Homeschooling Does Not Produce Recluses or Ruin Lives
A quarter of a century ago, deeply depressed, bullied, nearly friendless, and having become almost completely mute and unable to look up from my feet, I left public school forever. My 7th grade science teacher, who had confounded me for months with the college-level work he’d given a bunch of us in the “gifted and talented” (ha ha) program, said something that has stuck with me ever since. It’s not really the sort of thing you can ever forget: if I followed through with my decision to leave public school, it would ruin my entire life. That’s some heavy stuff to tell a thirteen-year-old. It still impresses me all these years later that he chose a pronouncement so extreme. He must have felt very strongly about the matter.
Being thirteen, I did not respond respectfully. Rebellious and subversive and disaffected, I was ready to leave the building and wanted to stick it to the man.
No, that’s not accurate. To be fair to myself, if I was rebellious and disaffected at times, I was respectful and rule-abiding a greater majority of the time. I was also an extremely sensitive kid; the slightest word of criticism or the tiniest moment of embarrassment would send me into a depressed tailspin for days. My soon-to-be ex-teacher’s remark crushed me completely. At the time, the reason I didn’t dig deeper into the reasons for his remark probably had very little to do with me walking away and giving him the finger or anything like that, and everything to do with being cut deeply and unable to repair in time to ask questions I might have asked.
Now, in retrospect, I would at least like to acknowledge that even if I did not and still do not agree entirely with his position, I do understand better where he was coming from. My decision to leave school is a matter on which I will always have very mixed feelings.
But my teacher’s prediction (or was it a hex or curse?) poses a few logical, if loaded, questions. Now that I’m nearing forty years old, can it be concluded that my life is ruined? And if so, was leaving public school what ruined it? Or, to put it more mildly, if my life does have room for improvement here and there, was leaving school a negative contributing factor?
My basic thesis, though it may take me a while to arrive at it, is that homeschooling does not produce recluses like me. Being already naturally geared toward being a recluse is what brought about that effect in my case and probably in any similar cases. Though homeschooling has been a significant part of my past, it did not do any damage to me or cause me to be more socially backward than I already was. If anything, homeschooling helped me in significant ways and perhaps even saved my life. In contrast, public school did cause me substantial harm, brought me very little good, and if I had remained in school, was almost certain to do me further harm with very little chance of bringing me any measurable benefits.
Since at least in part I wish to discuss homeschooling on a more general level (not exclusively in relation to my own experiences), I should acknowledge that I could not in any way have been said to be typical or representative of most children. I had abilities that were well outside the curve as well as issues that were well outside the curve. The issues involved serious social challenges and social anxieties, depression and suicidal thoughts starting as young as age six (it is not coincidental, I don’t think, that this age coincided with the start of first grade), as well as certain physical illnesses that made me open to mocking and rejection. With this said, my own view is that public or private school is the right path for almost all children (basically, all children who are socially normal or nearly so, who thus need that interaction and will do just fine in the midst of it all), but that there are some children with extraordinary challenges or unusual temperaments for whom homeschooling is the best or only option for a portion of their schooling, if not all of it. There are many different ways to receive a good education, depending on the individual. Public school and private school can both lead to good outcomes; and so can homeschooling. As with most things in life, there is no easy decision, and there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a perfect environment. Like many issues with a big debate surrounding it, it’s a Scylla and Charybdis kind of thing.
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Homeschooling is a fairly popular argument topic with my freshman comp students, and most write against it – as in, a “pro-public school” stance. However, with my own experience on both sides of it – six and a half years of public school and five and a half years of homeschooling – I have yet to read one of these papers that manages to be fully convincing by taking into consideration all parts of the debate and all significant points of view. The papers tend to be a bit too myopic to successfully convince the reader that they have really seen and considered all sides. Not that I can exactly blame them, can I? Though I do have a large percentage of nontraditional students of all ages in my classes, my students who choose “pro-public school” as a topic tend, for whatever reason, to be more of the traditionally-aged sort. And nineteen-year-olds can definitely be forgiven for still being in the process of widening their points of view of the world. They can’t help it that academia demands that they write argument papers at their tender age. In fact, what continually astonishes me and impresses me is the empathy of the young – how good-hearted they are and how far beyond themselves they can see despite how much there is that they still have to experience. They don’t have the years yet to give them wisdom. But wisdom is deeply present, nonetheless.
I once assigned a fall semester remedial comp class a beginning assignment to write a letter. In this case, I was teaching at a more traditional campus and my class was comprised almost entirely of kids right out of high school, living their first days of independence on a college campus. The assignment was fairly open – they could write a letter to a family member, a former teacher, a politician, a national hero, a film star, an athlete, to their future selves. But with the dazzling array of options open to them, almost every student chose to write a letter of gratitude to a parent, grandparent, or former teacher. I am a relatively grizzled, hardened instructor of comp, reading between two and three thousand student papers every year. Not yet having glanced over any of the results of my assignment, I sat down to mark the papers, procrastinating, grumbling and resistant to doing my work. But what I saw before me would have shattered the most hardened shell of cynicism. I have always said I cried more during that weekend of trying to read those papers than I have ever cried in my life. Never have I been more moved than reading letter after letter expressing love, gratitude, understanding, forgiveness, requests for forgiveness, in words and emotions that were still in many ways those of a child, simple, tender, sweet, innocent, but with the nascent inflections of adulthood.
People are good. Students are good. I am a tireless advocate of all of the miraculous and wonderful qualities of the overwhelming majority of people who fit in well in this world and keep this world going. I am grateful to my students beyond words for teaching me about the world every day, for keeping me grounded, and for constantly forgiving me and trying to support me as much as I try in my bumbling way to support them.
I am also continually taken aback by their kindnesses, because in so many ways the majority of my students strike me as being the same sorts of well-adjusted people who I recall mocking me or shunning me when I was a child in school – the kind of people who, at the same age as me, turned away from me in the hallways. Even though I’m nearing forty now, around every corner I ever turn I still expect people to mock me and bully me. I really do – even when I’m the professor of the class, walking into the classroom on the first day. Of course, students probably only show me kindness because I’m in a position of authority now. It’s unwise to bite the hand that assigns your final grade. But I can’t seem to grow accustomed to being in that position. It still seems to me that I should be the pariah, pushed to the margins of the classroom and the playground.
