Secular homeschooling as resistance: a mini manifesto

Honestly, it feels like the world is a mess, and the world of education is especially a mess — books getting banned, curriculums trying to justify enslaving other human beings, teachers getting fired for reading books in their classrooms… I could go on and on, and I bet you could, too.

Seeing this happening in the world makes us want to something. And we can do things: We can call our state and local reps, we can support local organizations working for change, we can raise our voices. But we can also homeschool.

Because I think secular homeschooling is a form of resistance.

Before I jump in, let me just say a couple of things. I’m a homeschooler, but I believe in public schools — I think good public schools make good communities, and people who can’t or don’t want to homeschool deserve good learning experiences. And I also recognize that being able to homeschool is a privileged position — I know most of us have to make some trade-offs to make homeschooling work, but being able to do that is a privilege. And finally, I’m a cis white middle class women — and while I think the patriarchy has made my life harder, I have also benefited from — and continue to benefit from — the white patriarchy. So my experiences are not going to be the same as people who aren’t white women, and I shouldn’t treat my experiences as the baseline for what other people should or could do.

But I do think that as secular homeschoolers, we are in a unique position to resist.

• We are already used to thinking outside of existing systems.

• We can adapt on the fly, in the moment — how many times have we changed our entire curriculum plan overnight?

• We have space and we have opportunities to help build the kind of world we want for our kids. And homeschooling, just our regular everyday homeschooling, is part of building that world.

So how do we do it?

Well, no surprises, the first thing we can do is to teach our kids critical thinking, to teach them how to think critically.

A lot of times when we talk about critical thinking, we talk about it in terms of helping our kids be able to see “the other side” of something. And that can be a useful skill if you’re debating who is the best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or what day your homeschool park meet-up should be. It’s useful when you’re trying to find evidence in a text to support one interpretation over another one or if you’re debating ethics bowl scenarios.

But in a lot of instances where we want to teach our kids to use critical thinking, there is no other side.

There is science, and there is somebody’s belief system. And somebody’s belief system doesn’t deserve the weight and consideration that scientific evidence does — you have no obligation to listen to someone debate the “other side” of evolution. It’s not an “other side,” it’s just wrong.

There is historical fact, and there is somebody’s opinion. The white patriarchy has historically harmed people who weren’t part of it — you can maybe argue some of the nuances around how and why the white patriarchy hurt people, but you can’t argue that it did. If you do, you’re wrong. Slavery was the major cause of the U.S. civil war, period. 

What critical thinking needs to do is to teach our kids how to understand and evaluate information so that they understand what the facts are. And so that they can understand that facts change when what we know changes — so that they can be open to changing their minds when the facts change — because facts do change.

And critical thinking is also about accepting that sometimes you’re not going to find an answer, sometimes you’re trying to pin down a better question. The question of reparations — some kind of financial compensation to the descendants of enslaved people — is a good example of this. I think most of us agree that enslaved people experienced a huge economic injustice and that that injustice has been passed on to their descendants all the way into the present day. But what should we do about that? What is the answer? I think we can’t find the answer yet because we need to find a better question, a more specific question. A lot of things are like that — good questions can be a better critical thinking tool than any answers.

(People always ask what resources do I recommend for critical thinking, and my absolute favorite resource that I talk about all the time — literally I posted on Instagram about it last week! — is the Good Thinkers Toolkit. I have used it with 4-year-olds and with college students and everybody in between, and I’m apparently going to recommend it every time I talk about anything.)

The next thing we can do to make resistance part of our secular homeschool is something I think we’ll all like: Read all the banned books.

Support the authors who write them. Give their books as gifts.

Check them out of your library or ask your library to order them.

And also: Read them instead of problematic books from the canon. Suzanne and I have been talking about this a lot on the podcast — how we need to write a new literary canon.

Believe people when they tell you a book harms them. If a Native woman tells you that Little House on the Prairie was a harmful book in her childhood, don’t read that book with your kids! Read The Birchbark House or something else instead.

I know that this can be a hard shift, especially for those of us who grew up as passionate readers and loved so many books that are being identified as problematic today. We want to share the books we loved with our kids.

