Yeah. Considering home-school here myself. I had negative stereotypes about it at first, but then I met actual homeschoolers, both peers and now homeschooled children. Sure, there’s shyness. That’s a fault in our culture, to be sure. But they were hard-working, bright, respectful, and yes, different. Sometimes different is good.
As far as being weird, there are plenty of weird kids in school too. I’ve always been a little weird. Frankly though, not being into the latest pop star is no loss. Sometimes that’s all it takes to be qualified as weird anymore.
We live in row homes, and there are lots of young kids whose interaction I watch while I’m watching my kiddo. I think I might be able to introduce our children to more variety and good culture than if I sent them to public school.
Drugs are getting more common too, and at least one of the young teens on the block I know of is having problems with it. One of my childhood friends got hooked in middle-school. I think I would rather deal with accusations of sheltering my children than unwittingly sacrifice them to addiction. I’m certainly not saying that that’s what someone is doing if they send their kids to public school. I’m just using my experience. I was solicited too, but I like to think that one reason I refused was because of the Catholic schooling. I was getting positive reinforcement.
There’s a Catholic school I would dearly love to send them to, but I’m not sure it’s feasible right now. A three hour daily commute, at the very least, isn’t family friendly. So in the meantime I’m researching curriculum (might do a combination of Memoria Press and Kolbe, supplemented with arts and Homeschool Connections as they get older) and starting to network. As of now, I might be partnering with a former Chemistry teacher (and environmental engineer) in doing a part-time Montessori inspired pre-school with our two sons. Starting in Fall. I’ve already got a logo for the school put together on a CAD program.
Never thought I’d consider homeschool. It was a definite no. However, this is my main motivation. I’ve been through conventional Catholic school. In my entire schooling, K-12, we read maybe one excerpt from Lewis, maybe one quote from Chesterton, nothing from the Summa… One gets the picture. This is wrong. I think it’s a kind of theft. We’re doing nothing to capture the hearts of kids to the heart of the Christian story. If I can do something about that, I will. I thank God I had one high school teacher who had the foresight to give us some basic apologetics. He quoted Lewis, and Chesterton. He read from The Great Divorce. And thank God that both the Lord of the Rings and first Narnia movie came out when I was in high school. That was at least some cultural augment to a spiritually imaginative awakening. I’m actually not angry at the system, because some of it stuck, but I am upset that such beautiful gems of Catholic culture were deemed unimportant or insignificant in the larger task of evangelization. It’s a serious mistake. Thank God I had a family who traveled, and who lived in Italy. At least some of that appreciation sunk in somewhere.
Of course our situation might change, and we might be able to put them in that Catholic school.