Of course, at times a few students do still mock me, sometimes perhaps behind my back and sometimes quite noticeably. At those times that I’m aware of it, my memories and feelings go back at once to all the misery of grade school and junior high. Strange how we are always the same person. In the front of a college classroom, I am still an eight-year-old who the other students shrink away from in contempt, the one picked very last for the team.
This was always followed, of course, by your own team groaning in disappointment because they ended up with you. As though you don’t have ears. As though the groan is only for the sake of their own cheerful solidarity and that it somehow won’t reach you. As though the sound won’t come back to you and haunt you and defeat you for the rest of your life.
But most college students are good. Whatever they think of me or of anyone else, what they mainly exhibit is kindness. Again, I am a strong advocate for this well-adjusted majority. I will always have their back. But because of my temperament and experiences, in my own writing I am in the main and by necessity an advocate for the marginalized, the minorities, the forgotten. And in any pro-public school argument, I believe these souls deserve at least some small mention within the refutation – some concession that perhaps for certain individuals, homeschooling may be the best or only choice.
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I am low in many departments, but not in the nerdy likes-to-learn department, so from 7th grade onward I taught myself using an accredited program following syllabuses, much like a college student, and I earned my high school diploma with a 4.0 GPA. I didn’t really need supervision. I loved to learn and very few subjects were difficult for me. I’m an autodidact, but I’m also at least somewhat pragmatic, so though I adapted whatever I studied to what I wanted to get out of it, somehow I managed at the same time to play by the rules enough to produce whatever work teachers and instructors were looking for, and thus picked up along the way all the various diplomas and other pieces of paper that society insists we should have. By age thirteen I knew I wanted to write, so I spent a lot of time doing that (not enough; I also spent a lot of time being a lazy teenager, and in that regard, at least, I was typical), and I was involved with community theatre and my mom’s church choirs, both of which ended up standing in as a social life. During my high school years I also had a couple of different boyfriends and a few close friends. This was probably as much social interaction as I needed, technically speaking. Being a Myers-Briggs 10-0 introvert by temperament, I didn’t exactly need a lot.
Incidentally, I did make an attempt to return to school after my junior high years – I tried to attend private Catholic boarding school as a high school freshman. I lasted around a week, physically ill the entire time with anxiety and depression and general homesickness. It felt like the world had collapsed in on me. I returned home and to homeschooling and never looked back from there.
I was happy in many ways during those high school years -- happier than I had ever been at any other time in my life, and probably happier than I have ever been since. So yes, interestingly enough, as is the case for many people, these were probably the best days of my life – they were just very different from the halcyon high school days of most kids. While they spend those years immersed in groups and social situations, and that’s what gives them the most satisfaction, I spent mine in solitude, studying and writing – which is what happens to give me satisfaction. I was happy because those are precisely the conditions in which I am able to be happy.
However, that is only looking at the situation in terms of short term effects. The initial question – my science teacher’s prediction of a ruined life – has little to do with whether I was happy and in my element at the time. That question is easy to answer: unequivocally, yes. But was homeschooling a wise decision in terms of long term effects? For better or for worse, much of life is about having to adapt to others’ needs and expectations, not just following the beat of your own drummer. So, to address the long term: Did homeschooling ruin my life?
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There are undoubtedly many experiences in high school that benefit a person later in life. First and foremost would be, to put it very generally, the socialization. Recently I wrote about driving being a microcosm of life. Much has always been made, too, of high school being where people experience a microcosm of the competitive pecking order of the rest of the world. It’s a place to learn how various kinds of social connection work in this culture – dating, sex, making friends, etc.
All of this social interaction and experimentation includes going through certain key American rites of passage – prom, sports, band or choir, dating, and so on – which define people more than I think they either admit or perhaps realize. Having missed out on them puts me in a special place to observe how deeply others are formed by those experiences. I’ve heard others be dismissive of these experiences – “Oh, they weren’t really that big of a deal” – but I don’t think some people realize how much having those experiences puts them on the inside track in certain ways, or by extension, how not having those experiences puts me and others like me even further on the outside track.
High school also provides a unique sense of being a part of a larger community that perhaps being involved in smaller groups such as church choirs or community theatre fails to provide. One of the most peculiar things I’ve noted about myself is that I’ve never even been part of so much as an “outsider” group. What I mean is that in high school, even outsiders tend to belong to some sort of fringe group. But I am an outsider of outsiders – I’ve never belonged to anything in any way, any time, anywhere. It’s as though I can’t even locate myself in relation to anything else at all. But even when you’re not really part of something, even if no one includes you, even if you’re unable to laugh and joke with them and you’re just sitting there wondering how they even do it, I find that you can still feel like you’re part of it in some way by at least watching others. But by falling away from others from 7th grade onward, I’ve felt removed even from that extremely marginal and dubious involvement.
Another argument in favor of high school is that it might provide a sense of being grounded in reality for individuals whose heads are otherwise in the clouds. During my teenaged years, I was allowed to indulge in writing as much as I wanted (and yes, I’ve always written fantasy in one form or another) – even though that was not likely to lead to any kind of realistic paycheck or career or means of survival in the world. I was not exposed to very many real world options for survival. My head floated in the ether, and I never formed any practical plan for survival. Further, I did not spend time around other more grounded peers and personality types. I think it can be argued that it took me a longer time than it should have to develop the appreciation I should have always had for those people who fit in better than myself.
I wish now more than ever that I had asked my science teacher specifically why he felt leaving school would ruin my life – whether it was for any of the reasons above, or for other reasons.
Also, did he mean that leaving public school to be homeschooled would ruin all kids’ lives? Was he generalizing? Or did he mean only my life?
