Waiting for the Cure

My family homeschools, and has for the last 6 years.  I have two daughters – one almost 12, the other 8, and the first went to a private Kindergarten, but that’s it as far as “normal school” goes for the two of them.

Last week, we decided to try public school, to see what we’ve been missing.  It was a reaction to the “back to school” buzz that is hard to avoid, and the weird sensation of all of the children over 5 disappearing from the public streets.

People are experimenting with the hygiene hypothesis, putting worms back in to balance the immune system, changing their diet to pre-industrialized fare, but no where have I seen someone examine the extraordinary strangeness of sending one’s children to school.

We tend to think of school as normal.  Adults need to work, so they need a place to put their children that is safe and takes up most of the work day.  We need someone else to educate our children, since most of us don’t have time to spend with our kids during the workweek, or the credentials to teach them.  But school, as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Even 100 years ago, we lived mostly in an agrarian society; summer “vacation” was a necessary break to deal with the harvest, and school was scheduled around this to fit the needs of most farmers.  Until 1840,  schools were highly localized, and mostly reserved for the wealthy, and predominantly education was religious.  It wasn’t until 1918 that all states had passed a law requiring compulsory elementary school attendance.  School as we know it is a very recent idea.

Of course, this doesn’t help when the neighbor friends you’ve been playing with all summer disappear, the children are suddenly missing from the parks, the downtown sidewalks, and everywhere, adults smile at each other in cafes, and say, “Isn’t it nice and quiet now that the children are gone?”

So, on Monday morning, I woke my sleeping children and they dutifully swallowed breakfast,  got dressed, zipped their backpacks up with lunch, and we headed on the bikes at 8 AM to their first day of school.

I dropped my 6th grader to the Middle School, where they closed the iron-spiked gates behind her, and I waved my goodbyes through the cage.

Then I went with my 3rd grader to her new classroom, where she happily hung her backpack on the outside hooks, and lined up with the other kids on the ramp to her new portable home.  When they passed the door, they had to take a magnet with their name on it and place it in the “hot lunch” or “cold lunch” box, so the teacher knew which lunch they were having that day.  Breakfast and lunch were free to those who qualified, but as we did not, and as we grow most of our own food, my daughter had her home-made lunch packed in her brand-new lunch box, and she was happy with that.  There were 3 magnets in the “cold lunch” box, I noticed as the line went inside, and I blew a kiss to my happy child and set off on the bike alone.

I went to a local cafe to write, finally free of the children, as everyone implies at the start of school.  “Now you’ll actually get some time!”  And I was in the Land of the Adults, the only sign of children being the toddlers too young to go to preschool, and even then, there was only one.

It was with a sad heart that I biked through the childless world, back to my garden, where I was able to work until 2:30 uninterrupted.  Then I picked them up.

“School is awesome!” my 3rd grader replied.  The teacher had a great rule; if she said your name wrong 3 times, you got an ice cream!  My daughter was already owed one, and one more wrong name and she would get two ice-creams.  “Isn’t that a great rule, Mommy?”  I was just glad we didn’t have a dairy allergy; I was sort of surprised that in a town of such health-consciousness, that a teacher would use ice cream as a reward, but I held my tongue.  She went through her day, how she had 3 new friends, and her favorite subject so far was P.E.  When I arrived, the teacher had the boys on one side of the field, the girls on the other.  The girls were winning, and she would tell each of their scores in a math problem; “You have 10+3, and the boys have 8+2!”  The girls cheered.  The boys looked abashed.  We biked to the middle school.

My older daughter was not smiling.  Weighed down by a heavy backpack, she was trying to maneuver her bike through the throngs of adolescent children.  My younger daughter rushed up to her joyously, and she scowled, not wanting to acknowledge her little sister.

It was the first time.

Let me just add, that we have been enrolled in a publicly funded, homeschool resource center, where the girls attend classes in their age group once a week, and there are other classes like theater, sewing, clay, etc. that are open to all ages, adults included, that they go to on other weekdays.  Their “school” is for K-12, so there is always a broad mix of students, and it’s a place that parents can hang out, check out library and text books from the resource center, and we get an attending “teacher” who tracks our progress, and takes samples for the school to “prove” they are doing something all day.  My kids are highly social, are on the local soccer teams every year, and have far too many playdates and sleepovers.  Mostly my girls play with each other, but when a friend comes, they all play together, regardless of whose friend it really is.  But the social requirements of middle school were clearly different.

