The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ whereas he thought his students “don’t know why they’re doing it. They just know that it’s cool.” For Aaron, as with Mindy, it was not the behaviors themselves that were good or bad, but the intention behind them that determined their moral value.

      A few parents talked about these pressures as being especially difficult for youth who may have nonheterosexual identities. Shannon, a high-income, married mother of two who identified as having a mixed race/ethnicity, said that she thought homeschooling, “to some extent, allows young people to find their sexuality in a more freeing environment. I think that not having that pressure to conform is good in allowing kids to find themselves, whoever they might be, because maybe they might be pulled to a direction, that you might be gay.” Shannon went on to note that this can be hard for children who know they are gay at a young age and feel pressure not to come out, but also for children who may still be unsure, but might feel pressure to declare a sexual identity before they are ready. For Shannon, what is most important is that children have the ability to figure themselves out on their own timeline, whether that means claiming a sexual identity earlier or later than they may be pressured to do in the school environment.

      Children as Autonomous

      Within this view of childhood, rather than seeing children as innocent, parents see their children as autonomous beings who are capable of exercising agency over their own lives. The practice of allowing children autonomy was a major theme in the sessions that I attended at the Texas Unschoolers conference. This theme was especially evident in a session in which the topic was talking to children about sex and sexuality. The main purpose of the session was to discuss ways of promoting bodily autonomy. Like the session on the “Bailey Bee Believes” program that I attended at one of the Christian conferences, the advice given at this session included teaching children proper names for their anatomy and using these terms without shame, and making it clear to children that they alone have the ability to grant—or deny—someone permission to touch their bodies. While the “Bailey Bee Believes” session leader had advised beginning these practices at age two, the leader of this unschooling session advised beginning them from birth. While it is unrealistic to begin asking for a child’s consent to be hugged or picked up from birth, the session leader noted that it was possible to begin laying the groundwork for these practices from infancy, for example, by telling a baby “now I am going to pick you up,” as a precursor to someday asking to pick them up. She also advised speaking aloud the anatomical terms for body parts when children are infants, not so much for the child’s benefit as for the adult’s. She explained that most of us have some degree of discomfort using these terms that stems from inexperience using them, so telling your infant child “now I am going to wipe your labia” or “now I am going to put diaper cream on your anus” gives parents the chance to get comfortable using the words early on.

      In contrast to the session at the Christian conference, in which the information was framed as important to preventing child sexual abuse, this danger discourse of sexuality in childhood was largely absent from the unschooling session, where the purpose of engaging in these practices was framed as giving children a sense of ownership over their own bodies. This session also included an acknowledgment that children are capable of understanding, and experiencing, sexual pleasure.16 One of the takeaway messages of this session was that children are entitled to information about their own bodies, including about sex and sexual pleasure, and that to “shelter” children by denying this information is harmful, not because it places them at risk of abuse but because it denies them full bodily autonomy.

      Like Jamie, who was featured at the start of this chapter, several of the unschooling parents I interviewed talked about how they went out of their way not only to teach their children about theoretical concepts like consent and bodily autonomy but also to allow their children, in practice, a great deal of bodily autonomy. Carolyn, a white, middle-income, bisexual, heterosexually married mother of three young sons, spoke at length about the responsibility she felt she had raising sons in what she identified as a rape culture. One of the ways she sought to counteract the culture of men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies was through emphasizing bodily autonomy. She makes it clear to her children not only that they never need to, for example, hug someone if they do not want to but also that they need to respect other people’s boundaries as well, including through reading their body language to tell if they do not want to be touched. She described how, when her boys interact with their cousin, Anna, who is an only child and is younger than they are, “sometimes she gets overwhelmed. And I’ll be like, I can see from Anna’s body that she’s had enough. And so we talk a lot about, you need to read people’s bodies as well as listen to their words. The words are absolute. If somebody says no, stop, don’t, whatever, then that is it. But you also need to look at their bodies,” she said, because sometimes a person can be saying “no” through nonverbal communication. Importantly, this was a lesson that Carolyn, like other unschooling parents, did not think children learn in school—that in fact, in training their bodies to conform to the demands and expectations of teachers and other adults, they learn its opposite.

      Gendered and Sexual Beings: Identity over Behavior

      The parents who engaged in this critique of public schools tended to talk about gendered and sexual expression in terms of their children’s identities or personalities (see table 2.2). To these parents, gender and sexuality were already a part of who their children were, and their expression of gender and sexuality was seen as a reflection of something innate. In keeping with this understanding of childhood, these parents tended to focus far less on who their children would be in the future, and more on who they are in the present. This was evident at the unschooling conference as well, where childhood was framed as a stage of life like any other. There was no talk of training children to ensure certain adult behavior, and only some focus on preparing them for adulthood—notably, in the theme of anxiety about unschoolers being prepared to attend college, which came up on more than one occasion. Overall, there was far less of a focus on shaping who children will be as adults and more of a focus on allowing them to be who they already are. This was explicit in one talk that Lisa, one of the leaders of the conference, gave about mindfulness and parenting in the present moment. Lisa noted that if you ask parents what they want for their children, almost all of them will answer “for them to be happy.” But, she argued, what they really mean when they say this is that they want their children to be happy in the future. Lisa explained that she had come to see unschooling as an intentional way of letting go of this future orientation, and instead focusing on the goal of having happy children—and a happy self—in the present moment.

      Like the parents who saw their children as innocent, these parents also feared that school might change their children—not by changing their innate identity but by causing their “true” or “natural” selves to be suppressed or distorted to fit within the constraints of the public-school environment. For example, Julia, a white, middle-income, married mother of three, told me the following story:

      There was one time I was sitting on my couch, and my son was five. He wanted these fairy wings, and a fairy wand at Target one time, so I bought them. They were a dollar. And I watched him, running around the living room, wearing his fairy wings, with his fairy wand, dancing, just totally free, not even self-conscious at all, and I was just like, f—— everybody else. I would not expose him to any kind of ridicule for being who he is, whoever he is. I know there are people who look down their nose at [homeschoolers] who [they think] are pulling their kids out of society. I dare them to look at their little boy dancing around in fairy wings, and think about sending him to school. I want my kids, every day, to know that it’s okay to be who they are.

      Julia saw her children as being able to be “free” to be their authentic selves in the context of homeschooling, whereas in public school, she argued, they would be ridiculed if they expressed themselves so freely. Such ridicule had the potential either to suppress her children’s expressions of their true selves or to damage their self-identity. Or, as Jamie, whom we met at the start of this chapter, put it when she talked about how СКАЧАТЬ