Carmen spied this article and shared it with me. We think there are some race, class and general parenting issues to dig into here. From the New York Times:
ONE morning early last month, long after that frantic hour between 7 and 8 when most New York City parents were hustling their 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds out the door and into their first day of kindergarten, Benny Rendell, the 5-year-old son of Joanne Rendell, a novelist, and Brad Lewis, a New York University professor, lay sprawled asleep in his bed, enjoying what his mother described as his first day of unkindergarten.
Benny stayed asleep, as is his habit, until well past 11 a.m., while his mother, whose first book, “The Professors’ Wives’ Club,” was just published by NAL Accent, worked on her new novel. When Benny awoke, he and his mother slowly made their way to a friend’s house in Brooklyn, with Benny reading the subway stops out loud on the way, and counting out change at a vegetable stand.They spent the afternoon in a Fort Greene backyard; while Benny played with his pals in the mud, the grown-ups looked on, and shared a cold one.
Ms. Rendell, 34, and Mr. Lewis, 51, are no slouches in the academic department — with two Ph.D.’s and an M.D. between them, the two fell in love at an academic conference and Mr. Lewis is now a faculty in residence in one of N.Y.U.’s only residential colleges. Nonetheless, they have made the semi-radical (for New York, anyway) and anti-academic choice to keep Benny out of the school system, for now. They are part of a community of like-minded parents who are opting to enrich rather than formally educate their not-yet-school-age children (6 is the age that New York City law requires parents to register their children as home-schooled). They discovered one another through the New York City Home Educators Alliance (nychea.org), a home-schooling bulletin board.
Benny’s parents aren’t home-schooling in the traditional sense, by hewing to a curriculum, nor are they strictly “unschooling,” that is, following the teachings of John Holt, a progressive educator who promoted a child-led learning movement that is a wildly democratic subset of the home-schooling world. Rather, theirs is an ad hoc, day-by-day exploration into what it means to be a stay-at-home parent and child in an accelerated culture like New York. In a city where the race to be on top can start in infancy, the disconnect between these parents’ choices and the New York City norm is vast, as Ms. Rendell learned recently. Read more…
I find it remarkable how polarized and incredibly intense people’s responses are to this – it’s on par with when someone brings up natural childbirth or breastfeeding. People really take this stuff personally.
I think the writer of the original article wrote a kind of smug, intentionally incendiary piece that people responded badly to. It sounded like privileged people talking about their awesome privileges.
However, I am totally okay with intentional, age-appropriate home/un/anti-schooling. Anyone who has ever studied the history of schooling in the US should know that it’s never been a particularly good system, and has never consistently served children well. Even within schooling, there are vastly different approaches.
One thing I appreciated in the comments of the NYT article was someone who pointed out that some families do make sacrifices to educate their children in this way, in an effort to clarify that non-institutional education doesn’t have to be the property of the rich, the elite or the university professors of the world. Some people struggle for the sake of their children’s education, which I admire. I think people should be able to choose the schooling they want for their children. I don’t believe that homeschooling belongs to the “upper classes.”
Clearly, when you struggle very hard just to put food on the table, homeschooling won’t necessarily work. But it might. I have 2 friends who homeschooled as single, working parents (one recently married), and they don’t have a lot of financial resources. They have enough, and they’ve made it work. We don’t homeschool, but we might later on (it’s something I think about if we end up having a son – schools can be very unfriendly places to little black boys), and while we are technically middle class, we are on that slippery sand between barely middle-class and a pit of crippling debt.
There are some schools that prepare children well, and there are some that damage children horribly and there are some that don’t do much at all. I say if you can provide a good alternative for your kids, do it.
Ms. Rendell is indeed a privileged parent. White, middle class parents often have the luxury of choosing whether or not to send their children to school. And it doesn’t just have to do with their economic ability to do so. We all know that if a person of color chose to keep their child out of school, educationalists would be more quick to cry “educational neglect” due to the parent’s “irresponsible” decision not to send the child to school.
If anyone should be protecting their children from the damage that public schooling can cause, it’s the parents of children from marginalized groups. Often these children are demoralized in schools–they learn about mostly white, middle class people and values and indirectly learn that people from their culture are of little to no value. And, they’re often treated unfairly by teachers and other school staff (no matter how well intentioned they are). I say this based on my past experience as a white teacher in a predominantly black high school. I’ve learned a lot about racism and my white privilege since then…
I feel like Atena’s comment took the words right out of my mouth…
Interesting, indeed. There is a part of me that wishes I could do something similar and there is a part of me that already does. I do it in between work and on my days off. I would love to see how these children turn out in the end. Will they be the ones that are gifted artists that produce beautiful culturally significant works of art or will they be adults attracted to competitive work environments? The whole idea of living in New York city and some how avoiding competition is an oxymoron. Everything about New York is competitive from getting on the subway to getting a table in a restaurant. That is why there is a saying “if you can make it here you make it anywhere.” Trying to avoid competitive environments for your children is like trying not to step on a crack in the sidewalk virtually impossible. At some point they are going to have to compete for something they want and they will have to develop a strategy for getting it. Personally, I think, it’s better to start them early so they can figure out their coping mechanism and you can help fine tune it.
I wish more of the parents I see would do this, actually
doesn’t have to be full-time unschooling, but anecdotally I’d say even the difference between kids who routinely spend days out of preschool with Mum and Dad just going about their normal business and those who don’t is remarkable. I learned how to unbog a car stuck in desert sands from a four-year-old 
Our local primary school would commend her decision (the prevailing wisdom here is – especially with boys – if they’re not ready for school, or more importantly are likely to benefit from a year outside it, then don’t force them to start at 5; it’s considered counterproductive, especially in terms of their reading development).
I wonder whether some of the irate responses are to do with guilt or lashing out from people who claim to want to spend more time with their kids, yet always somehow manage not to… (as opposed to the ones who *really* want to, and can’t)?
One possible source of the anti-homeschooling response you might see is from people who’ve observed or experienced child abuse. I know a *lot* of people who only survived their parents version of “raising” because of the resources – food, safety, interested adults, literacy, an excuse to not participate in the family – they got in school. No number of ideal homeschooling families you point out to them is going to take away the knowledge that the isolation that is possible for a homeschooled kid is a daydream for the worst kind of parent.
Also, there are progressive parents of color and white parents of kids of color who homeschool – one of the progressive homeschoolers I know of is the white mother of a half-Egyptian child, and she’s linked to a lot of homeschoolers of color over the years. They just don’t get a lot of press.
We all know that if a person of color chose to keep their child out of school, educationalists would be more quick to cry “educational neglect” due to the parent’s “irresponsible” decision not to send the child to school.
All people who chose not to send their children to traditional schools are labeled “irresponsible.” I know because my husband was homeschooled by white, middle class, college educated parents and people who know of my husbands education history ask me obtuse questions about his upbringing all the time. I also know the stories that my Mother-In-Law tells about being belittled and outcasted by family and peers. Homeschooling is not a popular decision no matter who chooses to do it.
I also know of one woman from my LLL group who homeschooled her biracial son for elementary school and did it very successfully. She also had the added difficulty of being a teenage mother. Neither she, nor her son are worse for wear now and he’s 14. I’m not sure what kind of grief she had endured but I know that she’s not alone.