My Homework Assignment
Annegret Hunter on the Joys of Losing a Career & Gaining a Calling
You did what?” exclaimed Dr. Smith’s impeccably groomed wife, Ms. Something-or-other, herself being a civil servant, and stepped back several paces. “I homeschooled my children.” She retreated further, smiled incredulously, her eyes saying: Wow, what a nutcase, looks harmless enough, though; turned her back, and started to converse with someone else. Since I am a sheltered woman and thankfully rarely go to official gatherings, I find this reaction amusing—it is my husband who must endure a lot more.
A Kept Fake
Homeschooling in these times of self-indulgence is a difficult pursuit, especially for fathers, who bear the brunt of ridicule in the real world: “You mean your wife just sits at home with the kids? Why doesn’t she work?”
But it is true that, as a homeschooling mom, you are in a double whammy: Not only are you a housewife, which means a kept woman, in importance somewhat lower than the kitchen sink, but you also are a fake teacher, pretending to teach, without knowledge and accreditation. And to top it all off, once the kids are out of the house and you want to re-enter real working life, you are told, like that woman out on the prairies, who after bringing up nine children applied for a job making sandwiches: “Sorry, but you have no work experience.”
Even the title wife is taken from you officially, here in Ontario. Here you are a spouse, which, we suspect, is short for “spineless mouse.”
However, more normal responses run the gamut from an awestruck “Oh, you must be so patient!”, through a pleading “Would you please consider homeschooling my child?” and a whispered “Is it legal?”, to a wistful “I wish I had known about it.”
Do not get me wrong, it is undoubtedly the right thing to do. My husband and I have done it for many years and have surfaced back into single-couple-life saner and wiser, or so we like to think. Yet the important question still is: Why would anyone homeschool?
I do not mean to evade the educational -explanation—tomes have been written about the dismal state of public education and the emptiness of secularism, and it is a fact that there are young couples who sit down and think all this out and decide there and then to homeschool their future offspring. I find this totally amazing. These are sensible people. But sense is not what I am talking about.
Nor is it the gut reaction of parents in distress: “My son was badly beaten up and the principal refused to do anything about it”—“I went past the schoolyard one day and was so shocked by the language of the third graders, no adult paying attention, and this was a Christian school!”—“They wanted to put him on pills and said he was dyslexic.”
No, I am talking about average couples, who have thought out life properly at the appropriate time and are following the right path up the hill of success, you know: Career (child) Career. We were such a couple, my husband and I. We were both building up important careers, and, being a respectable Ms. Something-or-other, I pitied my own mother, who was so foolish as to give up hers for the family. Modern woman without a career, ridiculous!
Annegret Hunter recovered after homeschooling two boys and was pleased to discover she was still a Christian, a wife, and a bookbinder. Her husband Graeme is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
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33.1—January/February 2020
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