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