Honesty in Homeschooling

I can't stand some of the homeschool books I've read recently. They are decidedly monosyllabic, written on a third grade level, telling you more or less that having a casual conversation about the digestive system while eating a peanut butter sandwich counts as "health" which goes under the label of "science" which goes under the umbrella of "academics." This just doesn't Speak to My Soul, As It Were. We need to drill these kids- they are brilliant minds begging to be stuffed. This is not a casual endeavor. I don't like to be told that Homeschooling is successful because Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were homeschoolers. That's spurious: how do we know they wouldn't have been brilliant anyway- that it was in the nature of their being to be brilliant? Just because we homeschool doesn't guarantee us a spot in history. We have to sweat for a good education! This is the PURSUIT of happiness. Kids don't want to just sit around their houses and call everyday life education. Education needs to be a special event that takes effort and work.

All day long I am telling myself, "We can do more!" And I can go full board on academics and end up with a pile of clean laundry so large that a boxcar is about the only thing left that can haul it. We homeschool mothers. Do we ever win? Today we fell far short in the academics department. We got only a little done. But our floors are really clean, and we all went 8 miles skating and biking on our own steam through the sunny, windy afternoon! No, this is not school, this is just housework and wonderful frivolity! This freedom is one of the dangerous advantages of homeschooling- it's way to easy to have fun instead of hit the books. It's not like we didn't learn during that time, though. We learned not to brake suddenly going downhill when Mommy is rollerblading directly behind us if we don't like to see her swerve and careen past us yelling at the top of her lungs to never do that again because she is an object in motion that tends to stay in motion and has no idea how to stop on rollerblades. (See, this moment would be where the Homeschool Books I Read That I Don't Like would say, "Ahh, physics. Yep. They're doing physics.") Thankfully I did not end up demonstrating the force equals mass times acceleration formula.

I wish I had a book like Rafe Esquith's There Are No Shortcuts (a great book!) but tailored to the homeschool model and not quite as boring as The Well-Trained Mind that lights my fire.