Atheist Homeschooling. It’s not just for Rabid Fundamentalists Anymore!
We homeschool our only son. It has not been as easy as we would have liked, for we are surrounded by an ocean of fundamentalism. Although nice enough people, the North Dakota Homeschool Association is as religious and right-wing as a group could be. Just take a look at this pamphlet advertising the yearly convention and its speakers. The first is your run-of-the-mill evangelical family speaking on the love of Christ in regards to home education. They will, however, be covering this topic for two freaking days! Needless to say, I will not be attending. But if people wish to be deluded into loving the Lord of Genocide, so be it. This is just common religious BS. Unexciting, I see it every day.
As an aside, my wife went the first year like a lamb to the slaughter. After the third or fourth “abortions make baby Jesus cry and people burn in hell” speech, she was done, never to return.
It is the second of the featured speakers who really turns my stomach: Buddy Davis proud as hell to be from Answers in Genesis. WTF? This man is the enemy, the stated target of this very blog, a young Earth creationist. Worse, he’s a YEC in charge of the children’s minds through two whole days! Apparently, he sings quaint little songs on the literalism of the Bible and Adam and Eve in the garden with dinosaurs. This is compete and utter trash! He may as well be teach phrenology to the impressionable. Maybe I should put in a request for an astrologer for 2011′s convention.
Seriously though, evangelicals pull their kids out of public schools to teach them this? This is why they homeschool? Yes, Virginia. Yes they do! Sigh. How does the human race survive?
Have you ever thought about homeschooling your own children? There are other methods aside from teaching your child to shove his head up his ass. Ever since I thought about having a kid, I’ve wanted to try. But why? It’s obviously not like most homeschooler’s religious reasons. Our nation has kept the schools relatively secular for a while now, and I am hoping they continue to do so. Many other parents choose this path to protect their child, to limit his access to the world, and especially, its access to him. This is not my way either. I believe strongly that I must train my child to live in the world as it is, not how I want it to be.
It is my wife and my goal to broaden his horizons to the furthest extent possible, to free him into the world with the most open mind possible. This is why we homeschool. I have always felt that I could do a better job one on one with my own child than the school system could one on twenty-five.
It comes down to this, I never had a child to have someone else raise him. It’s a job I wanted for myself.
Mate, good luck with it. Raising a child is difficult enough without the over-riding societal expectation that they will somehow be raised in Sky Daddy’s name.
Seek help here when needed; I don’t pretend to have any specific expertise, but I am sure your readers will at least provide the support you need.
Keep up the good work.
My children are now grown and I’m proud of them all, but, if I had it to do over again, I would have home-schooled them. The results might not have been really different, but we would be closer than we are and have shared more ideas and experiences.
I’m a secular home-schooler too. I wanted more for my son (like you I have one son) than the one-size-doesn’t-really-fit all state education system; the fit-them-into-round-holes education system; the left-brain-only system; the forget-creativity-just-learn-facts-to-regurgitate-on-demand education system.
I’m lucky that I live in a country where most home-schoolers are secular, and the Christian ones just join in and don’t try to proseltyse (I live in a country where the culture is NOT to proseltyse at all anyway, so the home-education ethos is a subset of that.)
I do think that home-education has been such a gift to the whole family, not just my son. I’ve learned so much! And with the internet knowledge is one thing that is NOT rationed.
My kids went to public school, but I did a lot of “fill in the blanks” teaching with kids who had missed something on the way through the system. Reading and basic math mostly and the learners were usually high school students. This is where Bubbles and Trixie began – kids wanting to know who these girls were that they always got such a rough deal.
elisaphant
Ottoman
Bubbles and Trixie Institute of Theology
I got my kids involved in all that stuff and sent them to public school. There are certainly things that the school did better than I could and they certainly exposed my kids to many different things than I could have because they have different expertise than I have. To each their own, some people like to grow their own food. I think that there needs to be some common standards because the kid has to be prepared for the world and not all parents have the knowledge to know what it is for someone else besides themselves. I know plenty of people who could do a great job with their kids but I also know others who have done a poor job like my sister with her kid. How do you know if you have done a good job of exposing them to what they need for their future?
We use the theory in which we expose him to a great deal and shelter him only from that which will hurt him. He tries most things we come up with. Every form of literature every type of music, movie, theater, outdoor activity, and sport we can find. He then is allowed to pick and choose what he likes as long as he actually picks some things. I try to expose him to more than the School system would. Especially in the tech, science, literature and history fields. Some people would think it’s too much, but if we think he can emotionally and physically handle it, we try it.
I’m the odd man out in my charming fundie family, as I’m the only one not obeying the “be fruitful and multiply” directive. But, please, continue to keep us informed of how you go about raising yours, because (god-forbid) I may one day have my own skeptic-in-training and I could use the pointers.