I have had many homeschooled kids in my college classes, and I can say that they tend to be my top students academically speaking. They also tend to have the strongest work ethics and are the best in regards to turning work in on time. I know these statements may seem biased on my part, but I promise they’re not. In fact, when I first started teaching, I perversely wanted to see the public school students do better than homeschooled students – I think I wanted to be able to punish myself for my own decision to leave school with proof that homeschooling is a fiasco and that public school students were superior in every way. However, contrary to my hopes and expectations, everything I have observed speaks to the other side of it.
In my opinion, criticism about academics does not tend to be one of the stronger counter-arguments against homeschooling within the general debate. I think that the most credible studies and statistics have consistently shown that as long as a strong curriculum is used, homeschooling does not in general hurt kids academically, and that in fact, homeschooled kids are at least equal to and often stronger academically than public or private school kids.
On my own part, I spent a lot of key years homeschooling, had a 4.0 GPA in high school, then went on to earn a 4.0 GPA in college. I finished college with the highest GPA in my graduating class and was named IUPUI’s Liberal Arts Chancellor’s Scholar along with being granted a number of other awards. My transcripts for any given semester often boasted nothing but A+’s. At my graduation ceremony, I carried one of the two school flags, leading my class onto the floor. Case closed on that.
One objection sometimes raised against homeschooling is that public school somehow teaches kids to be more “competitive” academically. But I don’t see any evidence to support this, or how it is even a valid point. Learning isn’t a sport. My personal experience involves attending college for seven years and now teaching college for several years, and my observation is that the skills needed to get through college are more closely related to the skills that homeschooled kids tend to develop – that is, skills of being self-motivated and driven by high standards and a personal quest for excellence.
At least to me, in public school there was always an outside impetus needed to do assignments, but little inner motivation. I always thought of the entire experience as being continually goaded on with a cattle prod. But in college, to be truly successful, students need to be self-motivated. The reasons for being in college need to come from the student – not from some misguided sense of competition or because teacher said so.
One story I often tell is that when I first left public school to be homeschooled, I actually did nothing at all for many months – I just sat on the sofa dozing or staring into space. At first this sounds like a strong argument against homeschooling. But really, it was that I was so accustomed to teachers telling me what to do in public school that I didn’t even understand that it was possible for me to have an impulse of my own, or that I could decide on my own to do what I was passionate about rather than just following the injunctions of others to fill all my time with activities that bored the shit out of me and that I cared about not one whit. I didn’t know how to do anything except stare apathetically into space, because that’s mainly what I had “learned” in public school. Public school taught me to be spoon fed.
What happened is that one day, after all these months on the sofa, I had an overwhelming breakthrough/epiphany. There simply came a day when I realized, quite out of the blue, that it was possible for me to have impulses of my own and motivations of my own. I could learn for no other reason than because I wanted to and because I chose to – because it was my own impulse and not someone else’s. That was empowering, to say the least. From there, I discovered that I could make learning my own by adapting it to my own passions, needs, and interests. I got out of it what I wanted to get out of it – not what somebody else said I should get out of it. I rapidly caught up with my grade-level work after that, and henceforth and to the present day, I never again had any trouble meeting academic deadlines. I did the work because I wanted to do it and because it fascinated me, and because I understood that deadlines keep us on track to reach our goals. And I excelled.
In my senior year of college when I won Liberal Arts Chancellor’s Scholar, I cared nothing about whether I was better or worse than anyone else. I wasn’t trying to win the award and in fact, I had never heard of it and was completely taken aback when I got the letter telling me that they were giving it to me. (Funny story: Not only had I never heard of the award, but the award had never heard of me. After I was named for it, there was a continual perplexed chorus amongst instructors and administrators of “Who on earth is Elisabeth Hegmann?” Apparently many students are indeed rather noisy about jostling for these sorts of awards – but I never spoke a word, never asked for anything, and knew almost no one on campus because I was so shy. So the whole thing came as a bit of a shock not just to me but to everyone else, too.) I had studied all through college not to competitively one-up others in some sort of “competition,” but because I had developed an extremely strong work ethic, and because I wanted to learn. I enjoyed seeing what other students were working on and hearing their thoughts and being challenged by their points of view during class discussions, but there was never a second that I thought of myself as being in some sort of rat race with them. Rather, I considered that I was collaborating with them, that we were part of the same community together, working toward productive ends. I competed only with myself, but I competed for absolute excellence, and I would settle for nothing less from myself.
I am certainly not suggesting that this is the only way of excelling in school. It was simply my way and probably the way of certain others who have temperaments similar to mine. There are other ways to excel, too, and such excellence could potentially come from a student with any of a number of different schooling backgrounds, as well as from a student with more of a sense of outward competition with others – as evidenced by my story above about students jostling noisily for awards: no doubt these students sometimes or often are the ones to “win out” in such situations. My only point is that this particular argument against homeschooling (that somehow someone with a homeschooling background would not know how to compete academically) is a poor one. It doesn’t hold water.
But indeed, speaking of arguments that notions of “competition” are flawed, there will always be a fundamental problem in pitting public school and homeschooling against each other as though it’s a duel. It isn’t. They should be seen as complementary and working together, and as being the right routes for different kinds of children at different times.
Now, as a college student I was a bit extreme and outside the curve just as I was earlier in my life (and I would not wish my worst enemy to be a perfectionist to the degree that I am), but in all my homeschooled students, I have seen a similar sense of self-motivation, and it serves them very well. They tend to easily see things through to completion, earn high grades, turn all work in on time, and so on. Thus, homeschooling apparently produces similar positive effects in a variety of different types of personalities and intelligences – not just my own oddball configuration.
In recent times I see it continually emphasized in various media that those who excel most in today’s professional environment are those who are creative and self-motivated. So, as another argument in favor of homeschooling, I would suggest that these skills may be better developed for certain individuals outside of a public institution; that perhaps for some, independent critical thinking skills are better developed in an environment other than the test-driven, one-size-fits-all environment of public school. (Of course, in this sense, public school is not to blame so much as the direction that public school has been taken by recent legislation and so on. But that’s a debate beyond the scope of what I’m trying to talk about here.) On my own part, though the degree to which I am a success can be questioned, I am most certainly as outside-the-box as it gets, and most of those aspects of myself did not begin to really shine through until I left school and became an autodidact. Leaving school was the genesis of my ability (and my decision) to see things from my own unique perspective.
