Home Schooling

There has been a definite increase in home schooling since I was a kid.  We never heard of such a thing in the 1970's and 80's when I was a student.  This is not a commentary on the modern practice of pedagogy in the home by the parents. . . But what about all of the things we actually did learn at home?  We learned to cook, clean the kitchen and bathroom, how to vacuum, to mow the lawn, how to take care of the pets, and even the most basic academics- reading and writing the alphabet.  We learned plenty of other things too, things we might wish we had never learned and things we wouldn't trade for the world.

My Family Systems mentor/coach, Dr. Larry Foster, once said, "We are all home schooled when it comes to emotional processes."  The thing we learned the best at home was how "to be."  We learned how to respond to criticism- whether we took that too personally or let it roll off our backs is a matter of the home in which we were schooled.  We learned when to speak and when to be quiet- whether we were assertive or passive depended again upon the home in which we were raised.  We learned to be ones who took too much responsibility for everyone else's pain and suffering, or we learned to let others feel their own feelings, some of us even learned to ignore feelings in ourselves in others at all costs.  We learned about being a first born, an only child, a youngest or a middle.  We learned about being a male or being a female and what that meant to the school we attended.

These lessons were hammered into us over time by our relationships, events, and even the culture of our family.  We were programmed, in a way, to respond the way we do, to react to certain things that others might not even notice, and to value certain traits/feelings/characteristics more than others.  And the patterns for all of that functioning goes back to the homeschooling of each of our parents and each of their parents before them, and so on.

So then, what do we do with that rudimentary education we received?  Is it set in stone, unchangeable?  Or can we learn to adapt, to create a new environment of learning about ourselves?  Can we reframe what we learned in our homeschooling so that we might better function in the homeschool we are creating for our own children?  Asking the question just might be the first step to a new education.  

Image credit: teachermamarules.blogspot.com