The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ first of all—kids are going to have sex. Alright? But I think the biggest problem is, that they turn it into this awful, terrible, not okay thing that only the bad kids do. I think instead of presenting it as this awful, terrible thing, if you just taught them the facts, okay, here’s what it is, here’s what can happen, here’s what you should do, and if you could abstain? Eh, you won’t have to worry about any of those things. But I think that teaching them that you expect them to abstain, is guaranteeing that they will not come and talk to you if they are thinking about it. I mean, if I had a daughter and she was going to do it, I would be like, “Honey, you can do it, in our house. So if something goes wrong, or if you don’t want to do it, you’re comfortable.” Instead of “Oh my god, I don’t even want to hear that you’re going to do this.”

      Raya believed that teaching abstinence is unrealistic because teenagers are sexual beings. Beyond limiting their access to information that would help them make decisions about sexual behavior, she also thought that abstinence-based education was unnecessarily moralizing. Raya identified one of the lessons of this type of education as being that people who do not abstain from sexual activity are “bad,” which discourages teens who are engaging in, or considering engaging in, sexual activity from seeking out their parents’ advice on their relationships. Raya believed that this can lead teens, particularly teen girls, to engage in sexual activity in which their comfort and ability to consent may be compromised. In expressing this belief, Raya sounded much like the Dutch parents in Amy Schalet’s examination of how Dutch and American parents differently understand teenagers and sexuality; unlike the American parents, the Dutch parents thought it was important for their teens to be able to have sex in the home so that they could do so in a comfortable environment.13 Raya recognized that this stance was rare among American parents, and attributed her own adoption of this view to having lived in several other countries before moving to the United States in her twenties.

      Mia, a white, low-income, married mother of two sons, also critiqued abstinence-based sex education. She was among several parents who felt that sex education that is primarily or exclusively morality based, or even just primarily biology focused, misses important educational components because it is divorced from concepts like respect, consent, pleasure, and sexual violence. Mia told me a story about how, when her older son was eleven, she seized on his question about a condom they had seen on the ground earlier in the day to have a very comprehensive conversation about sex. Though her son had been hesitant to talk about it at first, she recalled,

      That night after dinner he said, “Mom, I want to know more about that thing,” and we had the whole talk. I mean, all of it. Rape, birth control, abortion, adoption, condoms—all of it. And the emotional side, you know, don’t push a girl, no means no, and you don’t have to do it with everybody. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re manlier if you do it. And he was like, “Why do people do that?” And I said, “Because it’s fun, and because it feels good.” You know, it was a little weird at first, but I was trying real hard to make it not weird, and so once I started being like, really just, calm about it, he had all kinds of questions. And it was great.

      Like the parents featured earlier in this chapter, Mia said that she was glad that she, rather than a school, was the one to provide sex education to her son. However, unlike these other parents’ reasons, Mia’s was that she wanted to address a more comprehensive range of issues than her son would be exposed to in a school setting. She commented that she “want[s] him to know everything, real and true and open and honest,” and that such a holistic understanding of sex would not be what he would get if he took a sex education class in a public school. She also explained that, after this conversation, she was not worried about him talking about sex with anyone else, because she knew she had covered so much ground with him already.

      For Maria, a Latina, low-income, married mother of three daughters, the lack of open discussion about sexuality in schools discourages children—particularly girls—from taking ownership of their sexuality. She explained, “I think it’s really, really important for my kids to own their sexuality, especially as girls. That no one else determines their sexuality, and they own that, and they call the shots with that. And they have to be comfortable with that. It’s so much part of our identity, how we feel about ourselves, how we see ourselves, how we interact with others.” Maria did not think that girls’ ownership of their sexuality was something that was promoted by the larger culture in general, but felt that it was particularly hard to develop this in the context of schools,14 because even though sex is at the forefront of teens’ interactions with each other, it is in the background—if present at all—in instruction and discussion in schools. In not allowing sexuality to be normalized, Maria argued, schools are spaces in which it is difficult for girls to become comfortable and confident about their sexuality—and thus, following her logic, about their very sense of self.

      Concerns about Peer Environment

      Parents who expressed this second critique also noted that children’s interactions with their peers could be a source of worry about their children’s development of a gendered or sexual sense of self. Several parents I interviewed talked about how the peer culture of schools encourages conformity to certain gender and sexual norms. This peer culture was described by these parents as being a hierarchical social system in which a person’s ability to have and sustain social relationships is largely determined by their place in this hierarchy, and in which nonconformity can mean being relegated to the bottom of the social ladder.15 Parents with this concern were sympathetic to children’s difficulties in resisting peer pressure, and acknowledged the potentially devastating effects of being socially ostracized in school, but worried that this culture caused children to act in ways that would compromise their “true selves.” Mindy, a low-income, white, single mother of one daughter, Emma, stated that “there is a lot of pressure in schools, to do drugs, to drink, and while I’m sure that she’s going to get some of that anyway, and probably will experiment with all of those things, I think it’s different than the kind of pressure you feel to conform in school.” It was not the behaviors themselves that concerned Mindy; she seemed to expect that her daughter, currently six years old, would eventually “experiment” with drinking, drugs, and—as she brought up later in the interview—sexual activity. What Mindy worried about was that Emma would do these things not out of genuine curiosity but because of feeling pressure to do them. For Mindy, these behaviors are not essentially “bad,” but they are made “bad” when they happen in a way that is not guided by her daughter’s own desires.

      This concern about the pressure to conform appeared frequently when these parents talked about dating. This group of parents did not have qualms about their children dating—and many wanted it to be very clear that they were not discouraging it—but rather, their concerns were rooted in what might be motivating their children to do so. They were critical of what they saw as children and teens dating because of pressure, rather than desire. Aaron, a white, low-income, married father of three who identified strongly as a libertarian, had recently left his work-at-home job that allowed him to share homeschooling labor with his wife (his older children’s step-mother and youngest child’s mother) to take a job teaching music at a public middle school. Aaron’s oldest daughter, Becca, was a year younger than his current students, and while he said she was “as boy crazy” as his students were, he saw differences in how they date. Becca had a particular boy whom she liked, and they saw each other a few times a week and hung out casually, whereas his students were engaged in what he saw as all-consuming—and sexually active—relationships. He said, “It’s all about status, and that part does not happen in the homeschool groups. Because they—I mean, they make friendships, but because they’re not around each other all the time, they don’t have to have, like, social justifications for this hierarchy of who’s the coolest.” He further explained that he thought part of the appeal of the school relationships is their forbidden quality: students at his school were not even allowed to hold hands in the hallway, and he thought the children sometimes engaged in physical relationships so as to rebel against these rules, whereas “if Becca was holding hands with this boy that likes her, whatever.” Aaron was not concerned with СКАЧАТЬ