Orchestra was way too easy – she’s had 2 years of Suzuki violin, and clearly plucking an easy piece was not a challenge.  Math was review of 3rd grade material, and for the first time, my daughter described watching the clock.  “It didn’t move for 20 minutes!” she said.  “Core” class was her favorite, as they got to pretend they were stranded on an island, and list what they would need to survive.  She had sat with a friend from soccer during lunch.  “My stomach was rumbling in class, I was so hungry!”  Another thing that hadn’t happened for them before; we’re used to grazing around here, munching on pears or apples from the tree if nothing else is ready.

Her friends had all bought slushees from the cafeteria, and though she had money with her, she said she didn’t get one, because she knew I wouldn’t approve.  My heart felt glad that she would have that resolve, but I wondered how many slushees she would watch her friends eat during hot days, and if her will would hold out over her mother’s.  And then I wondered why a middle school in such a food-conscious town would sell slushees, most likely high fructose corn syrup laden ice, but I stayed silent.

We went home and had to help with homework, which was 2 pages front and back of greater and less than signs, ordering 10 numbers, and other mind-numbing math that took my daughter an hour to get through, though she got everything right.  Then she had to read 2 chapters, and at that point is was bed time.  Their neighbor came over to play, since she left her homework folder at school, and for the first time, my daughters had to begrudgingly remark, “We can’t play, we still have homework!” and what was left of afternoon ran into evening, we ate, then shuffled them off to bed, earlier then they’d ever gone since they were toddlers.

The next day was a repeat of the one before, only this time I really felt the intrinsic wrongness of dropping my children off to their “safe” gated prisons, and returned to work in silence with the other childless adults out in the world.

I realized during the 6 hours I now had every day, that I missed my children.  I don’t necessarily hang out with them all day, or even do much schoolwork, but I’m often in the garden, planting, and they run back and forth with questions, or demands.  Sometimes it’s overly distracting, but on this fine hot morning, I realized there was no one to show the swallowtail butterfly to – the cousin to the fat caterpillar I had painted in a painting last month.  I didn’t have help with the chickens who escaped.  I didn’t have four hands to unload the dishwasher.  I cleaned their bedroom, feeling as if my children had died.  I found all of their hand-sewed miscellanea, little crafty projects that had been shoved under the bed, closets full of discarded clothes.  As I put them all right, I realized that with soccer games starting on Saturdays, and practice two afternoons a week, with homework, my girls now had only Sunday that was free.  These spontaneous craft projects would be no more.

Their second day, they had soccer practice, so after dropping them off at 8, they didn’t get home until 7, and after dinner, there was homework, which there wasn’t enough time for, so my eldest daughter had to stay up and do her reading, which took longer than normal since she was so tired, then sleepily went to bed.

I had to sign a form that said she had read what she was supposed to, and my younger daughter had read 15 minutes.  Each 15 minutes she read was a raffle ticket, and if she won, she’d get candy!  I never timed them when reading before, my youngest daughter especially reads so much, we have to tell her to stop and do her chores sometimes,  but now, every few minutes she’d ask, “Was that 15 minutes?” and the pleasure of her book was lost in the calculation of how much candy she would get for reading.

I picked my girls up on their third day, and the 3rd grade report was still awesome.  “I want to go to this school, mommy”.  I told her we were just testing it out, but she insisted she was a public school girl now, and the realization of what I’d done settled in.  That day, they were told they were going to go on 15 field trips over the year!  And she couldn’t really remember what they did, but it was fun.  She wanted to try a hot lunch the next day.  She was very excited about it.

On the fourth day, I realized that there had been no time in the week for the girls to do their chores.  So I emptied the dishwasher for them, made their beds.  The adult now had enough time to do the children’s work, and the house was surprisingly clean, but the children had so much busy work they were no longer able to contribute to the family.

The school works so hard to be a community for our children.  Mothers cry when they drop their 5 year olds off to Kindergarten, but it is a real feeling of separation, and a general wrongness that no one acknowledges anymore.  My older daughter is growing into a woman.  She still talks to me about it, shows me her changing body.  Shares her old bras with her eager sister, helps me with the household work, getting more proficient at it every year.  She is a member of this family, and I depend on her as she does me.

But now, her job was school.  They had her for the best of her day, and after soccer, I got the tired remains of a day totally scheduled without her input.  Both girls were becoming more reluctant to wake up; unused to the early hours, they still hadn’t adjusted their bedtime early enough to get adequate sleep, and with biking to school, P.E., soccer practice, then home, their bodies and minds were just physically exhausted.  I had never seen them so zombie-like.  It was a blazingly hot day, and P.E. in middle school consisted of leg lifts, push-ups, then a huge run around the field.  If one kid lowered her leg before doing 30 lifts, she had to start over, and if you failed again, the whole class had to start over.  It sounded like the military.  And math was still boring.  Orchestra still way too easy.  The only real interest in her 6 hours of school, was Core class, and she was starting to wonder if it was worth it.

