Struggle-Thing

My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.

But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.

Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.

Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.

Everyone.

inspired by @baguettenjoyer's recent fic (here) and @dragon-spaghetti 's art (here)

MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI

House of Leaves (2000);