But trust me, when you go back to those books, the things you didn’t notice when you were reading them are going to bother you. Reading some of these books with your kids is not going to match up to the memories you have of reading them when you were a kid.

And you cannot read every book — even though I know we try sometimes! — so why would you deliberately choose to read books that you know are racist and harmful to people? I think it’s important to ask ourselves WHY we feel like reading a racist book with our kids is so important to us. Even if we plan to have the big conversation while we’re reading it. Why wouldn’t we want to instead read a book that DOESN’T normalize racism?

Another strategy for homeschool resistance: Teach real history and real science.

If you’re a secular homeschooler, this is something you’re probably already actively doing, so I don’t need to say a lot about it.

But I will say, if you value real history and real science, if you value curriculum by diverse people, spend your curriculum dollars on it! Support the people who are making this curriculum if you want them to keep making it.

And a thing that I think is important for me to keep in mind when I’m looking for curriculum: There is no magic intersectional curriculum. There is probably never going to be a perfect intersectional curriculum that represents the experiences of every single person —  because intersectionality is about recognizing that different people have different experiences of the same events. So a Black man and a Black woman would have different experiences living in the 1940s United States, but a Black man in the military would have a different experience from a Black farmer, and a queer Black woman would have different experiences from a straight Black woman, and a Black person living in Mississippi would have a different experience than a Black person living in Maine — basically, everybody has different experiences! And a good curriculum is not going to be able to capture every single one of those experiences. What it WILL do is to remind you to think about all those different experiences, and it will talk to you about its limits and biases and how it ended up with the information it includes.

We can also not support curriculum makers who include racist or homophobic or proselytizing materials in their curriculum. I know this can be hard. Sometimes we have to make something work. But when you can, when you have a choice, DON’T support curriculum makers who don’t teach real science and history. DON’T support curriculum makers who include racist materials and homophobic materials and proselytize-ing materials in their curriculum. Don’t give them your money! As long as they are making money, they have no incentive to change anything. As much as you can, whenever you can, if you have a choice between two things, choose the one that represents your values.

Another thing we can do: Be brave about who we are. 

It’s scary out there in the world, and I don’t blame you if you don’t always want to literally wear your opinions on your t-shirt.

But be brave when you feel like you can.

Let other people know you’re a safe person and a safe space.

If someone at your co-op says something that’s racist or transphobic, push back. You don’t have to have a fight, you can just say, “Wow, I really disagree with you.”

If someone proposes a policy that’s racist or transphobic, speak up and say what the problem with it is.

Don’t go in assuming bad intentions — a lot of us are learning, we genuinely want to do better, and there are still going to be things we don’t know or don’t recognize. We can help each other do better. And if you’re a white woman like me, maybe take that responsibility of being the first person to speak up in these situations so that we’re not always leaving that burden on the people who are being negatively affected. When they talk, listen. But don’t always leave them having to talk first because that’s really hard.

And I’ll say, I’ve been wearing my Secular Homeschoolers Unite shirt around town, and I’ve had several people come up to me who aren’t part of my particular secular homeschool community, and we’ve had lovely little bonding moments that never would have happened otherwise. I think a lot of us are looking for community.

And another thing: Don’t just focus on the bad stuff.

Real history doesn’t just mean terrible things that were done to people outside the white patriarchy.

Oh, there are a lot of terrible things. And we have to talk about them.

But they absolutely should not be the only thing we talk about.

A lot of people ask me about intersectional history with your little kids — how do you talk about these hard, complicated topics with them?

And I think the answer is that you don’t — at least not more than the broad context you would give them about any other big topic.

With little kids, I think intersectional history is about erasing what I think of as white patriarchy mythology — those little kid stories we grew up with, like George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, Dick Whittington and his cat, Sir Francis Drake — and replacing those stories with better stories, stories about awesome people from history who aren’t necessarily part of the white patriarchy: Mansa Musa, the Japanese empress Himiko, Charlotte Forten, Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture — there are so many amazing stories about amazing people doing amazing things. And these stories are just as important as the dark parts of history because historically marginalized people are more than the things that have been done to them. If you start history with these stories, you’re giving your kids a much clearer picture of the world.

