Home School, Prep School, Unschool

As I write this, we have an application at one local school of the Quaker tradition. I am also reading “A Well-Trained Mind,” which is about doing classical education at home. Here again, we are at a crossroads: who are we, what do we believe and how do we make that bite-sized for our children? I vacillate between wanting to claw and connive for Manny to get onto the conveyor belt to the ivy league AND trying to teach and shepherd him in our faith, to try and live a life like Christ, who was homeless and who was not impressed with pristine institutions of learning.

I guess secretly, my wish is to be a hand-made, home-made kind of mom, tons of hands-on work, tons of face-time with my kids, making elaborate and time-consuming projects, sitting on the floor drawing AND THEN have them test in for Masterman and have them be way ahead of the curve and then I’ll have these 16 yr. old Ivy-bound kids with an array of options before them. Like, “Mom, Dad, I think I want to lead a sailing team around the Ivory Coast but I don’t know if that’s unwise and I should just take the fellowship at Curtis Institute and keep practicing my music. I promise I’ll be back in New Haven for orientation.” We had a playdate today and I found myself talking schools with the other mother. Talking of applications and interviews and recs from their current teacher: our sons are 5!!

I don’t know, I guess I write this just to scribble down a little snapshot of our life now. I write for long-distance friends who follow this little blog. I wish they could talk to Manny right now, get a sense of how hard this is, deciding. He is complex and sensitive and I don’t want to jeopardize my relationship with him to do the homeschool path only to permanently bruise and wound him and send him to GFS in a year. But we keep thinking, if we have to pay 13K for kindergarten, it had better be a life-changing, super-stimulating but gently nurturing mind-blowing, phenomenal kindergarten! I have peaked in on the local homeschool groups and run into a few moms. All well-meaning, all with cute swarming broods around them. I just keep thinking that I am not them either. I can’t really knit, I love red meat, and my hair has never been longer than my shoulders.

I think we’ll find our way, we always seem to. In PA, you don’t have to report any kind of schooling until they’re 8 so I figure I have at least that much time.