Homeschooler's Rant.

I homeschool. I haven't always homeschooled; always wanted to but it took a while & some heartache to get Dearest on side. I've done the Public School thing. I've worked there & seen it from the inside out. Just so you know because I'm getting incredibly miffed. I am miffed all the way down to my toe socks.

I should really like to know where some people's head space goes. I would never, either on line or in real life, attack someone for their choice to send their littlest & dearest off each day into the jaws on their local Public School. Their family, their choice & I have enough to do with juggling my own life to worry about anyone else's choices. So why do people feel they have the right to wade into spaces clearly labeled *Homeschooling* & deride, ridicule, slander people who have made a different choice? I do not get it. Heavens above, there is plenty of variety to choose from amongst public schools: good schools, bad schools, mediocre schools, good teachers, bad, teachers, mediocre teachers, good kids, bad kids...& on it goes. I've attended enough P&C meetings, stood waiting enough times for classrooms to empty out their regulation quota of children to know there are lots of unhappy parents around but suggest that they don't have to put up with this & they are horrified.

I don't get this attack on the island where we are well known for being a little different & having great kids. I rarely get it at the supermarket or on the bus or while waiting at the cinemas on a Tuesday morning but any time I wander into a Homeschool forum (clearly marked as for homeschoolers!) some public menace arrives to tell all the homeschoolers just how wrong their choice is, no matter what reasons they have or how awful their local school was.

I sort of expect it from the secular left who would like everybody to be the same despite all evidence that God particularly likes variety & no two snowflakes are the same let alone two people, even twins, even identical twins! I know there are people who are great advocates of the great smelting pot called public schooling & they are entitled to their opinion; I just happen to disagree with them, as is my right. What stuns me is the number of Christians who wade into this debacle declaring that public schooling is going to pot because all the Christians are pulling their kids out to homeschool. Say what??? When did this get to be our fault. When did it get to be the wrong thing to nurture & disciple our own children before worrying about the *Great Commision*? When did it become the right thing to send immature, inadequately trained children to fight the sort of battles most Christian adults successfully manage to disengage from? Who decided they got to interpret God's revealing of His will to our family? And while we're at it when did people decide they had the right to be so jolly rude?!

Not impressed. Not by a long shot.