Homeschooling Badly: Maxwell's "I Just Want To Be A Mommy"

Thanks to the wild 'n crazy cold that's working its way through our family right now I haven't had time to transcribe more of Jasmine (Baucham) Holmes' book "Joyfully at Home".   Instead, I picked an article from my favorite rabbit hole of lost time: the articles section of the Titus 2 website.  Back in 2003, Teri Maxwell wrote an article meant to encourage home schooling moms who were thinking about quitting. 

As I was reading that article, I wondered about paradox of feelings in CP/QF belief.  In the article, Teri Maxwell describes a relationship with a Christian mentor she worked with during the first year Teri homeschooled.   As the unnamed lady and Maxwell met, the two women gained a lot of spiritual insight and the mentor decided that she wanted to homeschool her kids, too.   In describing her decision - which Maxwell calls 'justifying' - the other mother explained that she simply wanted to be her kids mother and not their teacher as well.   Interestingly, Teri Maxwell's emotional response to the woman's decision was an overwhelming desire to place her three children back in school so that she could be a mother to her kids and not their teacher.   In standard form, Teri Maxwell ignored her feelings and decided to continue homeschooling.

Personally, I get a feeling of impending doom at the idea of homeschooling my son - and I take my feelings seriously.   Teri Maxwell's feelings on hearing that a friend had placed her kids back in school weren't a single moment of nerves in an otherwise happy home schooling environment.  Teri Maxwell has been open about discussing her painful postpartum depression that she was struggling with when she started homeschooling her kids.  She's described being routinely angry and frustrated by the behavior issues of her two sons when they started homeschooling.   In all of her writings about homeschooling, there are precious few stories that involve positive feelings while she is actively teaching her kids.    None of these feelings means Teri Maxwell is an incompetent mother; it just means she's not a natural teacher of her own kids.   And guess what?  Very few people are!  Even professional teachers strive to keep their own offspring out of their classroom because being a parent-teacher can add all sorts of chaos to a functional classroom.

The next section struck me as both a fantasy and a form of shaming on women who send their kids to school:

In my mind, I pictured my friend’s children coming home from school in the afternoon. She would have spent the day in personal Bible study, prayer, exercise, housecleaning, reading, ministry, sewing, and cookie baking. As the children bounced in the door, they would be met by a beautiful, smiling mommy. I was sure she would have taken a long shower and blown her hair dry too. The children would smell the freshly baked cookies and scramble for a seat at the table. There they would happily discuss the excitement of their day in school. Finally, they would head outside to play while my friend started supper in peace and quiet. I just want to be a mommy too!

Let's discuss opportunity costs for a second.  CP/QF leaders and mommy bloggers seem ignorant of the idea that by making one decision a person accrues costs by losing opportunities that would come from other choices.   Homeschooling advocates rarely look at the full spectrum of opportunity costs.  First, the homeschooling mother loses a chance at having a different career.  The severity of that cost varies a lot depending on the educational and vocational skills of the mother, clearly, but all homeschooling mothers are choosing to teach without pay for a full-time job. 

Second, the children in the family lose the benefits of having professionally trained teachers in funded school systems.  Yes, some professional teachers suck.  Yes, all school systems are underfunded.  Even with those caveats, the likelihood that one parent can bring together enough educational resources to provide an equivalent education to the local public school system or local private/parochial schools is slim.  Replacing the number of potential business and romantic contacts that the average student gains through enrollment in traditional schools is hard as well. 

Third, a parent who wants to homeschool in a way that differentiates curriculum for their kids, protects the student from non-approved ideas, and has a large family quickly finds that homeschooling eats up all available time.  I think that's part of what Mrs. Maxwell was responding to in her glorious dream of a SAHM who has time for extras like exercise, sewing, cooking and ministry!

Finally, how does homeschooling - especially CP/QF homeschooling combined with extreme sheltering - fit within the larger purview of Christian ministry?  I've known many women who worked in low-paid or volunteer ministry jobs for years once their children were school-aged - and they were the rocks on which wonderful programs were built!  Some of them worked as personal aides for students with disabilities that were severe enough that the students needed 1:1 supervision.  The patience and understanding of child behavior that these women gained in raising their families blessed other families who had kids who needed lots of support to learn.

What about the time we spend in homeschooling? Have I taken off my “mommy” hat and replaced it with a “teacher” one? I am taking the place of a teacher in a classroom in my children’s lives, but I am still “Mommy” in the fullest sense of the word. My mommy role as a teacher began from the first words I quietly whispered in each newborn baby’s tiny ear. Almost everything my children have learned in their young lives, this mommy has had a part in teaching them. Being an official teacher in our homeschool is simply an extension of this natural teaching relationship that exists between a mother and her child. Really and truly, I just want to be a mommy!

Yes...and no. 

Parents do teach their young children scads of important lessons about self-care and how to interact with other human beings.   Humans are born at such a helpless state - and with such plasticity on how to do things like gather food, communicate, and play - that the first five years of life (at least!) focus on teaching kids the very basics of staying alive.   That is a huge part of development in young children and a core piece of human education.

Having said that, modern education quickly ramps up into areas where humans don't have a strong instinctual basis.  Humans have instincts around learning to eat, learning to speak/communicate, and use tools.  Humans don't have a strong instinct around interpreting abstract symbols for words.  Humans have an instinctive understanding of number sense - but peters out for most people beyond addition and subtraction.  Humans love sharing stories - but we tend to miss the broader scope of history unless we are actively taught it.   Humans love to explore natural phenomena - but we are subject to some fascinating logical gaps that can lead us down strange ways.   Once humans move beyond the basic and universal skills that all people have a desire to acquire, more specialized educators begin to appear.

To be blunt, professional teachers would not exist if all people were naturally at similar levels of teaching skill.   There are people who are born teachers.  There are also people for whom teaching is nightmarish in spite of their best efforts.   Most teachers are made from a combination of some basic talent combined with lots of hard work.  My heart goes out to all the women who are homeschooling in spite of the fact that they lack the desire, skills and training to do so because they falsely believe Jesus requires it of them.   Hint: there are NO verses in the Gospel about the importance of home schooling - because even then the idea was surreal.  Yes, women taught their daughters how to prepare food and make textiles - but I suspect that girls learned skills from other women as well. Likewise, boys learned careers from their fathers - or the man they were apprenticed to.

I thought about what it meant to be a mommy teacher beyond simply teaching my children facts and figures. What teacher in a school loves their students like I love mine? What teacher’s main goal in life is to see their students grow up to love the Lord Jesus Christ with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength? What teacher is going to cuddle a sick student on the couch, tucking that student in with extra pillows and blankets, while loving and consoling him through his misery? Hey, I just want to be a mommy!

Um. Yeah.  No, you really don't have to worry that your kid's high school math teacher has set her primary goal for the year as "Have all the students saved according to Steven Maxwell's requirements by the end of the year."  I feel quite confident in that point.  I feel equally confident that teacher is capable of teaching high school math - and that is the reason I'm sending my kid to interact with them.

And sadly enough, I have consoled sick students through days that they just plain weren't feeling well.  Morning sickness and final exams always made for a few rough days for unlucky female students.  But - and I feel like this should be obvious to Ms. Maxwell - most kids stay home when they are sick to be coddled and nursed by their parents since that's a natural part of parenting and family life.  Dropping "caring for kids while dealing with the normal run of illnesses" into the middle of an essay on homeschooling worries me quite a bit.  On the other hand,  I'm starting to see how CP/QF homeschool bloggers can blithely switch out basic life skills for advanced academic content if they all share such muddy logic skills.