While trying to think through and prepare for the switch to homeschooling, I’ve found myself indulging in the convenience of bashing the public school system. By “convenient,” I mean the human tendency to villify one option before selecting another. In the case of deciding we’re going to home school, that’s meant not merely finding fault with the public school system, but feeling anger and even a sense of betrayal for its deficiencies.

The truth is, public schools aren’t necessarily poor or sub-standard, they just might not be the best fit for a child’s personality, learning style or temperment. Yet for years they’ve been promoted as just that. Encouraged by our Federal and state governments, taxpayers have come to expect all American schools to reach unform standards, wholly ignoring the natural consequence of this approach.

We speak about educational fairness and equal access, demanding that students in less-affluent areas receive the same opportunities and education as students in more well-to-do locations. By doing so, we ignore reality: that public school funds come from the public, which means a school’s financial resources are destined to reflect the financial resources of the area it serves. In other words, the only way to truly even the playing field is by redistributing wealth… and that, as we know, is a wholly un-American concept.

But we ignore this, just as we ignore the consequences of demanding that public schools work better, faster and cheaper. Ultimately, those expectations have forced school administrators and teachers to devise boiler-plate, outcome based curricula that can be efficiently and homogeneously imparted to children. And that’s the problem.

The assumption underlying our demand for a more effective, more efficient school system is that all children can be taught in the same way, using the same books, the same lessons, the same lectures or teacher interactions. Look beneath this assumption and you’ll find another: that all children learn pretty much alike.

So we have come to accept, and teachers have come to rely upon, a combination of visual- and auditory-based techniques. Students read text books, listen to lectures, copy notes from the chalk board, fill out workbook sheets, sit in classrooms decorated with posters and collages reinforcing current study topics and take written tests to demonstrate mastery. Doing hands-on projects are “special treats” — field trips to sites relating to areas of study, dioramas accompanying book reports; role-playing in skits or puppet-shows.

And let’s face it: students are learning. True, we hear horror stories about social promotion and high school graduates who still haven’t learned how to read. But you are reading this, I am writing this, we’re both successful enough to afford computers and internet access, and we’re smart enough to have learned how to use them. We didn’t acquire those skills in a vacuum. We learned them — or the building blocks upon which they are based — in school.

Just because public schools are capable of teaching children, just because so many millions of American children receive acceptable educations, just because public schools are, quite simply, there does not make them right for each and every child. If it did, schools would not have had to create and adopt the concept of “individualized educational programs” (IEP) for those children who can’t learn with the mainstream.

Sadly, needing a unique learning environment or alternative teaching methods — needing an IEP — stigmatizes a child. He or she is “different” and must be set apart, taught separately, and often socialized separately as well. By definition, a child needing an IEP is disabled. Translation: a child capable of learning exactly the same concepts as others, to the same degree of mastery, is still somehow flawed, incapacitated or otherwise handicapped. For the child whose mind takes in and processes information different than other children, a public education means either continually struggling to conform to something inherently foreign to his/her way of thinking — and the likelihood of perpetual poor- or sub-standard performance — or accepting the notion that somehow he/she is deficient and born “broken.”

What a hell of a burden to place on a child to whom, not so many years later, we then say: “Measure up! Be like others! Fit in!”

My son is a kinesthetic learner — he does not learn by verbal instruction, he does not seek written or visual clues to help him understand a new concept. He learns initially through physical manipulation, action and activitity. Having personally encountered something new on his own terms, he is then prepared to assimilate additional knowledge. So, once he’s had a chance to independently explore a new concept or task, then (and only then) is his mind prepared to receive additional information from other sources: verbal explanations, hints, questions, written materials.

Ask any public school teacher — or parent, for that matter — and they’ll tell you that kinesthetic learners are tough to handle. They’re time-consuming. You cannot deliver information orally or through written words and send them off to try it themselves. You have to do just the opposite: let them explore on their own, deal with the (occasionally loud or explosive) outbursts of frustration, re-motivate them so they don’t completely give up, wait for that motivation to lead them back to you in search of additional information, and then start the process all over again. Ad infinitum.

That’s a process I’ve gradually learned and adjusted to over the past 5 years. It was hell at first, and led at times to such heated outbursts from my son that I found myself dreading any activity that required our interaction. I could not understand why he didn’t “get” things, since I could definitely see evidence of his fierce intelligence as he picked up reading on his own, learned how to count on his own, figured out how to operate a computer on his own.

But he could not — or, as I thought of it at that point, would not — learn from me. He grew defiant whenever I tried telling him how to make his bed, how to operate a new toy, how to write his name. He’d push me away, sometimes yell at me, and often broke into tears. At one point I found myself wondering how I could so deeply adore my little boy and yet feel that parenthood was, ultimately, unsatisfying and burdensome.

And so, as I’ve mentioned before, I was eager for him to start kindergarten. Let him be someone else’s antagonist for 6 hours a day actually went through my mind. Like most parents, I assumed that having taught so very many children for many years, the teacher would possess more coping strategies, more patience, more insight into my little guy and his mysterious brain than I ever could hope to possess myself. I believed in some magical classroom alchemy through which my challenging child would transform into a well-behaved, calmly patient and submissively receptive learner. Then I’d be able to deal with him better.

I was wrong.

Almost from the get-go, my boy experienced problems. He did not like to sit still. He wants to be up and moving around, looking at things, even when it’s story time and the others are all raptly focused on listening. He wanted to talk with the kids who sit next to him, play games while the teacher talked, color outside the lines if he felt like it, and do his workbook pages in the way that most suited his whim.