The major point of this entire digression is that I don’t think the general academic outcome of students can come under fire in any valid argument against homeschooling, or that somehow “lack of competition” is damaging in any way to homeschooled students. There is just no legitimate evidence to support this since homeschooled kids mainly go on to excel in college and in the professional world.
Rather, the social aspects of homeschooling are the part of the debate that I believe to be most problematic and difficult to parse out – the lack of exposure to peers in certain important and unique ways. Proponents of homeschooling argue that kids can have social experiences in many other ways besides school. That’s very true. I did. But our modern society and culture is built on kids having not just social experiences, but certain kinds of social experiences, and public or private high school plays a large role in that. In my experience, community theatre and church choir did not even remotely stand in for the social experiences I would have had in high school. These other environments did not teach me subtle skills about how to interact with others or how to get ahead in the world socially.
That’s the thing. The real problem isn’t whether homeschooled kids will be able to compete academically – being able to compete socially is the real issue at hand. It’s sad to have to acknowledge the truth and irony of that: Our world is based on the ability of one person to “beat out” another socially. It is. One person who charms or has political savvy will get the coveted position over the person who doesn’t know how to do those things. Life has very little to do with who you are, but it has everything to do with who you know.
So, let’s address this thorny area. Does homeschooling handicap kids from being able to deal with the social realities of the world? Are they denied certain very specific experiences that will benefit them in college and the professional world and life in general? First off, I can say unequivocally that from everything I have observed in my own teaching, homeschooling does not in and of itself produce “recluses” like myself. In fact, all homeschooled kids I’ve had in my classes so far, unlike me, are highly social, happy and healthy people.
I do think, quite honestly, that there is often a sense of touching naivety and idealism about homeschooled kids. They have more of an air of innocence and goodness about them than public schooled kids, who are savvier and more cynical. You do get the sense that the homeschooled kids have been more sheltered and that they have formed some sort of core sense of integrity and values that haven’t had a chance yet to be sullied. However, I don’t believe that these qualities work against them in any way. While it may soon get crushed out of them in this brutal world, naivety alone is not enough to sink a person. The real question is simply: are homeschooled kids’ social skills sufficient to allow them to get them through the door into college and then through the door into the professional world? In this sense, can they compete with public or private schooled kids?
I once worked my fingers to the bone writing letters of recommendation for one homeschooled student I had because I believed in her so strongly. She was one of the top students in my class academically, but she also had one of the highest characters, one of the most admirable senses of integrity, of any student of any age that I’ve ever encountered. This was made even more remarkable by the fact that she was still only 17. She was clearly an introvert by temperament, but she interacted very well with others. All introverts do not have to be as withdrawn as me. To be an introvert simply means that a person carries a certain set of qualities of looking inward and needing a reasonable amount of alone time, but many introverts are quite socially adept and sometimes even charismatic. I do wonder, though, if a great percentage of homeschooled kids are introverts by temperament; extroverts may feel a much stronger sense of needing to be around large numbers of people that the public school environment provides. Even if this is so, having introverted temperaments should not automatically handicap homeschooled kids.
In any case, this particular individual I’m thinking of was likeable and caring and selfless and kind – not in a put-on, performed sort of way, but in a way that sprang from a genuinely good heart. I desperately wanted her to do well in life. In my own state of cynicism and desolation, I wanted the universe to reward someone good – I wanted to see some justice in the world. Since she had been homeschooled and freshman comp with me had been the first college class she’d ever had, I was virtually the only and best chance she had for the required recommendation letters she needed to open further doors for her. I was so afraid I would fail her.
But thank God, the right doors did open. She received the internships, the scholarships, the acceptance letters. She was the one mainly responsible for this, of course. Others also saw all of her good qualities, I reported on them in my letters, and together we recognized an outstanding young woman. Occasionally perhaps there is some justice in this world, and it is gratifying when it happens. I happen to know that my former student was able to take advantage of all the opportunities given to her and has risen to every challenge with grace.
She is just one example, but from all other examples I’ve seen as an instructor, I cannot believe that homeschooling is problematic for most kids on a social level. All the homeschooled students I have ever had in my classes have exhibited the right abilities to go on and compete in the world socially. When I observe them in class, they interact with others just fine and make new connections and friends just like any of the other students. And because many of them do seem to come into college with a strong, intact sense of integrity and values from their homeschooling environment – a strong self-identity, basically – in some cases this may actually work in their favor to make them stand out from the crowd so that they receive scholarships and internships and other opportunities.
My conclusion: Homeschooled kids tend to have a strong sense of self, show a great sense of caring toward others, and interact in socially normal ways. Nothing I have seen suggests that homeschooling itself produces any handicaps.
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This brings it back to the question of just little old me – and after all, my science teacher, in placing his hex, did say that it would ruin my life to leave school. He did not specifically mention anyone else. However, in my own observation, and in what I detailed above, homeschooling is not to blame for how I am. If it does not produce negative results in others, there is no reason to think it would produce negative results in me. Or is there?
Perhaps my science teacher’s point twenty-five years ago was that because I am a 10 and 0 introvert, and on top of that am intrinsically socially handicapped, public or private school might have been my only hope to stay focused on the outer world and develop any social skills instead of just collapsing in on myself like a black hole. Maybe what he meant was that someone like me needed continual, intense exposure to socialization to have a hope in hell of developing into a person who could adapt to the rest of the world, and that my separation from the crowd would only accentuate some of my worst features – self-loathing, self-absorption, low self-esteem, social anxiety, extreme shyness, etc.
