A Good Read

"Most parents feel fondness for those rare, odd moments when they have knelt close beside a son or daughter to transmit the mystery of some ancient, incidental craft: tying a bowline, weaving a pigtail, nipping the suckers from a tomato plant. These are now Hallmark, quality-time moments, exploited by advertisers and available on weekends--we want more of them, we long for that sort of warm proximity in which what we do is necessary, unforced, and precisely as it should be....

"In the end there are reasons beyond education (Can we really detach education from everything else?) to homeschool--a misnomer, in this context, for doing what human beings have always done in bringing up their children. There is a love to be cultivated, an instinct to be nurtured, a need to be satisfied at both ends."

--David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

It's been several weeks since I've finished reading Guterson's book, but passages like these have stayed with me. Written by a high school English teacher, novelist, and homeschooling father of four, Family Matters is a defense of homeschooling as a choice "neither extreme nor outlandish." The book is anything if not sharply intelligent and exhaustively comprehensive, looking at homeschooling from all angles, from legal to theoretical to financial. Guterson inserts just enough anecdote to keep it lively, though I did get a bit bogged down in the theory section. The final chapter puts an elegant cap on Guterson's ultimate message: that our culture tends to alienate parents from their kids, and that homeschooling is one way to restore a sense of connection that's often sadly imperiled these days.

Hear, hear.

homeschooling
David Guterson
Family Matters