The Great Change

Last night on our date, after eating dinner, Trevor and I went to ASU. We were planning on going to look something up in the library, but found that because we're no longer students we couldn't even access a catalog, so we decided to just walk around for a while instead. The campus has changed so much, and it's absolutely beautiful. We hardly recognized parts of it.

It brought back so many memories, so many feelings, and to be honest, so many regrets. I kept thinking about all of the time I spent there, all of the classes I took, all of the papers I wrote, everything I should have learned, and it finally happened.

I wish I had not gone to public school.

This thought has been very long in coming. More than a year ago, I took a class that I have often called a "book club on steroids". We read classics together, discussed them, wrote papers on them, and even gave speeches. Of the other members of the class, Trevor and I were the only ones who didn't homeschool our kids and weren't planning on it. I told them that public education had worked well for me, but I was open minded about having my children homeschooled if I felt like they needed it. I wasn't outspoken, but I was definitely the minority.

I loved school. I felt like deciding to homeschool my kids was demeaning to the excellent teachers I'd had, and I didn't think that was fair.

But the teachers weren't the problem, it's the system. What is the value of a grade? In my opinion and experience, it does not reflect true learning or even effort, and in education these are the things that really matter. It doesn't accurately measure education, but it does have a huge potential to either discourage those who are working hard but can't quite get that A, or lulling people into a false sense of security about the quality of their education and learning. I fell in the latter camp. According to the public system, I was an excellent student; in retrospect I fell far beneath my potential in learning.

Of course I loved school: with the grades I received and how I tested, I had praise from every side. Unfortunately, I wasn't really learning, and I was not in the least bit intrisically motivated. It has taken almost three years out of the public system to be detoxified from it's effects and feel like I am learning for the sake of learning and actually retaining it.

I don't want that for my children. I don't want them to waste 12 years, or worse, waste 12 and then battle for the rest of their lives to recover from the effects of a distorted system. They need personal mentorship, intrinsic motivation, and a recognition of how to apply what they learn so it actually benefits them.

Now how do I do that?

The adventure begins...