Nonfiction

Learning All The Time

I am occasionally asked to explain my reasons for homeschooling my son. I am sometimes asked to explain how it works. I am often accosted by well meaning individuals who want to know why I am warping my child socially by not sending him to school. And every now and then, I meet people who are amazed by my patience and commitment to something “they could never do”. Somehow, I never seem to get asked the question which is most important to me, which is “What have you learned by homeschooling your son?”

My son is at the time of this writing, nine years old. He has never been to school. When he was a baby, we thought that perhaps we would send him to a private school, something with an “alternative” pedagogy, such as Waldorf or Montessori. Then he turned five, and we still couldn’t afford it. Honestly, that’s what it was. And I was most adamantly opposed to sending him to public school.

In addressing my reasoning for refusing public schooling for my son, I can also address the most common concern I hear from people regarding that decision: what about socialization?

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Let’s Talk About Pornography

 

Pornography is the quail inside the duck inside the turkey at Christmas dinner. The hidden secret lurking inside all our hard drives, waiting for its moment of private delight to shine out. We see it everywhere, but continue to strive to deny its influence. We don’t like to talk about it; not what we as individuals really see in it or why as a culture it’s still there under our mattress after centuries of effort to eradicate it. Enough denial, already. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it…let’s drag it out on the carpet and really explore why we keep it around.

Pornography has existed ever since people started drawing. We drew pictures on the cave walls of voluptuous women with no heads to give us a sense of connection to the mysteries of life (or perhaps as R. Dale Guthrie suggests, as simple pornographic doodles) . We worshipped snake goddesses with their bare breasts and their transformative power twined around their wrists. We had sacred prostitutes in the temples who would lay you for a donation, and explicit scenarios painted out on Greek urns. This is nothing new. Shouldn’t we be grown up enough to talk about it by now?

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