Kat Dancing

Holly Lisle just linked to a very frightening essay on public schools, which I largely agree with, though I should point out at this juncture that my parents began homeschooling me in the seventh grade, and that the only reoccurring nightmare I had as a child was the one where I did something really, really bad, and they made me go back. My attitude towards public school is not perhaps the most objective.

She also asked how we became readers, and if applicable writers. I was big on stories from very early on - my family still can recite parts of The Scrawny Tawny Lion, and I suspect I was taught to read mostly to spare them the endless requests for story. My own personal memory of the epiphany moment, though, was when I was seven and my mother handed me McCaffery's Dragonsinger and said, "Here. You'll like this."

For much of the rest of my childhood and teenage years people were yelling at me to put that book down while they spoke to me.

Writing was more drawn-out. I can remember being - four? five? - and lining my toys up to tell them stories; I have tapes of myself telling stories to my brother, mostly Pern fanfic, and I used to concoct elaborate make-believe games for us to play (unfortunately, with only two roles to fill, it tended to be Queen and Loyal Subject. There were a great many revolts of the peasantry.) One epiphany was in fifth grade when our teacher had us write a short story and a poem for class. She made a great fuss over mine, and I realized that hey, if I wrote all this stuff down then people would be really impressed and make fusses! I was (hell, still am) a terrible attention whore, and a great deal of poetry and unfinished stories resulted.

A second epiphany came when I was twelve or so and read a collection of LeGuin's essays on writing called The Language of the Night and realized that writing could be more than simply a yell for attention: it could be art, truth, self-expression, a voice, a means of growing. A great deal of finished but very dull and pretentious stories resulted, but I was getting closer.

And finally, when I was twenty, I hit on the real and final reason to write: I had to do something with these damned stories, because my subconscious clearly wasn't going to stop making them, and maybe if I wrote them down and got them right the voices would shut up and leave me in peace.

Well, it kinda works. They're quieter now. I don't run into so many walls.

Looking back, though, there is a real trend there, and that trend is my parents. I was always encouraged to read and to think about what I'd read. Unlike many of the writers I knew, I was encouraged to write: my parents came from hippie backgrounds, and though they never forced artistic accomplishment on us the way some parents from that era did, when I showed a leaning that way they praised me rather than dismissing it as "impractical." They never raised my hopes either - both had known enough aspiring artists to guess I wasn't going to make a million bucks writing - but it was always "what kind of job can you take that will leave you space for writing?" (or, if I was working for them as I am now, "are we leaving you enough space for writing?") and never "when are you going to get a real job?"

I'm not really all that independent. I'm not a natural rebel. Without that support, I suspect I'd have stayed a lifelong unsatisfied daydreamer.

School... never did much for me either way. I had supportive teachers, but I had far more teachers who simply didn't care and one who actively sabotaged my ego. I always liked learning, and I suspect I learned more reading the textbooks on my own than I ever did from them; certainly I learned more homeschooled than I did in public school. And don't even get me started on my "peer group". The use of peer pressure to encourage conformity and discourage thinking is the one big thing I think the author of that essay missed out on.

I doubt - for all that I agree with the essay - that it will do much good, not because of government or society, but because of parents.I've heard too many parents counting out loud the days until their kids go back to school to think they'd welcome a change that meant spending more time with the kids. Publically funded school has done good things - like letting both parents work when that was needed to keep the income coming - but it's also allowed a lot of people who didn't really want kids to dump them in free daycare until they're eighteen. It's going to take a far greater shift in public opinion and social structures than the essay suggests to go back to the good old days.