My son’s teacher grew frustrated, just as I had. Using the rewards/consequences paradigm which leads most children to demonstrate good behavior, she urged my son to listen when instructed, stay on task, keep his attention focused along with the rest of the class. When he had to “move his star,” I tried reinforcing the teacher’s point by instituting consequences at home for misbehavior in school. He began trying to get out of going to school. It didn’t take long to see a pattern.

The fact is, things probably would’ve gone on that way and perhaps my son would’ve eventually capitulated, learned to control his activity level and sit quietly when expected, and maybe with his high intelligence he could’ve even become a more model student. Lord knows, my life would be easier had I just sat back and waited for all of that to happen. Yet, at what cost? Would the process of conforming quell the active, inquisitive spark that served him so well as he learned the alphabet, numbers, addition tables, U.S. geography… all on his own? Was I really willing to trade his gifted, albeit challenging, intelligence for a child who’d sit still and remain silent when bidden?

Back at home, where I’ve spent evenings helping my son finish incomplete classroom assignments, I had to become the student. I had to observe him, to learn how he works best, what motivates him and what turns him off. I had to study the things he was doing on his own that worked, analyze how they differed from what I’d been doing. I had to ask him questions, to let him teach me how I to teach him. I had to research different learning styles, experiment with different techniques, and train myself to use these new concepts when we were together. Then my work began paying off: my son grew happy, cheerful and courteous. He grew inquisitive again and invited me to sit with him while he did homework. He worked diligently, independently, and without the tears and frustration of the past. He came to me with questions, seeking new things to learn, and I knew how to respond in ways that encouraged him even more.

Having invested so much of my own effort into learning about my son, I could now see all the wonderful things he’s been doing right on his own. I began to see myself as a partner in his education, and that by continuing to work with him I could at least re-invigorate his love of learning at the end of each day.

It wasn’t until my son’s teacher suggseted that I have him evaluated for ADHD that I came to realize I’d invested myself in another role, too: that of my son’s advocate and champion, the adult whose responsibility it is to do the hard work in order to make learning easier for him. As his champion, it is also my task to distinguish between what is and what is not in his best interest, and to fight for his right to be accepted and loved for who he is. When it comes to my son, I draw the battle line at classifying his way of thinking and hands-on style of learning as “disorder” best managed by changing his personality through medication.

Like any info-junkie parent, I am aware of the frequency with which little boys are now placed on psychotropic drugs. I know there no long-term studies showing their effects on children. I know that American school children are prescribed (and sometimes legally forced to take) these drugs in numbers unparalleled by their European peers. Try as I did, I could think of no rational basis for that discrepancy, nor could I come up with some organic change within children making them need behavioral drugs more than children did five, ten, even twenty years ago. Which can only mean one thing: we’re diagnosing children with ADD and sometimes — although certainly not in all cases — sticking them on drugs because it’s convenient.

Don’t get me wrong: I do wholeheartedly believe that some of us have valid organic reasons for needing medication. I am in no way implying that every parent giving their child such meds is somehow copping out. In fact, the NIMH research indicates that intensively medicated children show improvement in social interactions. Ironically, the very same study reports in one paragraph that ADHD affects only 3 to 5% of children, yet in the next paragraph describes it as “relatively common.” Since when was 3-5% common?!

It’s this form of short-hand thinking that has led educators to view such medications as the modern-day aspirin: a panacea for challenging behavior patterns. All too often its seems that if Johnny does better in school after going on Ritalin or Adderall, well then, Joey ought to try taking it, too. And it’s far more convenient to tell a parent they need to medicate their child so he/she does better in school (a goal every parent wants their child to achieve) than to examine whether the problem lies not with the child’s inability to adapt to the teaching methods, but rather, the teaching methods’ inability to adapt to the child.

As you’ll recall, this whole entry started off using that word: convenience. My point in the beginning was that humans tend to villify one option before rejecting it in favor of another. I do not want to villify the teaching methods used in public schools for not perfectly every student’s style of learning. But I also reject the “convenience” of labelling a child as deficient, as needing mind-altering medications, as a behavioral problem simply because his learning style does not perfectly fit in with the way public schools have undertaken to teach.

It would be so very “convenient” for me, as a parent, to continue sending my son to public school and hope that somehow he would change. It would be very “convenient” for me to lower my academic expectations for him in exchange for more time to myself, more autonomy, more of a life centered on my own needs and happiness. It was oh so very “convenient” for me to think — initially, that is — that the problem somehow was my son’s, and that figuring out how to get along in school was his job, too. It would be far, far more convenient to give him a pill every morning and send him off to school where he’d be calm enough to become a receptive (rather than active) learner.

I can’t afford such convenience. I only have one son, and he only has one life. We have just these few years in which to inspire him, to ignite that spark that promotes a life-long love of learning, to equip him with the skills and concepts upon which he’ll rely once he’s grown into a man. I can no more justify the villification of public schools for not suiting him than I can justify the villification of my son for not fitting into public school. If it weren’t for my son’s school prompting me to examine my expectations of him, along with my expectations of myself, I might never have gotten to the heart of what convenience really means:

Main Entry: con·ve·nient
Pronunciation: k&n-’vEn-y&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin convenient-, conveniens, from present participle of convenire to come together, be suitable, from com- + venire to come — more at COME
1 obsolete : SUITABLE, PROPER
2 a : suited to personal comfort or to easy performance b : suited to a particular situation c : affording accommodation or advantage
3 : being near at hand : HANDY

For our lives, the obsolete way of thinking is to expect my son’s behavior to be suitable or proper for public school. For us, our educational choice needs to be suited to his personal comfort, affording accomodation for his different style of learning, so we can give him the advantage he deserves, and that means keeping him near at hand. For us, homeschooling is convenient.

This time, I am embracing that word.

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