I can’t say. I can say certainly that my decision to leave school might have had some of these effects (I can’t prove otherwise), and I can say without any doubt that I was then and still remain a lone wolf. And the fact that I’m a lone wolf has certainly influenced me in a thousand ways, from the fact that I’m a prose writer rather than writing in more collaborative forms (screenwriting, librettos, etc.) to the fact that I teach college – a lone wolf position at the front of a classroom. Everything I do is “lone,” no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
But is the fact that I am a lone wolf a terrible fate? Is this an indicator that my life is “ruined”? And either way, what role did homeschooling play in my becoming a lone wolf? Would public school have somehow prevented that outcome?
We always say that without doing [such and such] in the past, we would not be who we are today. We say that our choices and experiences form us and make us who we are. I believe that sometimes, no matter how proudly we try to utter this, we are really just paying lip service to it as a way to circumvent guilt or regret over questionable decisions. And yet, clichéd as this view is, it’s also very obviously true.
My decision to leave school at age thirteen was a move with titanic repercussions and it did a lot to set me up for where I find myself now. Of course I would not be where I am and who I am today if I hadn’t made that move. Looking back, the decision was also remarkably true to who I am today. That is, the decision fits logically within a pattern of choices I’ve made throughout my life – it definitely sprang from some central core of “self.” It was not an outlier or a freak occurrence, but a very typical expression of my basic personality.
But at age thirteen, I of course still thought that “who you are” matters. At that age, you do. (Or at least you do if you’re a bumbling oaf of an idealist, like me.) But as already mentioned earlier, who you are matters not a whit. What matters is what you do and that you do it “right.” Even more important is who you know.
So, regardless of how “true to myself” my decision to homeschool was, would it have been better to go contrary to that? Would attending high school have set me up for being better “socialized” and grounded in reality? Of course here we get into pure speculation. One thing worth acknowledging is that if I had stayed in school, I can’t even say whether I would still be alive today. I might have committed suicide. I was certainly depressed enough by age thirteen to consider it. If that had taken place, obviously all other considerations would have been moot.
Another thought that has crossed my mind over the years is that had I stayed in school, I very well might have gotten into drugs. My dark thoughts and attitudes could very well have taken me toward some of those crowds, and that might have been disastrous for me. Even shy as I was about approaching others, being in school would have put me in close enough proximity to those kids who might have pushed drugs on me that I might easily have developed some nasty addictions. (I base this speculation on the fact that years later, I’ve discovered that I definitely have an addictive personality; I have to tread extremely carefully around addictive substances.) But schooling at home, I did not have exposure to these people and environments, and so I steered clear of some of these traps for a time. This at least allowed me to keep this early part of my life somewhat on the rails.
Perhaps had I stayed in school, I would have “found myself” in high school and learned all kinds of confidence. That version is the opposite extreme, though, and seems overly optimistic and extremely unrealistic.
The middle ground alternate reality is that had I stayed in school, I might have learned to be a little savvier about the world. Maybe I would have learned better strategies to survive as an outcast. I might even have found a way to fit into some sort of marginalized group.
I read recently about a woman much like me who in high school was lucky enough to find a great defender, a shining knight who came to her rescue in social situations and helped her throughout all of her high school years. This was apparently a boy more socially adept than she was who admired her intellect and became her trusted ally. Sorry to be forever the great cynic (or perhaps just the great realist), but I saw a picture of this woman, and she was more physically attractive than me. Sometimes this is the one element that makes the difference for people. Though by high school I had slimmed down a little, I don’t think it would have been wise for me to count on this great knight riding to my rescue. I’ve been waiting for and looking for that person for my entire life now. He or she ain’t coming.
All things taken into consideration, had I stayed in school, I actually think the darker scenarios would have been the more likely outcomes.
As already established, homeschooling prepared me just fine academically speaking. But by withdrawing into my own little world, I had no preparation later for how to navigate reality – especially how to deal with people on a social level. However, the other alternative available to me – staying in school – very well might have destroyed me completely. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis. Granted that leaving school, a decision that in some ways equated with being true to who I was and following my dreams, did not prepare me well for all aspects of life. But what the hell would have?
What has always held me back the most is my social awkwardness and trouble making friends or acquaintances – or especially keeping them. I can sometimes make a decent first impression on people, but after that, I have no idea how to continue or maintain a connection. I have had many opportunities in my life – I’ve simply blown them.
But if in childhood and throughout adolescence I had a greater need for the learning of social skills, I don’t think that public school was the answer for that. Beyond basic academic skills, all that my first six years of school taught me was non-stop pain, humiliation, misery, and rejection. I did not learn any useful social skills in school during those first six years. Would the next six years really have brought about any different result? If anything, the brutal environment of junior high and high school would only have made things worse.
I posit that homeschooling did not in any way delay or impair or handicap my social skills. My social skills were already delayed, impaired, and handicapped. The first six years of being in public school did not help me socially, and it’s unlikely it would suddenly have started having that effect. In fact, instead of learning how to interact with others during those first years of public school, I developed incredibly low self-esteem and extreme avoidance of other people, which exacerbated all of my already-existing difficulties. In all instances, school always drove me further and deeper into myself rather than bringing me out of myself.
The downsides to a person with my temperament and set of challenges – anxiety, depression, self-loathing, social isolation, insecurity, low self-esteem – were exacerbated by being in school. If I had stayed, what would the Powers That Be have ultimately done with me? Put me on antidepressants, perhaps? Sorry, but that is no real answer. With that hanging over me as a possible option, I’m glad that I left school and stayed away from any chemical attempts to alter me psycho-socially.
I was just lucky enough to have had a mother who did the best she could with a child who was “different” and was open to allowing what was best for me by that time: homeschooling as an autodidact.
I think it can be argued that maybe some different kinds of interventions when I was a child would have brought about some benefits – that homeschooling was not the perfect or only answer. But operating only upon the information and alternatives my family and I had at the time, it was probably the best available choice.
There was no ultimate answer. Sometimes there isn’t one. I don’t think I had any choice about leaving school when I did. I left to save my life. Regardless of how dramatic it sounds, to stay was death. If there had been any way for me to develop into a more complete and fully formed human being, the answer was not public school.
