Secular Homeschoolers — guest column by JJ Ross
You think YOUR secular kids face some tricky issues in Christian-branded society? Ha!
Picture a homeschooling family. Do you see a bible in the picture, prominent in the foreground — perhaps on the kitchen table around which six or seven modestly-dressed children do their lessons, while their denim-jumpered mother bakes bread and solemnly applies her righteous rod to strays?
Kathleen Parker’s column this week about the GOP might as well be about homeschooling:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch…is what ails [us] and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
You could say I’m a “constituent” of homeschooling, but in a radically different picture from the evangelical right wing oogedy-boogedy branch. Heck, not just a different picture, a whole different story, written in another language.
Last week Dale said of secular parent blogging:
“Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ‘em, read ‘em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.”
He can picture secular homeschool parent bloggers as a friendly neighborhood in that community. So if homeschooling, like Harvard, had a Humanist of the Year Award — and why don’t we, come to think of it? — Dale would deserve it. 🙂
We’re just starting to find ourselves and each other in the blogosphere, a search made more challenging by the fact we don’t know what to call ourselves. (Homeschoolers Beyond Belief?) Secular, inclusive, rational, atheist, freethinking? The online homeschooling community fights over the word “homeschool” itself, never mind the weight of all those adjectives hung around it like baggage on a skycap’s cart.
Some of us are trying Thinking Homeschoolers and Evolved Homeschoolers on for size. The main lesson I’ve taught myself so far is that it takes real thinking — knowledge work if you will — with plenty of detours through link farms and those insipid generic “about homeschooling” blurbs, to discover solid secular homeschooling resources that endure.
Three comprehensive favorites:
National Home Education Network with discussion forums (now read-only) on thinking topics such as networking between religious and not-religious families
Sandra Dodd’s Radical Unschooling and her “merrily unschooling” family blog
A secular network of trustworthy — preferably jaded — independent homeschooling parents doesn’t just connect us with the good stuff; it helps steer us around the bad. There’s the HSLDA to get to the bottom of, of course, which I won’t link because those patriarchs blot out the homeschooling sun without any help from me. Then there’s an elaborate online con game in which an individual (with many names) sets up a fake but believable show of influence as homeschool leader and authority, quoted by reporters, selling products and running private schools, sometimes from dozens of intertwined sites very unlikely for one parent to suspect, detect or connect.
It takes running down rabbit trails and then networking in controlled chaos, to share what we learn in places innocent newbies are likely to find it, and save them starting all over again — real education! I would give you three infamous names to prove the point, except then Dale would get indignant letters threatening legal action. (That’s how they operate. See why you probably won’t hear about them without some networking?)
Email lists were the hot ticket when we started homeschooling in the 1990s. For years they were my lifeline. Ten years ago the secular National Home Education Network (NHEN) was born of and built on email lists. But — maybe in a form of punctuated equilibrium, or would it be climate change? — it’s not the same today. My blog partner Nance Confer and I still operate Parent-Directed Education for a static membership, 28,000 archived messages dating back to the summer of 2001.
If you’re just burning to roam the archives of a particular list, it may be worth joining. State and local email lists often thrive; I hear two good examples are VA Eclectic HS with Shay Seaborne and Stephanie Elms (see her bloglink below) and Ben Bennett’s Indiana Home Educators Network (IHEN).
And there are tightly focused mentoring lists, for new unschoolers say, or college prep advice. But generally I no longer recommend email lists, for any homeschool parent comfortable in the blogosphere.
So think blogs, maybe find a couple here that speak to you. Then see who comments there, and who’s on that blog’s blogroll. Follow at your leisure, to infinity if you like. The universe is expanding, not contracting. 🙂
This has worked better for me than searching for atheist or rational, plus homeschooling or school choice or education freedom, etc. Oh, yeah, here’s a tip — don’t assume “rational” means merely logic and thinking. It can indicate ideology more than analysis, code for Ayn Rand discipleship as an “Objectivist” and sometimes coupled with an extreme brand of libertarian homeschool politics that uses Founding Father quotes and defend-the-constitution rhetoric to forward its fascist fringe beliefs. There is one blog for example listed on every “rational” homeschool blogroll I see, that’s anything but. So I don’t go back to that blog. Just sayin’ — it would be RATIONAL to vet your links more thoroughly, ahem, unless you too actually believe Obama is Jesus and Hitler all rolled up into one Marxist plot to overthrow America.
With that [drum roll please!] here’s a grab bag of 15 smartly secular homeschooling blogs, from my own little corner in my own little chair, just right for my home and hearth:
Home Education, Religion, Politics & Eclectic Stuff (HERP&ES)
Unschool Days
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JJ Ross blogs about thinking parenting and secular homeschooling at Cocking a Snook!