In my previous post, I described the frustration I feel when people within the homeschooling community insist that all homeschooling parents are well-intentioned and would never willfully harm their children through their religious beliefs and homeschooling practices. And I'm concerned about the long-ranging effects of these denials--I'm strong enough now and have gained the perspective necessary to withstand the assault on my reality, but I worry about others: for those who are yet unable to escape the system or those who are newly-liberated from it and still struggling to make sense of their feelings of betrayal and hurt, the denials from the homeschooling community can feel a little like gas-lighting by proxy, if that makes sense.
This is why I must tell my story. There are myriad tales of homeschooling horror on the web, and I will add mine to that dismal collection in hopes of validating what many others out there must feel when they reflect on their homeschool experience and wonder if they have a right to their anger and confusion.
In this post I will sketch out the background of my family's move to homeschooling and how our involvement in the system evolved over the years. In later posts, I'll examine how this process affected my family and contributed to the eventual disintegration of my relationship with them.
It was 1984. Michael Jackson was at the top of the charts with Thriller, Los Angeles was gearing up for the summer Olympics, and the Cold War was still going strong. In my little corner of the world, I was just completing the fourth grade and my parents had decided that my brothers and I would not be returning to the public school system the following year. We were warned not to tell our teachers, for fear that they would report our withdrawal and alert CPS, which would apparently result on our being snatched away from our parents, never to be seen again. My middle brother, who was four years older, would never attend high school, while my oldest brother was pulled out just before beginning his senior year. Academically and socially, I believe he suffered the least harm from my parents' decision.
We weren't homeschooled during that first year after we left public school. Our tiny, independent, fundamental Baptist church operated a private school that used the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum (see the Leaving Fundamentalism blog for a scathing and accurate assessment of ACE), and that was the setting of my first non-traditional education experience. In the back room/fellowship hall of the church, there was a row of wooden, partitioned cubicles--called "offices" in ACE parlance--where for five days a week about fifteen of us sat and toiled through our PACE workbooks. There was one college-educated, formerly-certified teacher on staff, and a handful of moms--some of whom had never completed high school--who were pressed into service as monitors and flag-answerers. It was a depressingly efficient indoctrination system, one that encouraged rote, mind-numbing memorization while also presenting much temptation to cheat for the more creative and daring students (yeah, so sue me).
After that first year, our already-small church experienced a split over some charismatic elements that were creeping into the congregation. The Gothard-worshipping founders of the church were so appalled and horrified by the holy rollers that they took their toys and went home--actually, they started a new church of their own where they could safely re-install Mr. Gothard and his Big Red Book as their objects of veneration.
Anyway, back to my story: with our church destroyed like Jericho before the Isrealites, we no longer had enough prisoners, er, children to keep the ACE school open. There were only about eight kids during that second year, so we used a hybrid model: three days a week, we homeschooled, and on the other two days we met at the church. On "school days" we had chapel in the morning, worked individually in our cubicles, and had a couple of recess periods on the playground. There were about eight kids that year, and we transitioned from ACE to Alpha Omega Lifepacs (yes, we used a curriculum that couldn't spell its own name correctly).
The following year, when I was in seventh grade, we began meeting only once a week at the church, and my contact with other kids was reduced to two church services on Sunday, Thursday night services, and that one day a week at "school". With one exception, all of the families in the church were homeschooling or un-schooling by this point. We were not allowed to have contact with outsiders, even other Baptists; this practice of extreme secondary separation is, I believe, one of the characteristics of harmful homeschooling versus a more balanced, mainstream approach to homeschooling. But I'm digressing again.
My years from seventh grade onward are a blur. I do remember that we began using the A Beka curriculum, which is published by the same folks who bring us the craziness of Pensacola Christian College. And I remember that before I began the ninth grade, I determined to finish my high school work in two years rather than four, because I knew I couldn't endure another four years of homeschooling; suicide was a very real option for me at that time in my life so my survival truly was on the line. So I "graduated" from high school when I was sixteen years old, wholly unprepared for higher education or the real world and unable to function in society as a normal adolescent.
Next up: Where did it all start to go wrong?
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