WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOL TOOK FROM ME

After homeschooling my dc for a few years, I now know what I missed out on by attending the public school. Mind you, the school I went to was actually very good. I learned a lot and as public schools go it was, for the most part, as good as most.

Trust in instincts

I have come to realize that I have learned, subconsciously, that it is wrong to step out and teach yourself. It is wrong to step out and learn material that the rest of my peers are not learning. I can trace this back to my 10th grade Geometry class where the teacher did now allow us to move on in the class until every single student understood the concept we were covering. Consequently, we never got pass about chapter 10. The concepts that I learned in Geometry, I know EXTREMELY well, however, I only know very little. I could have gone on and studied the material myself, but I felt guilty for wanting to leave my classmates behind. He had given us a lecture, I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember the overwhelming guilt at leaving students behind.

I probably had this reinforced in other areas, but I don’t remember them specifically. This particular event had a huge impact on me.

Confidence

Somehow, somewhere over the course of the years, I have come to accept that the school system knew better what was best for me educationally than I knew. I never, never followed my interest, but did as I was expected to do. I never complained and was an extremely good student. I graduated 8th in a class of 400+ where I transferred in 2 years before graduation. I had come from a small school where only the basics were taught, a class of only 100.

I think that, for me, as one with a compliant personality the PS system can be very dangerous. I would have never acted out, complaining for what I needed. My aim was to acquire approval and make everyone happy. I was willing to sacrifice my own educational experience to make this happen.

Desire to learn

As I became older, graduated from college, and went to work, I still had a desire to learn. I loved learning, so what did I do? I enrolled in a junior college and started taking pre-med. courses. This was a good thing. However, the reason is pretty pitiful. I was looking for a classroom where people would feed me, like spoon feeding a baby. I never learned to feed myself.

Oh, I read all of the time, but I was always looking for or waiting for the external structure that I needed to move my learning along. This is just disgusting now that I now better.

See I didn’t realize how bad off I was. I was not aware of these ideologies that I had learned from attending school. Homeschooling has changed all of that.

Patience with self

Since I was so accustomed to catching on very quickly, I never learned to push through a difficult area of learning. I was never significantly challenged to learn more complex material. And I completely lost all patience with myself when I did not know the right answer or couldn’t figure it out immediately. Remember, I had also learned it was wrong to move ahead of the crowd, so if I wasn’t catching on they probably weren’t either, so that meant I wasn’t supposed to be learning this right now.

Hope

Having their external boundaries set upon myself, I felt locked it and imprisoned. And I not only applied this same thinking to education, but to other areas of life. I basically never wanted to stand out or do better than everyone else.

Now I know I’m not so smart or so special that I would have been better at every single thing than everyone else, but it is only till recently that I’ve begun to trust myself, work hard, and allow my self to succeed.

I do not want to put these external constraints on my own children. I want them to find their passions and pursue them. It would take a mandate from God for me to place my children into public school. I have no doubt that they would learn and probably even do well. But I’m more afraid of the underlying assumptions about life that they would pick up than I am afraid of the material they would learn.