August is the worst month of the year by far. It’s hot and dry and unforgiving in the Northern California interior. We haven’t had rain since April and we won’t get any until October, maybe November. The grass that covers the entire state with its golden blanket is parched and bleached out. If it doesn’t catch fire and burn to ash, it will give off the most beautiful, clean, lively smell the first time the rain finally hits. At that point, we are reborn.
But that’s not for months. It is beautiful in the mornings and evenings, when there is some moisture in the air and the temperatures drop. But it climbs back up to 100 degrees or more most days. Only the lilies and the wisteria and grape vines in my garden are at home in August. For the rest of us, it’s inhospitable. Like living on the far side of the moon.
We are Californians; much of our life is centered around being outside, playing outside, eating or entertaining outside. Housing costs so much that indoor space is scarce for most people. On the rare occasions where outside is inhumane, we are at a total loss. Nothing makes sense. And so August and January are when I question all of my major life choices, and when I find myself on Zillow looking for new places to live.
One of the rare delights of middle age is the ability to suddenly break free of behaviors that once got the better of you. Ten years ago August meant announcing to my husband that maybe we should sell the house and farm and move to the coast somewhere with a decent school so our kids can have a good education. You know, some mythical place where all the nice people our age live with their quirky businesses and start-ups and their talented, well-behaved kids. Somewhere we could just jump into the pre-existing cultural current and be carried along, swept up to something better than what we’ve got here. Somewhere that could basically raise these kids for us.
Now, I know better. There is no such place. It doesn’t exist. So every August I spend a little less time refighting this battle in my mind. It will pass. Especially if we get an early rain, it will pass.
August is when I must pencil in time for my annual interior catastrophic psychological reckoning because it is, once again, time to stop pretending that I don’t have another year of homeschooling I must engineer out of thin air.
Women who write about homeschooling often really enjoy planning the academic year. It’s like planning a wedding or a trip. Creative, whimsical. I think I enjoy it too, once I finally get around to doing it. But before I can buy crayons and write color-coded schedules, I have to wrestle with myself about my decision to homeschool my children.
I do not think alternative education is simply a foregone conclusion in 2024; instead, it is a practical decision one must make only after considering about a million different variables, which necessitates a clear understanding of the final goal or picture one has in mind for family life, and the sort of happiness one hopes to model and display for the children.
Why do we do this? Why not just put them in the local public school and forget about it? Why not try that Christian school again…it wasn’t really that bad, was it?
Both my husband and I wish we had some version of our own childhoods to give to our kids—late 80s/early 90s public school in a small, conservative American town. My husband grew up in Arizona and I grew up where we live now, in the California Gold Country. Blue-collar areas, for the most part, but each with deep cultural and community values rooted in hard work, agriculture, and the American Cowboy West. We played elite sports and had lots of good teachers from the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. They were hard asses; the educational equivalent of drill sergeants. Many of my high school teachers built houses in the summers or ran cattle on their ranches. They didn’t put up with any shit. Our education was something like the school of hard knocks, set in boom time America. The American Dream at the End of History.
That world doesn’t exist anymore. The entire culture has changed. Schools have changed. A lot of my teachers are still around, but the school system has overcome them. They aren’t able to shape it or the kids the way they used to. In my youth it was still possible for the local culture and work ethic of a place to filter through heavy federal education bureaucracy. It’s impossible now.
Despite the difficulties in our modern education system, because of our American culture and our existing ideas about work, family life, and achievement, I think it is very likely the case that the most prudent thing for most parents to do is to put their kids in either a private or public traditional school. I say this not because homeschooling is drudgery, nor because I think homeschooling is the unique province of the talented or the wealthy. I say this because homeschooling is not simply alternative curriculum and instruction.
When we remove children from the normal or default pathways to adulthood—school systems, schedules, sports, and extra curricular activities—what we are really saying is that the default pathway to adulthood is so fraught with potholes and brambles that we feel more confident abandoning it to cut out an entirely new trail of our own, out of the veritable wilderness.
It takes up a lot of time and energy to do this. Doing it well requires a really strong home culture and friend group to battle the loneliness and odd-duck feeling homeschooling often instills. One can definitely do alternative schooling, but without either a lot of money or a very developed local homeschool culture, alternative education is going to feel rinky dink and Mickey Mouse a lot of the time.
What I have built for my kids is good, but often chaotic. It never feels finished or polished. It never stays set up. Each year some tutor moves on or some family opts out or some vendor goes belly up. Compared to my education, it often feels like we are faking it or making it up as we go. But, again, what I had doesn’t exist anymore. My kids test well and they meet their benchmarks. I am confident they are being educated. Is it the best thing I can imagine? No. It’s not.
You have to ask yourself Am I really comfortable taking my kids out of the mainstream culture to fashion something myself, like a freaking idiot, with the seams showing and everything held together by duct tape?
At least I have to ask myself this. Every August.