The thing that always cracked me up was best friend dated women that were like refugees from a sitcom or an Adam Sandler movie. Like, one engagement ended with a restraining order, and another when her friends in school started getting their driver's licenses and suddenly settling down to married life didn't seem as cool.

Curse Canada and its ability to change all the coins in my change purse to its useless-in-American-vending-machines currency!

I was homeschooled for a year (grade 3) because I hated school so much that I was refusing to participate. My attitude was essentially "This is stupid and boring. Why should I do it?" Apparently the almost-daily detentions didn't seem like a convincing reason.

I missed enough that year that grade 4 was kind of interesting, and school improved steadily from then on.

Yes, there's a big difference between wanting to get married because that's the expected "next step" for people your age and getting married because it is natural growth of a specific relationship.

Like Hec, though, I believe in the public schools as a fundamental foundation of a the kind of society we want to have. And I think by starving and denigrating them, we're losing something so so important and I wish I had solutions instead of laments,

That seems articulate enough to me. Mind, I'm familiar with the particular circumstances behind homeschooling for AmyP (for whom it wasn't her first choice, but the best choice under the circumstances) and Lizard. Undoubtedly, everybody has their reasons.

(sidenote: Renoir: "There is only one great tragedy in this world - everybody has their reasons." I remember reading that when I was 12 and not being able to grasp it and still sensing there was something true in it.)

Aside from my faith that high quality public education is and should be the foundation of a democracy, I'm also opposed to home schooling as an example of what I consider Freak Ass Momism. Which is not a label I would apply to any individual (and certainly not anyone here), but the current cultural tendency to weirdly overvalue A Mother's Love and Only I Can Give My Child What It Needs etc. I think we're going through a cultural pendulum swing that's as distorted and out of whack as Victorian and Edwardian parenting was.

Again, I'm as big a fan of dedicated parents as you're going to find. I know what it requires and I appreciate it when I see it. So this isn't a comment on stay at home parenting, or making sacrifices for your children. I lived next door to a family that practiced hardcore attachment parenting and they were fine. I didn't agree with that philosophy, but I'm not talking about one particular approach or the level of devotion.

But there has been a cultural valuation (for a while now - ten to fifteen years or so now?) for one-on-one parenting which does a disservice to the child. I think children thrive with regular varied contact with other adults, teachers, kids of different ages. The vast majority of human culture has encouraged that. I think home schooling deprives children of absolutely necessary social skills, and even survival skills. You don't do them any favors by keeping them focused on a relationship with just one or two parents.

Damn, how'd you work that?

Heh. See above clarification.

I had huge committment issues right up until a year into the marriage. One of the sweetest boyfriends I ever had, and I still adore him to death, was planning on marrying me once I graduated HS, and we would do the college thing together. Once I saw he was really planning that stuff I was gone. Even when Mr. H asked me to marry him, my answer wasn't "Yes" but "When!?!"

In some ways, homeschooling would have been better for me. Except for the part where either I, my brother, or my mother might not have survived. I guess it was worth it, to not. I went to a public school and I turned out...wait, what point was I making again?

and I turned out...

Snarky.

ita, are you home today?

I will amend to specify that my "everybody has his reasons" quotation is not dismissive, but an acknowledgement. When it comes to parenting everybody makes their best call and there are times when it will be private school or home schooling and that was the best choice.

My gripe is with the presumed cultural value (which I see as prevalent) for one-on-one parenting that is so strong that it can't put it in context with socialization, common acculturation, democratic values, or even that there are times when on-one-one parenting is narcissistic and unhealthy.