I should preface this with the statement that I'm not recriminating my parents for their choice to put me in public school and then private school. Still, I sometimes wonder about how my life would be different if I had been homeschooled. At the time, homeschooling was much more unusual and had a lot of unanswered questions about it. But my experience homeschooling our children leads me to wonder what might have been.
I imagine that I would be more creative, at least. Instead of driving me toward the sciences, I might have balanced it out with more of the arts and humanities. I had a knack for understanding the language of the King James Bible and therefore reading Shakespeare. I wonder, would I have been a good Henry V or simply adequate? Given that my performances onstage were limited to supporting roles, it remains a mystery.
Would I have discovered my calling to write much sooner? Probably, I would have. Perhaps we would have caught my learning disability earlier if I had the amount of individualized attention presently enjoyed by homeschoolers. Ergo, reading would have been easier and my passion for writing would have had much more time to grow.
I think my struggle to understand my relationship with God wouldn't have been as hard. Given all the teasing that goes on in class-based schooling, the rejection and heartache that I faced (not entirely uncommon), I had trouble believing that I had value, that Someone loved me as I was and that I had a reason to live and a cause to fight for. I didn't realize that I was a child of God, a son and not a servant until I was nearly a decade out of high school. I believe that if I had been more sheltered as a student, this discovery would have been easier to accept and given me a direction to go as a young man.
On the other hand, I know enough about writing that a time-travel paradox can quickly become cliche and wondering about what would have been is not always the best use of time. Really, things could have been much worse. My parents could have taken less interest in my education and my life. My mother and father reached out to me at a critical time and probably saved my life by investing their time in me. Additionally, there is some value in doing it wrong; I see how much better doing it right and I believe in homeschooling much more because of my experiences in public and private schools.
I believe God knew what He was doing. Like Gena, Treon and so many others, I needed to experience these things to know what other students continue to endure. Is this a valid argument for all children to be in government schools? Not really. That's like saying that a man should steal to know what criminals go through or that a woman should sell her body to know what prostitutes go through. The criminal aspect of such a comparison is also valid because what is going on in today's schooling is criminal compared to the benefits we've found in homeschooling. Violence, over-crowding, curricula disputes, moral training and even attitude problems are all improved when parents are able to choose homeschooling.
