School isn't always the solution to homeschool struggle
And sometimes it is.
Hello friends,
We are in what is beginning to feel like an extended period of not-quite-rightness, punctuated by fleeting moments, sometimes whole days, of fullness and joy.
Enough to keep us going a bit longer. Not enough to leave us feeling like this is sustainable.
It’s easy to look back and see years of care-free homeschooling, and compare it to what now often feels extremely effortful, but the truth is that nobody said homeschooling was going to be easy. And in fact it never has been.
It’s just that the problems and issues and struggles change and shift.
I’ve written a bunch about how home education is really not an ideal solution to anything, and I still believe that.
Perhaps for some families it’s perfect. And for us, it’s definitely the best thing available right now.
But there’s a space between those two things (perfect, and the best available), and we have mostly sat inside of that space, except that lately it feels like we’ve moved from It’s not ideal but it’s actually kind of great, to It’s not ideal but it’s better than any alternative.
The reasons it feels hard are not really to do with the nature of unschooling, but with where we are and the lack of proper community, particularly for my eldest child.
And here’s where people will say, There’s always school y’know!
But that is not what any of us want to hear. Today, after a morning of tough conversations around how we can make leaving the house a little less fraught for everybody, I asked my son if he’d like to have somewhere to go every day, and he said, “Sure, if it was somewhere I liked!” and that kind of says it all.
The issue is not that we don’t want to find spaces and settings and communities to exist in, even daily. We want that! I’d love for my children to go somewhere, and stay there for a few hours every day. I’d love to get some time for me.
It’s that we don’t want any of the options that are on offer! (Apart from our little once-a-week Co-op, which we’re so grateful for).
I’ve always thought that the institution of school betrays such a massive lack of imagination. Can you imagine having the ability to create a space from scratch, and actively choosing, over and over again, to create variations of essentially the same thing?
There’s no creativity in that. Can you imagine standing in front of a blank canvas, or a blank page, and replicating versions of the same piece of art, the same story? Like using the same image and just changing a few colors here and there, altering a few words and storylines.
Like, what?! The art would appeal to no-one, after a while; those words wouldn't touch anybody’s soul.
And so I refuse to believe that the solution to struggling with home education is to go back to the only other available thing, and succumb to its utter lack of soul.
And perhaps, if my children were asking, I would do it - for them. And perhaps if the struggle was unbearable, I would also do it. We’ve been there before, after all. I’ve been tired, burnt out, sick - I’m thankful there was an easy option during those times. Easy for me - not so much for my children, in hindsight.
But I want to put out there that school just isn’t the solution we think it is.
It isn’t the “safe” route, it isn’t the easy one either. I tell myself that perhaps it would be even tougher if my children were in school. Perhaps there would still be no community (I don’t see evidence that there is from people I know here who have school-going children), perhaps my daughter would feel lonely and my son would feel stressed, perhaps I would have no time, perhaps we would become disconnected to one another.
School is not a guarantee of anything, I remind myself. It’s not really a solution at all - even though we are made to believe it is. It probably creates more problems than it solves, for many of us.
And, and. School is sometimes the answer you’ve been looking for. Not all schools are soul-sucking. Not all children find school hard. Not all families can or want to live as if schooling is not a thing.
So that’s where I’m at today, folks. Feeling a little less enamored with this life we’ve chosen, but feeling even less willing to believe there is a school-shaped solution for it.
Perhaps sometimes things are just kind of awkward and non-ideal and a little hard, and that is just the way it’s meant to be. Perhaps we need these periods so that when things start to feel easier, we recognise it and embrace it.
If you enjoy my writing and you’d like to be part of a community with weekly resources & posts, Days in the Life, and a monthly zoom Community Call, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Read more about that here.
If this is beyond your capacity, I give our subs for free, no questions asked - just reach out.
This is such a important conversation and one that my friends and I chat about often. It's like you're not allowed to say it's all a bit shit right now as you just get the, "well you should have sent them to school" line. Home ed can be tough, IS tough. Each family members needs change over time so you have to keep evaluating what's working, what isn't. Come up with alternative ways of doing things and like you said, sometimes just acknowledge that periods of life are shitty. We need to be able to voice this and make space for others to do the same, especially our children. Thanks Fran 🙏
Thanks for this. I don’t think we talk enough about the many ways in which home/unschooling is hard.
We’ve had incredibly beautiful homeschooling years where everything felt aligned. My energy was almost fully on creating lovely experiences for my small children and their friends, who were the children of my best friends. They were little and still wanted what I wanted for them.
We’ve had years of intense struggle.
And now we’re like you, somewhere in between, at least from my perspective. We’re doing the best we can with the opportunities available. My teen and my littlest aren’t interested in the cool alternative programs that we have access to - they like being self-directed at home. My middle goes to several different drop off programs, but that requires a lot of driving for me, without my actually getting to spend time in community.
I used to create the programs I wanted for my kids, which meant I spent time with other home educators every week, and the kids had built in playtime. I’m constrained from doing that now by having three kids at different ages and stages. We at least have one weekly co-op left, but it’s very small, and not the same. It’s challenging.
I think you nailed it though Fran that we are going to have extended ups and downs in homeschooling. We know that happens for school kids. It happens in families too.
I am comforted by how much more flexible and responsive we can be as unschoolers though. I’m so proud of my kids for learning about themselves, who they are, and what they love. Also when they want to say no to the outside world and just be for awhile. That’s valid too.
AND I still really, really crave a full day or two a week to work on my own stuff. I’m so ready.