Next week, the kids head back to brick-and-mortar school: another demarcation of the end of the Gap Year.
I’ll miss homeschooling. Well, aspects of it. Most fundamentally, of course, the portability of homeschooling enabled us to do the trip at all, and I will sorely miss that freedom of time and place. I’ll also miss the reading. For me, the opportunity to delve into books with my kids, the time to talk them over in detail, the ability to link what they were reading with what we were experiencing as a family… was magical. As well, we laughed a lot. (When we weren’t on the verge of murdering each other, I mean.)
School is different.
The Schoolboy (William Blake)
I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!
But to go to school in a summer morn, —
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning’s bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!
O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay, —
How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
The line that comprises the title of this post is also the title of a book by David Albert, chronicling his experiences homeschooling his daughters. For both practical and pedagogical reasons, our learning on the road looked quite different from his daughters’ experiences. There’s as much variation between homeschoolers as there is between large brick-and-mortar schools and small ones, public and private, parochial and secular, general and specialized. No shockers there.
The poem, however, is not concerned with pedagogy; its focus is joy. Outside, unfettered, children have it; whereas caged in school, they don’t.
Many homeschooling families concur.
Between the three of them, my kids have over the years attended small schools and large ones, private and public, traditional and progresssive. They each would say that there are moments of laughter and joy in brick-and-mortar schools of all kinds. I have taught in public school, and I agree.
I think it is fair, though, to say joy is not part of the mandate, official or implicit, of most brick-and-mortar schools. Kids are funny, and curious, and active, and mischievous; and wherever kids are convened, joy will bubble up spontaneously. That is precisely why many teachers are drawn to the profession in the first place.
However, in large groups, that very energy, and attendant noise and disruption and distraction, quickly devolves into a management issue. Which in turn evolves, all too often, into lists of rules that in the context of kids are simultaneously understandable and ridiculous: No running. No talking. No playing. No touching the hallway walls. There’s nothing wrong with joy in school, so long as it contained and silent; but its frequent corollary, exuberance, is a problem.
Map of Africa near our Blantyre guesthouse
Geography lesson: “Okay, backstroke to Liberia! Good job! Crawl to Morocco! Breast stroke to Kenya!
Sigh. How shall we, back in our regular lives…
…bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
Family Gap Year 