Cultural Exchange

by Celeste

Ask a veteran homeschooling mom if homeschooling works, and you’ll probably hear stories about remarkable, accomplished young people who have used homeschooling to succeed in school, careers, and life. 

Ask an employee of the public schools if homeschooling works, and you may hear horror stories about children who are “behind” in their studies due to “neglectful” parents who did not educate them properly.  These stories often begin along the lines of “Well, I know you’re doing a fine job educating your children, but what about those other parents?”

Could they possibly be talking about the exact same children??

Perhaps the problem is that the public schools are assuming that homeschooled kids are like “transfer students”.  But kids who have homeschooled a long time aren’t really “transfer students”.  They are more like “foreign exchange students”.

Homeschooled kids come from a different learning culture, with different timetables, methods, and expectations about life and learning. They may be more accustomed to dealing with adults as equals.  They may not buy into the “peer culture”, and may be surprisingly ignorant about mass culture.  They may be used to taking control of their time and their education.  They may have prodigious, adult-level knowledge about certain subjects, yet know next to nothing about other subjects at all.  In short, these kids march to a completely different drummer, which can be very disconcerting if you’re not expecting it.

And the key word here is “expectations”.  School teachers assume that a child can move from a homeschool setting into the neighborhood public school as effortlessly as a child from the town down the road.  While they expect some minor adjustments, they assume that within a few weeks the new child will be up to speed with the other children and behaving in the same ways as his peers.  While they expect some variation from school to school, they assume that all third graders across the state and country are doing roughly the same sort of work in the same ways.   

But if that same child were a foreign exchange student, the teacher’s expectations would be quite different.  The teachers would recognize that the child came from a different culture, and had been educated in a different manner and on a different timetable.  They’d encourage the child to explain how things worked in his culture, and use the experience as an opportunity for fostering global understanding for all parties involved. 

Then there is the question of “gaps”, those dreaded lapses in education which cause so much angst and concern among those outside the homeschooling community.  When a transfer student comes in with an educational “gap”, this is a major problem for the teacher.  If the child is significantly behind, he can slow down the rest of the class and provide extra work and challenge for the teacher.  “Gaps” in transfer students can mean that the child received a substandard education in the original school division, so it’s understandable that teachers would assume that the fault lies with the old school, or in the case of homeschooling, with the parents. 

But foreign exchange students have “gaps” too, not because their education was substandard, but because they were educated in a different place and culture with different expectations.  If a foreign exchange student has a “gap”, it’s usually because he has spent his time learning something else of equal or greater importance in his home culture.   Teachers know that most foreign exchange students are smart, educated, and capable; they just need time to absorb and assimilate the cultural knowledge of their new community.  And so it is with many homeschoolers.

Teachers and other concerned parties might do well to remember that with homeschoolers, as with foreign exchange students, “Where there’s a gap, look for the mountains.”  It takes months or years to climb out of a gap caused by a deficit, but the in-depth knowledge and wisdom obtained from building a mountain of specialized knowledge can easily slide down the mountain to fill in a gap.  Many of our homeschooled children have acquired the skills and experiences to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it, so “gaps” are not necessarily as big a problem to overcome as they may first appear.

Perhaps the world would be a better place if everyone thought the same way as the folks who run our town’s house league basketball program.  The house league welcomes all children, regardless of experience or talent, and places the emphasis on learning and growing, rather than winning or losing.  (OK, so they do get a little excited about the winning part sometimes, but the emphasis is definitely on learning all the same.) 

My 11-year-old son tried out for the house league last year. He had never played basketball outside our driveway, and his inexperience showed during the tryouts.  But the coaches didn’t care.  They used the tryouts to gauge skill and experience, so the teams could be evenly balanced, and no one team would wind up with all the good players or bad players.  My son was welcome to play in this league, despite his inexperience, and they made sure that he got the training he needed to be a competitor.

Nobody at the tryouts accused me of “neglecting” my son’s athletic education.  He has a lot of experience with team sports from six years of Little League baseball.  He’s a good athlete with great hand-eye coordination.  He knows all about working on a team and good sportsmanship.  He simply hadn’t played basketball before, and everyone predicted that he would do just fine once he learned the rules and basic skills of the game.  And they were right. 

So perhaps this is the secret recipe to bridging the gap between homeschools and public schools:  a welcoming spirit and a willingness to take people as we find them, rather than trying to mold them to fit our prepackaged expectations.  Perhaps all we really need is a little more cultural exchange. 

Celeste  has been unschooling her kids for well over a decade. She does homeschooling advocacy work for her state homeschooling organization and spends way too much time on the computer. In her spare time, she does tae kwon do, plays the piano, and plays a glamorous, powerful, purple lady bunny in an online virtual reality game.

Comments

[Lydia]

A welcoming spirit and a willingness to take people as we find them would do a lot of good in a number of situations, not just school. Unfortunatley, I think most teachers see an adversarial relationship between hs-ers and schools, and so are predisposed to judge harshly rather than look for positives. It's easier for them to shake their heads and roll their eyes and say "Those homeschoolers!" than to see each child as an individual. Of course, they're not particularly encouraged to see each PS student as an individual either. Oops... rant coming on... ;D

[priscilla]

What a great analogy! I'll definitely keep it in my back pocket to draw upon in conversations. Thanks for the insight, Celeste!

[piscesgrrl]

This was not only an incredibly insightful article, but incredibly spot-on in its timing for me. (I love serendipity!)

My always-unschooled son chose to try high school this year and enrolled in a private college-prep school. (He's done fine after some minor transitional bumps in the road.) Describing him as a foreign exchange student versus a transfer student perfectly sums up the divide we're experiencing first-hand in the school's reaction to us as we now ponder whether or not to continue with school next fall. I'm trying very hard not to burn that bridge, but the vibes of "urgency" and "how could you" and "what about physics!" are poking holes in my thin skin daily. It was perfect timing for me to read this and be reminded of the vast divide in expectations and understanding, as well as remind me to work from empathy and sharing rather than whining and nitpicking.

[Pat]

As a public school teacher, my students who were homeschooled brought in the best insights. They usually were more receptive to my "crazy" ideas about projects and more flexible with changes in schedules. I have had wonderful exchanges of ideas and materials with parents who homeschool their children locally. Also, I have had volunteers in my classroom as peer tutors who were being homeschooled. I think it takes a mutual respect from both sides of the fence and see that we want the same goals: for students to get a quality education. Sometimes we just need to respect that each of us have a different way of doing things.