During my years of homeschooling, I needed more help in my life and more people in my life than what I had. But I don’t think that the help or people I needed were to be found in public school. Nor do I think I would have found my confidence there. By that time, low as I had already fallen, I would probably not have found it anywhere – at home, at school, or at the far reaches of the earth. Either the damage had already been done through all the painful years I had already lived, or I was born so damaged that nothing could ever have been done in the first place.
The homeschooling versus public school debate can’t really be “solved” – nor can I be “solved.” Back in the day, I think that’s what my science teacher was probably trying to do – “solve” me. But I’m not that simple. Nothing is that simple. No one is at fault. There was no real answer, and life is like that. Often there isn’t any real solution or answer or alternative at all. All the pieces don’t click into place perfectly. Would that life were that easy.
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We make decisions according to who we are, how we’re put together. That I left school was, in that sense, inevitable and fateful. I don’t think it had the effect of making me more disaffected, more withdrawn, more on the fringes so much as the fact that I was headed in that direction anyway. In terms of cause and effect, the way I’m put together caused the decision to leave school, not vice versa. Staying in school would not have somehow halted that process. In fact, as already delineated, it’s very possible that it could have made my situation even worse.
After I left school, at least I began to experience moments of happiness again – mainly when I was writing. It’s worth acknowledging for a moment that there are positive aspects to my deeply introverted and withdrawn nature just as there are drawbacks; I do have certain abilities and talents that others do not possess, just as they possess abilities that I do not. Of course the fact that I withdrew from others (in a very accurate sense withdrew from the “real world” by withdrawing from high school) had a major impact on the kind of writer I am (lone wolf) as well as on the rest of my life. But these qualities were innate; they pre-existed and perhaps even pre-determined the decision to leave school.
Staying in public school would probably not have helped, and might have hurt. In the meantime, homeschooling probably didn’t hurt, and perhaps even saved my life.
Therefore, I am going to conclude that leaving public school did not ruin my life. What is responsible for some of the more undesirable aspects of my life? Well, it’s beyond the scope of this essay. It’s much more complicated than simply leaving school, which was just one factor, one event (albeit a major event) in the midst of many.
I can understand the view that leaving school constituted “running away” in some sense – that instead of facing up to my fears and challenges, I just walked away. Perhaps that was yet another implication of my science teacher’s statement. I’ve frequently felt that way myself. School is hell for many. For years, I beat myself up over why I had “failed the test” while others who also found the experience difficult made it through anyway. I thought that I was a wimp and a coward and not tough enough.
And maybe there’s some truth to that. Maybe my nature is more sensitive than others, and maybe I can’t withstand the same levels of emotional pain – or more accurately, because I’m put together as I am, I actually experience greater levels of emotional pain than most people. But that’s not a bad thing. It makes me who I am.
It also means that I am not necessarily suited to the same environments that others are suited for. The survival-of-the-fittest world of high school was not the right place for me.
There are some of us who, in some strange way, transcend competition and survival of the fittest. This way of looking at the world is simply irrelevant to us. The ways in which we “succeed” are not the ways of others. Success for us is not defined as it is for the rest of the world. We march to the beat of our own drummer. We do not need to succeed in the ways that others have defined for us. The very idea of “competition” is meaningless to us. The role that we play in the world is of its own making and the works that we create test their own boundaries.
But many of us are still hounded by the insistences and demands of the rest of the world that we be like them and that we fit their definitions. Insecurity and low self-esteem have dominated my life. The gap between what I really am (and wish that I could be proudly and without any apology) and what the rest of the world thinks I should be is far too wide.
Well, but did I run away from school’s social challenges? Am I a coward? Was my decision to leave controlled only by fear and failure? First, I have to say that this version of events is rather over-simplified and lacks much compassion. With my set of handicaps and challenges, school failed to provide me with an environment in which I could succeed. Second, I have to say that there are many platitudes in the western world about facing up to adversity, not running away, taking on all fears and challenges, never having any regrets, the sky’s the limit if you only reach for it, etcetera ad infinitum. The older I get, the more dubious I find these injunctions. For most of my life, I let these thoughts infect me so that I turned in on myself with nothing but self-loathing and self-blame for all of my millions of “failures.”
In more recent times, though, I have become an advocate for appreciating an individual’s total nature and for any individual to put together a realistic life that works, in order to bring about whatever happiness is possible for him or her – reasonably, within any particular limitations and boundaries that might exist for that individual. This is my approach to students and teaching – an appreciation of the whole person. And it is my approach to myself. Life will never be perfect. And if a particular situation in life becomes untenable, an alternative situation should be developed that is realistically workable. A person should have a form of schooling that he or she can experience with relative happiness and success, as well as a job that he or she can perform with relative happiness and success. This is respecting people and being proactive at finding positive solutions.
To find workable solutions in life within the realm of what is actually possible for any particular individual is not “running away” from challenges. I spent decades beating myself up and hating myself for “running away” and “failing” at so many things in life before I finally came to an understanding that true respect for myself was allowing myself to work within my own capabilities. Trying to take on all of these impossible (for me) challenges was only setting myself up for defeat. It was a form of punishing myself because I was always doomed to failure, with no chance of experiencing life’s little happinesses and successes.
That doesn’t mean that I have reached perfect peace with this. I’ve made progress, but I still spend at least part of every day beating myself up over one thing or another. And I admit that I am in my late thirties and still struggling with how to find my place in the world. But I don’t think staying in school – or much of anything, really – would have helped me to come to that answer any faster. Indeed, school probably hampered my “finding myself,” because my real role to the world is undoubtedly one that is carried out in solitude and isolation. The work I’m capable of producing is produced alone. Most of my happiness is found in solitude, too. I wish it weren’t so.
Even a lone wolf needs someone in his or her life. We need love, as anyone does. Without this, we cannot sustain forever. Maybe this was what my science teacher was trying to convey – that by leaving school, the fate of my life would be forever wandering the earth in search of love and approval and never finding it. Probably not, though.
Love is the last thing I was feeling in 7th grade. There was no love for me in that place. If there is love for one such as me anywhere in this world, I have yet to find it. But certainly, it was not there.
