their only toys were whatever they could find on the earth that they crawled around on. Now, if you go to a park in any city in our country you will see parents scrambling to keep their babies from putting rocks and sand in their mouth. Obviously some of these things can be a choking hazard, but what if we are being entirely too cautious in our attempts to keep things out of our curious toddler's mouths and generally trying to keep our children safe? Maybe there is something that we can learn from this tribal mothers here.
Secondly, while I realize that parenting a child in a small tribal community in Africa is going to be different than raising a child in the U.S. no matter how you slice it, what if we found a way to make it less complicated? What if we as parents made the decision to just give ourselves over to the process of being parents and stopped worrying so much about college funds and so called leisure time? What if our main goal in parenting became simply raising curious, compassionate people who value their families and the nature all around them?
As I asked myself these questions today I of course started applying them to education and homeschooling, since these things are tied so tightly to parenting in our family. Here's the thing. The education system in our country is entirely too complicated and many might say that it is broken. In identifying a problem within the system you quickly realize that what seems to be a minor issue, which you believe could easily be fixed with a few policy changes, is really anything but minor. The parts that are broken are so deep and wide spread that the only fix would be to trash the whole thing and start from the ground up. No amount of money or policy changes are going to repair what is broken within our country's educational system.
What we need is to get back to the basics. We need to be focusing on simple goals, the main one being to raise good human beings. While memorizing times tables and making a child learn to recite each President in chronological order seems to be important, these things really are not relevant to our lives.
I am sure that all of us had moments in our educational career in which we thought, "Why am I learning this? This is not going to help me in my life at any point in time!" As it turns out, our chagrin was not all that unjustified. But what is baffling is that we all had those thoughts and yet, here we are, teaching our kids in the exact same way that we were so frustratingly taught in our childhoods.
I am sure that all of us had moments in our educational career in which we thought, "Why am I learning this? This is not going to help me in my life at any point in time!" As it turns out, our chagrin was not all that unjustified. But what is baffling is that we all had those thoughts and yet, here we are, teaching our kids in the exact same way that we were so frustratingly taught in our childhoods.
In the short time that I've been homeschoolig my children the main things I've learned is that education does not have to be complicated and that it can also be really fun. Our family's homeschooling today consisted of a morning with grandma and making terrariums together. Sure, tomorrow we may spend some time learning long division and about 15th century England, but even our most structured educational time is basic and uncomplicated. We have no tests or quizzes, and if someone does no understand something then we just try again later. We are able to learn without all of the stuff and without all of the pollicies that the people who run our country's educational system have convinced most of us that our kids need. There's no fuss and no self induced complications here in our cozy little homeschool, just time together learning about life, with some long division thrown in for good measure.
