stfuconservatives:

shotgunsunday submitted:

(trigger warning for racism)

As a person that was home-schooled all the way through high school, I’m not even slightly surprised that a lot of home-schoolers support Perry. My history textbook consisted of ‘Jesus came and then God invented America.’ This seems to be…

It kind of bothers me when people talk about homeschooling or homeschoolers as a blanketly fundamentalist Christian thing to do. Not all parents who choose to homeschool do so because they are wacko fundies who don’t want their kids exposed to the evils of secular education.

Even when I was little, I loved learning. I used to beg my mom for “homework” when I was too young to start school. I would read anything I could get my hands on from the moment I could do so. 

Public school almost killed that love. I remember getting yelled at in kindergarten for doing my assignments in cursive; we were learning the printed alphabet in class and that was what I was supposed to use. I didn’t understand why, if I was able to do things we hadn’t learned yet, I was not allowed to. I had one awesome teacher who would let me sit in the back of class and read quietly to myself above grade level when the class was working on sounding things out, but for the most part I was shut down at every turn. No one would let me learn more than what the other students were doing, even if I’d already mastered the material. 

This isn’t supposed to be me bragging about how awesome and smart I was or am or whatever, but the point is that public school couldn’t teach me everything I wanted to learn, and as a result I started putting forth less and less effort into my education - I didn’t need to, so why should I, when if I do all I’m capable of I’ll be reprimanded? And so eventually I hated school. I used to cry every morning because I was so incredibly bored and neglected.

After 5th grade my mom pulled me out of public school. Not because it was evil or immoral, but because she wanted to find a method of education that would be challenging and stimulating and, well, educational. We tried a few online schools, and we even tried “unschooling” - an entirely student-led form of homeschooling wher my only real parameters were that I had to read and write every day. Aside from that, I was free to research and teach myself anything I wanted to know, and we would compile everything I learned at the end of the year for my homeschool portfolio. That sort of freedom is entirely antithetical to the Christian homeschooling model- I was free to and I did do plenty of research into science and evolution and all kinds of evil secular things.

Eventually I found a really great charter school and finished my high school years there, but at no point was the motivation for any educational alternative religiously motivated. Every kid has a different way of learning, and the sad truth is that public schools just aren’t equipped to handle them all. I fully intend when I am a parent to pay attention to every one of my kids’ learning styles and try to put them where we feel will allow them to learn the way that is best for them.

I don’t know, it’s a personal bugaboo. I hate seeing perfectly valid things be blanketly judged because some constituents made a bad impression - just feels like another sort of prejudice to me.