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  • From: Thomas Gorman <tom@honeychrome.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Sustainability and invisible structures
  • Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:37:50 -0400

I believe that parental involvement is the single most important thing in the education and formation of kids. I feel like pretty much everything of meaning and importance I learned growing up I learned from my parents! I wasn't home-schooled per se, but my brother, sister and I were all reading before we entered kindergarden and were surrounded by the educational and creative tools at home, made weekly trips to the local library and regularly visited museums, etc. It was largely unstructured- our interests were pretty much allowed to run riot. And it isn't a case of a luxury of American, white middle-class upbringing: I didn't know it at the time (having too much fun to see it!), but we were always at the poverty level, moving around a lot and generally living in rural areas. It did present some feelings of alienation and confusion when in school- our level of education and awareness was invariably advanced beyond most of our classmates, but that was (and is) more than offset by family relationships- by mainstream standards we are a 'freakishly' close family, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. And I do remember there were times when my parents debated pulling us out of public school and attempting to home-school us, but decided they both couldn't afford for one of them to not work at all, and they thought the socialization was a good thing (I think if they were to do it all over now, they would home-school, having concluded that for the most part the 'socialization' aspect of school isn't worth the time spent there!). Every home-schooled kid I've ever met has been far more well-spoken, mature, inquisitive, interesting and interested than their 'normally' schooled counterparts. Think about it- the education of your own child is going to mean more to you than to any one else, even the most devoted school teacher. To my mind, sending a kid off to school is like pulling boxes of processed who-knows-what off the shelves at a big supermarket- you really have no idea what is in that 'box,' where it's coming from, etc. Home-schooling is akin to tending your own kitchen garden full of whole, real, foods. Or put another way, you don't want to feed your children processed, agribusiness-dominated and unwholesome food, so why feed their minds the mental equivalent? Home-schooling or small-scale, community based education seems to me the 'permaculture way.'

Disclaimer: we don't (yet) have kids of our own, so it's easy for me to say what I think........ I don't yet know from experience how hard it might be!
Tom




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