I dropped my 3rd grader off with a heavy heart, feeling like I was finished with this little experiment, but lost her in the process of it, to the promise of ice creams, candy, and a class that filled the day with snippets of fun.  Now her favorite subject was art, where they made accordion books with their name on it.  And she couldn’t wait to have her “hot lunch”.

My husband and I had decided that though we gained 6 hours every day without them, the packing of the lunches, going to and from school, helping with the homework, and not having any help with the chores, ate into that time.  But the time wasn’t a good trade for the feelings of wrongness of being split apart as a family.  My husband works out of the home, and has for many years, so we are used to being around each other all day.  We trade work time; he gets to go off for one day while I am in charge of the children, I get other days, so it isn’t as if we had no free time before.  We don’t need a day care to drop our children off to on the way to work.  We have chosen to live this way so we are not locked into the industrial schedule of 9 to 5 – he does his best work late, late evening, mine before 7 AM, and though he has various conference calls and scheduled phone meetings, in general, he is in charge of his own schedule, as am I.  We don’t really NEED our children to go to school.

My daughters came home, exhausted after soccer, and we told our eldest our decision.  That we weren’t that impressed by the academics, and mostly we realized that we only had 6 years left before she became an adult and would probably be off to college and her life; most likely would never live with us again, and we didn’t feel like giving her best years left over to some school where she was forced to do things she found very boring.  She hugged us firmly and was glad of it.  Her assessment was that she’d miss her Core class, but hadn’t really made many friends; there wasn’t that much time!  And she could see them in soccer anyway.  I didn’t make her do her math homework.

My youngest I was worried about.  She can be quite stubborn, so I was afraid her decision to keep going to school would not be easy to reverse.  I also felt like I had opened Pandora’s box; she had looked into the school lures of ice cream, field trips, hot lunch!  All that was left was hope that some day, it would be awful enough for her to recognize what she was missing.  I had gone into this as kind of an experiment, but didn’t really expect them to like it.  I thought it would reaffirm our homeschooling commitment, and finally let them know what they were missing when they saw their neighbor friends pack up every day and go off to some neverland they didn’t return from until after 3.

At first she said her day was fine, but she wouldn’t leave my lap.  My older daughter told of her adventures buying lunch (I let her get “hot lunch” too.)  How she shoved her friends in front of her so that she could watch what they did to get lunch.  How she didn’t know her student ID number, but just gave her last name at the check-out counter, and everything was fine.

My youngest started sobbing.  “I didn’t know you could just say your name”, she cried.  It turns out she had flutters in her belly all day – another first, because she was nervous about ordering hot lunch.  When I had dropped her off, I overheard her teacher asking, “Oh, a hot lunch today?” and she had dutifully handed over her envelope with $3.50 and marched in proud and triumphant, having put her magnet in the “hot lunch” box along with most of her class.

But when she got to the line, no one told her what to do.  She watched one student after another enter their student ID number into the little machine, and she wasn’t brave enough to ask a teacher, or a friend, what her student ID number was.  So she ate the little snacks I packed her, went about her day, and held it all inside.  That what she had most looked forward to that day, she was too nervous to enjoy, and as she sobbed, she told of other things that had happened throughout the week.  That no one told her the rules, just yelled at her instead.  Don’t climb the tree!  No jumping rope outside of the green line!  Kids were mean to her, and she didn’t know why, she didn’t even know them, why were they mean to her?

I held my sobbing daughter, as she let go of all the injustice that had happened to her during the week, until she finally said, “I like school, Mommy, but it’s not the right school for me.  I want to go back to AFE.” (Our little homeschooling hub; Alternative Family Education”.)  I held her and rocked her, reminding her that in an hour was the AFE bonfire night, where parents and children could reunite, eat and play together, under a beautifully full moon.

That evening, at the beach, I felt like I was back with my family after a long, bad vacation.  Parents I had known for 8 years; parents totally invested in their children, deeply a part of the local community.  People who were active politically, socially, teachers, poets, came up to us, welcoming.  So many knew I was trying hookworms.  I got grand hugs for my success.  One woman said, “Every time I see you, you look healthier!” and they laughed in glee over my stories of egg counting, incubation, how I wanted to infect my husband, about the hygiene hypothesis.  I’m sure there were like-minded parents at the public school, in fact I know some of them from soccer, but in the few minutes of drop off and pick up, there was little time to converse with them, and I don’t know how many I’d ever feel comfortable talking about my new “therapy”.  To be in the company with people who make their own cheese, ferment their own wine and yogurt, choose a difficult alternative in homeschooling, but feel a sense of rightness in doing this.  I may be the only one with worms, but they are INTERESTED in it.  Many I talked to had allergies or a child with allergies, and I passed on websites of information, knowing that they were the types to do their research, and though some were squeamish, they all thought it was the greatest thing.