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The last question inadvertently raised by my science teacher twenty-five years ago was: Is my life ruined? Can I be deemed a failure? I have already posited that even if I am, leaving public school to homeschool was not the reason for it. Still, am I?
It could be successfully argued, I think, that I am a success, or at least that I am not a complete ruin or failure. After all, I teach college. But if being a college English adjunct instructor for a living does not constitute total failure in life – after all, it could be so much worse – neither does it constitute great success. It is not high-paying, to say the least, nor did I ever have any ambition or desire to teach. I did want something different for my life. Especially in regards to my writing, I was considered to have had greater potential than what I have managed to accomplish. But that’s true of many of us.
If I haven’t ever really found a place in the world, nevertheless I have at least carved a niche out of it that works for me. I am able to provide a service that others need and want competently enough to earn a very modest living. In the meantime, in whatever time I can find, I pursue my own aims, marching to the beat of my own drummer – in the main, this means writing whatever I wish to write, whether it’s Muller’s Mile or a piece like this. I’m lonely, but I doubt high school would have solved that for me. I’ve always felt lonelier around others than when I’m alone – despite always yearning for at least one companion in the world and a few close friends.
In short, I can’t complain. If many have it better than I do, many also have it worse. Life is not bad, and often it is good.
The irony that I now teach in a classroom is inescapable. Some say I’m a good instructor. If I am, I believe it is my outsider status and years of pain and struggling with my challenges that have made me that way. Pain can take a person in a lot of different directions. One thing that can happen is that it can turn a person to bitterness. Frankly, in almost all other aspects of my life, it has. But with teaching, I am able to take half a lifetime of pain, of feeling alone and disliked and inferior, and transform it into encouragement and appreciation for my students. I don’t know how or why. I’m just glad that the pain of my past sends me this way instead of in the direction of blowing up subway stations or shooting up movie theatres.
Still, my past hounds me more closely than I ever want to think about or admit; my old junior high sits right beside my house. Here I sit in this very moment writing this, directly adjacent to the pain – less than a block away, visible right outside my window. In twenty-five years, have I gotten anywhere at all? The school itself has perhaps changed more than I have.
At the time that I attended it, the junior high was made up of two buildings, but the older building that stood at the top of the hill was torn down not long after I left. In fact, my class was to be the last class to attend at the old school and the first class to graduate at the newly constructed building out on the west side of town by the current high school. I felt denied at the time – as though it was some epic disappointment that I had missed out on that experience. As years pass, this particular regret has diminished and become meaningless.
But yes, they tore down the older of the two buildings and moved all the kids to the western side of town. This older building had also, before it served as junior high, been the old North Vernon high school. My mother had attended high school there in the 1950s. My grandmother had taught English there in the 1950s and 1960s. And then I attended junior high there briefly and ignominiously in the 1980s and the rest is history.
The lower and newer building still stands and has been used in subsequent years by Jennings County Schools for a variety of different educational purposes. This building also happens to be the one I mainly attended for the brief time I was there – it was predominantly for the seventh graders while the older building was utilized by the eighth graders.
Recently I was hired by the Jennings County Education Center to teach a College Readiness class. The job is just a little summer diversion, a little summer money, and a chance to be useful to some people here in my hometown. The class itself meets at a building on the outskirts of town, but I was told I would need to make my copies for the class at the JCEC’s “new” facilities – the old junior high building.
Though the building sits right beside my house, I had not visited it since the day I left it twenty-five years ago, except in strange dreams. It is too close. Too spectral.
Kids used to walk by my house after school, and if they saw me, they pointed and laughed at me. I feel this pain just as keenly now as on any of the days that it happened. Everywhere I go, I still expect people to point and laugh at me, or to turn their backs on me and walk away. In this sense, I have gotten nowhere. Twenty-five years never passed.
The first time I decided to walk over to make copies for my class was as perfect a July evening as we have ever had in southern Indiana – the weather fair, the temperature mild, the crickets singing, all the trees and flowers in that full flush of life that seems somehow heavy with sadness, ready to make that turn once again toward death even though the fullness only just arrived. I walked through the peaceful neighborhood, let myself in with the key, and set foot inside the building for the first time since I was thirteen years old.
The last time I had been inside was when my science teacher had made his prediction about my life. Now here I was, that kid who had been so unwelcome and so reviled, by peers and teachers alike, trusted to walk through the door all alone with my own key. The hallways were desolate and grim, the walls a sickly pale green, the shadows deep in the evening light, outlines vague around doors and cavities where lockers used to be.
I was a sensitive kid. A conscientious and rule-abiding kid. Yet just inside the door to my left was a room that I remembered being part of the library, a room where I was once called out of class so that I could be accused of stealing a library book. The book I had taken out of the library was rather small – some sort of nonstandard, under-sized format. I had returned the book to the cart before its due date. I still have the mental image of placing that tiny book back on the return cart when I was finished with it. I don’t know what happened to it after that or how it got lost. But I nevertheless stood in that room accused. I explained that the book was very small and I suggested that it might have fallen off the cart or slipped between other books. The adults did not believe me. They told me that I had stolen it. That I was lying. That I had better produce the book soon – or else. As I left, the two librarians frowned and scowled after me, shaking their heads in contempt. My word was not enough for them. Perhaps because I was different than other kids – odd and withdrawn and socially awkward – I was already beginning to feel the repercussions of that. If I had stayed in school, perhaps the prejudices and suspicions that the adults felt toward me would only have gotten worse.
And that memory was only in one glance to my left. Everything from back then was punitive. Being placed in the “Gifted and Talented” program was no gift. It meant being segregated off into separate classes from the rest of the kids, removed from the very few friends I had managed to make in grade school. It also meant a lot of pressure that I did not feel I could live up to. My science teacher gave us college level work without any sort of scaffolding to get us up to it. I still remember going home at night with my homework in the blackest despair, not comprehending even the smallest part of it. I did not feel gifted or smart. I felt like the stupidest girl who had ever lived, incapable of living up to the work or the pressure. I literally shook with tension during school hours in the terror of being called on in class and made to look stupid because I didn’t know the answers. I ached with physical pain almost all the time because stress and panic kept my muscles almost constantly tensed in a state of fight or flight.