And keep doing this in high school and middle school — talk about the atrocities, but also talk about the accomplishments, the successes, the good stuff. Because there is a lot of it — despite their best efforts, sometimes, white cis straight men are not the only people who contributed to the big story of humanity. 

And in fact when I was writing U.S. history curriculum for high school, that’s where I started — I wanted to tell the stories of people who weren’t straight cis white men. Those stories really matter.

Another thing we can do, I think especially as secular homeschoolers, is to normalize a different kind of education.

Education is not a rat race where you go through a series of tests and receive a reward pellet at the end of each one and then immediately start the next test.

But this is what it’s become like for a lot of kids.

So just homeschooling in a way that opts out of this is pretty radical.

Taking your time, not loading up on AP classes or testing or activities, prioritizing deep learning over multiple-choice right answers, having time to breathe, having space to try things you don’t already know you’re good at — and if you take another year to graduate so what?

We don’t need to shift the current education goalposts. I think we can forget the goalposts entirely and write our own definitions for education success.

And we should because it’s very clear that the definitions out there right now are not good ones, and they’re not working.

I know it’s tempting to think about what are my state standards and what is the school down the street doing, and it’s OK if you feel better following those guidelines — but you don’t have to.

And the more you homeschool, the more comfortable you get, the more you realize that real learning, the kind we care about, the kind we want for our kids, that kind of real learning happens when we climb out of the standard education box and do our own thing for our own particular kid.

And people may be weird about it — people often are weird about it.

But over time, as people see more and more kids who have had a totally different kind of educational experience — one that was fun and not stressful, one that didn’t leave them burned out by high school graduation — and as they see these kids moving into college and succeeding — and moving into the real world and succeeding — they’ll start to see this kind of learning as a real option. And maybe they’ll want it for their kids or their grandkids. And maybe the system will start to change because you did let your teenager take that 10th grade gap year to hike the Appalachian trail or write a novel.

Resistance can be a long game, but don’t discount the ripple effect.

And along those lines, another way we can use our homeschools as resistance is to be open to kids’ ideas for alternative ways to do things.

When I was growing up, people would always say, “Well, this is how it is, you can’t change the system, you have to work within it.”

And sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes the system is so broken that you CAN’T work within it.

I think kids and teenagers today — they see things we don’t.

They’re opting out of things we took for granted — like you have to go to college right after high school, you have to get a job, you should make money so you can buy nicer things.

And that can be uncomfortable, especially if you have family who are kind of looking askance at your kid for making these kinds of choices and at you for letting them make these kinds of choices.

But ultimately, resistance is about supporting this kind of change. Supporting our kids. Maybe some of these things will lead to change, maybe they won’t, but I think it’s important to encourage them for saying “I don’t like this game, I’m going to play a different one.”

And I’m almost done, but this one is important: Take breaks!

Rest IS resistance

And it’s okay to take a break and focus on doing the things that feed you

It’s okay to take a break from the news — my friend Suzanne and I kind of swap off doing this, so I know she’ll tell me if there is something urgent I need to know about, but I can let go of that low level hum of distress that comes with the news for a little while. Sometimes we just need to not be plugged in for a minute.

It’s not that you don’t care, it’s not that you’ve given up.

You’re just putting on your oxygen mask.

It also helps me to be very deliberate with my resources: I have this much money this month — where do I want it to go?I have this much time this month — where do I want it to go?

I can’t do everything, so taking the time to really think about what feels important to me RIGHT NOW really helps — it gives me a sense of purpose.

And finally, DON’T GIVE UP. 

I am a student of the history, and if we take the long view of history, all the things that we’re seeing today — the other-ing, the fear mongering, the valorization of ignorance, these have all happened before.

They’ve happened over and over again.

Every time the world starts to move in a more progressive direction, people who have benefited from the previous system push back. And they make a lot of noise and they hurt people and they succeed for a little while in slowing down change.

But they’re only slowing it down, they can’t stop it.

The world gets better, slowly and painfully, but it gets better.

And we can feel sad and discouraged and angry and frustrated, and sometimes all of those things before our first cup of coffee, but we also need to know that we are not alone. That the world is full of people like us quietly working toward a better future.

And eventually that’s where we’ll end up. All of us. Even the people who really don’t want us to get there.

So hang on to hope. And know that what you’re doing makes a difference.