That is really missing the point. It is also quite a new phenomenon in many cultures for parents to send their children away starting at the age of 5 (or even much younger than that in many families) for most of their waking hours. Not long ago, even in the US, most children didn’t start full day school until age 6 or 7 and the full day was for less hours than today’s school day. But if you remember, she specifically stated that homeschooling was a joint decision made with her husband that she didn’t care to debate with online strangers. She was seeking advice on maneuvering through tough times, not seeking ways to abandon her vocation or change the way she schools her children.
There were women in the past that homeschooled reasonably successfully.
But they tended to have servants and lots of them.
Here’s some very funny stuff from one of my favorite homeschooling bloggers, the amazing Deputy Headmistress. She’s gently roasting Charlotte Mason:
"“I find no difficulty in securing obedience from my children,” says one [letter, I think]. ….”Suppose my little boy is playing in the drawing room, I tell him, ‘you may play as long as you’re good.’ He begins to be naughty. I ring the bell; the nurse comes down and the boy goes up. He forfeits the pleasure of my company. The plan is simplicity itself.”
The Deputy Headmistress says:
“I also once had the treat of visiting the Library of Congress and looking over a few of the older PR volumes. I had very little time and chose to focus on the letters sections with questions and answers from other parents. There were several questions about schedules, also many answers. The answers
all talked about getting up really early, like 7:30, and spending a couple hours in the kitchen arranging meals with the cook and going over the tasks for the day with the other help.”
Wow–7:30! Amazing!
“Children also were sometimes put to bed as early as 6:00, and yes, if I put my children to be at 6 p.m. when they were small, I could have accomplished quite a bit around the house that otherwise got only a lick and a promise.”
“The mothers of the class most involved in the PNEU simply did not raise their own children. They spent lots of time thinking about it, writing papers about it, attending meetings about it, and they really
cared about it, but over and over in these volumes I am seeing this faint thread about how in ‘today’s culture’ women have so many social obligations they need well-trained, intelligent nurses to support them in their work.”
"The nurses had the bulk of the child-rearing work for children from babyhood to about five. Mom was involved- but she came and went. Nurse was
always there. Nurse also had almost
no other job to do except care for the children. So of course Nurse could devote the constant time to habit training that was expected.
“I don’t mean that none of CM’s ideas are applicable. They are. They just have to be taken as goals to aspire to, not bludgeons to beat ourselves over the head with.”
"But I also think this is why CM takes discipline so lightly, as something easy for the alert and clever mother to address with nothing more than a look and a shake of the head. It’s always a simpler matter to get a child to mind somebody not its parent, or not as familiar to it than it is to get a child to be consistently obedient with Mom when Mom is the only one around. It’s not the same as having Nurse, Cook, Gardener, under nursemaid, parlourmaid, second housemaid and the tweeny
all
there, and
all bowing to Mom’s authority.
“I also note that a lot of the distractions offered to redirect the attention involve sending the child to other adults (take a message to cook, take this package to the gardener…) Somehow I just don’t see that working for me (The crock pot wants to see you…).”