It turned out later that none of the kids understood this college level work either – that we were all taking it home to our parents at night in tears, begging them to help us with it, and even the parents couldn’t figure it out. It was a fiasco. A mockery. A punishment. The work was defeating us, not challenging us.
So, here I am, back – an educator myself now by profession; an educator determined to challenge my own students without ever trying to defeat them.
I could not withstand those halls when they were full of kids and teachers mocking me and harassing me. But now, here only to make my copies, no one was asking me to. Back then I arrived on their schedule, trapped inside the walls once I got there, no control over my own fate, adults free to order me about or accuse me. Now I walked alone through the building on my own decision, in complete silence, as suits me best.
One answer to my science teacher is that I have now been entrusted with the keys to the building that I once left in disgrace. I walked away from that building for the last time with my head down twenty-five years ago – not long after he uttered his words to me – and I walked into it this day with my head held high enough, getting paid to be there.
Yet I am still every bit the imposter inside. Aren’t we always.
At age thirteen, I was at least forty pounds overweight. I lived in horror of anyone seeing my body. I’m not sure what word to use other than horror. It is precisely accurate. I used to lie awake at night shaking, knowing that the next day I would have to undress in front of other girls in phys ed. The next morning as I prepared for school, I might as well have been going to the executioner.
I know these things seem funny and petty and over-dramatic to an adult’s perspective. I am one now. But it is not at all funny to children living in a universe of agonies and intense terrors inside their heads. I wished to die. I’d had suicidal thoughts at least from the age of six or seven.
Unfortunately, by the time I was in junior high I still did not have much conception that certain choices I made were socially unacceptable and that I brought much of the derision upon myself. I was a kid with no social sense and very little guidance in my life doing the best I could. So, I took to always wearing a one-piece bathing suit under my clothes – somehow this made me feel less self-conscious than undressing down to just a bra and panties. I suppose this was because since I was so overweight, other girls would at least not see my bare stomach. By then, my belly was already covered with stretch marks from rapid weight gain. After my father died when I was ten, my mother and I ate mostly greasy fast food; coupled with the arrival of adolescence and my own sedentary nature, this diet wreaked havoc on my body. I was horrifically self-conscious.
Of course the bathing suit only made things worse. As I undressed, girls whispered behind their hands and giggled. I kept myself insulated in a kind of mist, a fog, trying to withdraw into myself to escape the pain. Then when I went out and couldn’t hit a ball, couldn’t kick, couldn’t run, didn’t understand any of the rules of the game, they – the girls and the boys, too – just ignored me. Remarks, direct or covert, mainly came in the changing room. Out in front of other eyes in the gym or on the field or in the hallways, I was only invisible. I did not exist. I was an outsider of outsiders. Most of the time, not even outsiders would speak to me in the halls.
The halls are what remind you most keenly of the worst of it all, because they are the passageways to every torture chamber – the changing rooms, the gym, that next classroom that you would rather be stricken down than visit because there you would be humiliated, pressured, called upon, made by an adult to feel as small as possible.
The memories are not always specific. Just to see through a window down the end of the hallway at a specific angle the same that your eyes saw it twenty-five years ago echoes over a bottomless chasm. There is that bizarre disjunction, that increasingly alarming void of years. Too much has changed and not enough. The sights and sounds and smells are identical, but you are much closer to the grave. The building, last time you were here, was once teeming with people and loud voices and lockers slamming and mockery and intense grief and humiliation and anger and pain inside your head. Now there is only silence and dying evening light and sadness and emptiness in the hallways. But it is not peace.
The class I am teaching is almost over, and I will not be haunting the hallways of the old building on late summer evenings much longer. I only attended one semester of junior high. One semester. But measured by the impact it had on my psyche it might as well have been a lifetime. If leaving school ruined my life, I’m more certain than ever that it provided me with no other viable options. Back then, there was not much help for kids like me. I acknowledge that a few did try. I remember the assistant principal at the time calling me into his office and attempting to have some conversations with me. It must have been obvious that I was unraveling. But it was too little too late. Kind as he was (and his is the only kindness I remember in that place), he was not reaching me. As is usually the case in adolescence, I was hard at work forming my particular brand of disaffection. But it wasn’t just that. I could not have said what kind of help I needed if I’d tried. I was as lost in my head as he was in his awkward, fumbling words.
I had been homeschooling for some time and must have been about fourteen or fifteen when they tore down the older building of the school. One night, very late, I walked over and picked around amongst the rubble for a souvenir. I chose a slab of bricks, still held together with mortar, and brought it back home.
For years, it sat in my bedroom. Throughout my teenaged years I was fond of found objects and making amateur postmodern art pieces, so I used the piece of the wall in various sculptures and arrangements. This was some knowing and symbolic form of subversion I guess – taking a piece of my old school and using it to my own artistic ends.
After that, in my fitful, unsuccessful attempts through my twenties and thirties to live in New York and Cincinnati and Raleigh, I lost touch with that piece of the old school. After I made my first recent July evening visit to make my copies, I wondered what had become of that slab of bricks, deciding at last that it must be long gone. I had not thought about it in years, but the visit had brought it back into my mind.
In one of those uncanny instances of synchronicity, that very evening as I ate dinner on the back terrace at my house, my eyes were moving around the yard and found it. It was sitting beside a rose bush with the sleeping figure of a resin angel atop it. Many years ago, before moving away on my misadventures to other cities, I must have deposited the bricks in the backyard, and then my sister-in-law or another family member must have come along and put them beside the rosebush and set the angel on top of them.
I walked over, moved the angel, retrieved the piece, picked it up to look at it. But what do you do with such an object? You don’t move it halfway across the country with you when you’re going to be living in a one-bedroom apartment. And when you’re busy teaching and writing, you don’t spend much time anymore displaying found objects in your bedroom. So I put the bricks back where they were and gently restored the sleeping angel to her place. Heaven knows she’s getting more peace from them than anyone who ever walked inside those walls.