I didn’t wake my daughters up for school on Friday.  I let them sleep naturally until 9.  Then we cuddled on the couch and read books for an hour.  They helped make breakfast, unloaded the dishwasher.  Made their beds, then promptly laid out their dolls and homemade doll clothes on the kitchen table, and gleefully played for hours, as I went in and out from my planting, harvesting, painting.  I loved watching my almost 12 year old play with dolls.  How much time does she have left to do this?  How precious are these hours with her sister, who she barely saw this week?  How much of their unusual, strong love and protection of each other are due to this, the fact that they aren’t separated in grades, in schools.  To get glared at after 6 hours of separation, merely because you arrived with unabashed exuberance, in a place where it is cooler to be baleful?

It took a few days to undo the math rules my daughter was taught, and actually look at the number line to figure out integers.  They don’t seem too harmed by the 4 days emotionally.  My older daughter admitted that she sat next to a girl in her advisory class, who wore all black and had bandages around her wrists, having “put them through” a window.  “She said she had a nervous breakdown.  What’s a nervous breakdown, Mommy?”

I’m sure homeschooled kids have nervous breakdowns too, you just don’t see them.  But I was glad my daughter didn’t have to sit next to this poor girl who didn’t have a choice but to go to school; maybe it was even the best place she had to go to all day.  Most homeschooled adolescents , at least the ones I see, are different then their schooled counterparts; they look you in the eye, they are interested in life, more self-confident, more united with the family’s values.  I don’t know if we’ll weather the teen years unscathed, but I sure feel a lot more confident about it with my girl out of the atmosphere of middle school.

For my girls, nirvana just got extended a little longer.  Some insist that they have to get used to the system sooner or later, but my husband argues that beating someone to get them used to being beaten isn’t a philosophy he likes to follow.  And I agree that they have plenty of time in their life to get used to not having any free time, a mean authority controlling your every desire, and having to wake up on Monday and go somewhere you’d rather not.  But then I realize that my husband and I have chosen not to live under this system, and perhaps they will choose this too. And then they will have had their whole lives to be free.

The hygiene hypothesis is all about early childhood exposure to certain worms and bacterias.  Absence of a way of life we left not so long ago.  Absence of farm life, exposure to the feces of animals.  Lacto-fermented food and well water.  We try to recreate it as best we can; putting hookworms back in, eating as much fermented foods as possible.  But then we cart our children off to fast-food education, filled with not only real junk food, but also junk for the mind.  I know there are excellent teachers out there; some of them are my friends, but even they admit that much of their day is spent in discipline, line formation, getting a student to stop talking so the other ones could concentrate.

Think of our tribal ancestors, did they separate their children by age, stick them in a place different from the adults and young children, keep them from contributing to the household with mindless busywork so that we could go about our  mindless business, get payed to buy unhealthy food, escape from the drudgery of the day through television, then up at Monday to start anew?  And so much learning is done with hands in the soil, a swallowtail butterly landing on your neck, the new solar oven my husband built with other homeschoolers, smashing home-grown beans inside to ready for dinner in a few hours.  Playing with dolls.

For now, I have my girls back.  Safely at home where they belong.    I’ve promised many field trips throughout the year.  They start their classes next week.   There are no tests or barked rules.  There is no “hot lunch” that no one tells you how to buy.

We are so far from the way a human animal was meant to live. But the hygiene hypothesis extends beyond the physical.  We must examine what we do with our children’s time.  Is work so precious that we must lock our children up as animals, bribing them with ice-cream and candy in order to learn?  Separating the ages, the sexes, all so we can be prepared for another artificial society of workers?  Wasting our time for a company we don’t believe in, waiting out our retirement so we can finally do what we want in life?

I didn’t realize how unusual we are until I went to that cafe.  Sat around the happy adults, pleased to be separated from the children, as I missed my own.  I wrote about my first year with Crohn’s disease that day, how I hated going to school, longed for freedom from the drudgery of daily life, had no one to talk to about the fear of being told I had a chronic disease, was separated from my home.  If I had known about worms then, I would have been the type to try them; unafraid of snakes, growing up in the Los Angeles mountains, coyotes eating all of our cats. I didn’t have this opportunity then, nor the freedom to even contemplate not going to school.  But my children do.

For now, after two decades of suffering a disease that is probably a result of not getting the proper stimulus in childhood, I have the chance to change the lives of future children, spare them from suffering as I did.  But I will try to provide as many of the Old Friends as I can, which for now, involves learning in an environment that is not artificial, but includes the world, the family, the community.  The dirt.

School, we’ve left behind.