Excerpted from One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love by Rebecca Walker. Courtesy of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA).
*****
Let’s start at the beginning. My husband, C (his name is Charles, but so is our eldest twin, so C is easy, plus that’s what his mother calls him), and I came to homeschooling by default. I wish we could say we planned this, oh so carefully, but that would be a lie. In the same vein, I wish I could say we all loved the process of homeschooling. But unlike many homeschooling families, ours did not love it, at least not while we were doing it. My husband and I were often tired and discouraged, and whether they actually meant it or not, our kids told us they hated being homeschooled—and they told us every day.
Unlike many new parents, not only did my husband and I not know we would homeschool, I’m not even certain we had heard of homeschooling outside the context of nineteenth-century history. Our in-depth analysis of educational options began in 1983 when the twins were three years old. It was pretty much limited to the traditional triumvirate of public school, parochial school, or private school. Period. Back then, charter schools didn’t exist, nobody was talking about vouchers, online learning happened only inside multinational corporations, and as I said, we thought homeschooling, with the possible exceptions of missionaries, Mennonites, and the Amish, ended with the pioneers and other purveyors of Manifest Destiny. We were not part of the progressive and informed parent party.
But educational ignorance notwithstanding, there were some things we knew right at the beginning, unequivocally and beyond the shadow of a doubt. We knew we loved Charles, Damon, and Evan abundantly and beyond measure. We knew they were each unique and fascinating children.
We didn’t concern ourselves with the question of what they would become quantitatively. We weren’t interested in whether they would become doctors or lawyers or engineers. We were interested in the qualitative; we wanted them to become healthy, conscious, and contributing members of the world’s community. We knew we really, truly enjoyed their company. We knew they deserved a holistic and wellbalanced launch into the universe. We knew we were responsible for doing our best to ensure that they received it. And as a corollary to all of the above, we knew we wanted to be a fully functional family, not just a bunch of people who shared some genetic material and a mailing address.
At first we thought the “problem” was public school. There was the whole slightly larger than you’d like student-to-teacher ratio; the ever-increasing pressure on teachers to do everything, leading too often to less than enthusiastic teaching; and, of course, the abiding guilt many prep school alums have if they send their own kids to public school. After all, if your parents sacrificed to send you to private school, the presumption is that you will make the same sacrifices for your own children. While our parents and grandparents were sympathetic and were always there with a listening ear and solid support, the situation they had faced was so different. C and I attended school in the sixties, when everything was in turmoil. He went to legally segregated schools in Memphis until tenth grade, when his family moved to Toledo. And while I attended integrated schools, it was still a turbulent environment. Our sons entered school in 1984, not 1954 or 1964 or even 1974. But it still seemed that at every turn we were surprised or shocked at yet another of our miscalculations about another teacher at yet another school. Brown v. Board of Education notwithstanding, we quickly learned the depth of truth in the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (As an aside, there was a certain irony in the fact that C’s uncle, the late James M. Nabrit, actually argued Brown before the United States Supreme Court with the late Thurgood Marshall.)
C and I initially processed the typical collection of “racial encounters” during the first few years of our kids’ schooling within the matrix of class conflict, namely middle-class white women teachers who seemed uncomfortable with black children who weren’t from dysfunctional families or a lower socioeconomic group. There is something potentially dangerous in the lure of helping “the less fortunate,” something that frames the helper as a savior there to ennoble the less fortunate, and that danger is there for everyone in the helping professions, including teachers.
The challenge for our sons’ teachers seemed to be the fact that they couldn’t figure out how to “help” our sons and so classified them as arrogant and unmanageable. Example: Charles, who was a chatterbox in kindergarten, was talking during practice for the Hanukkah portion of the holiday program. When his teacher yelled at him for not paying attention and not understanding the importance of Hanukkah, he responded by telling her he knew the Messiah had already come. Like most children brought up in Apostolic, Pentecostal families like ours, Charles and his brothers began learning about Judaism and the Old and New Testaments of the Bible while still young fans of Sesame Street. He just wasn’t yet intellectually mature enough to comfortably balance “competing” religious truths. But his teacher was even less mature. Her response was to slap him in front of the class. This was one of our first “incidents” in public school in Jacksonville, Florida.
We felt Charles needed to be corrected for talking, for not paying attention, and for thinking his religious beliefs excused him from respecting the beliefs of others. But we felt his teacher’s response was an extremely irrational and totally unacceptable reaction to a four-year-old. And since we provided a clear and written prohibition against all forms of corporal punishment at enrollment, we were stunned and angry. An added complication was the fact that Damon had been telling us for months that “the teacher hates Charles.”
Charles’s silence about what was happening in school. I pulled him onto my lap and told him that school was important, but not more important than him, and that Mommy and Daddy needed to know if anybody was ever mean to him because that was not allowed. Charles very calmly told me his teacher yelled at him a lot when I wasn’t there. When I asked him what he did, he said, “When she starts yelling at me I just suck my thumb and look for Damon because I can’t help her.” While I was amazed at his coping skills, I was also ashamed that I hadn’t been asking the right questions earlier.
I scheduled an appointment with one of the most respected child psychiatrists in town. In the spirit of full and fair disclosure, he told us he was quite familiar with the school and its excellent reputation and felt that the kind of racial bias I suspected was indeed quite rare within the ranks of professional educators. We appreciated his candor (or at least I did) and so we paid our money and proceeded with the process. Over the next several weeks he examined both boys, individually and together, observed them both in his office and at school, and spoke with their teachers and the principal. His final recommendation resonated with C specifically: “Get the boys out of that school ASAP!”
We figured if public school didn’t work, no problem, there were other options, we’d try private school. Private school appealed to us in a number of ways. The class sizes were smaller, the curriculum was more intense, the instruction seemed more focused, and the facilities were flawless. Plus, by this point we were ready to relocate back to Columbus and I felt things would be better once we left the South. But with regard to our children’s holistic development, private school was not better, just different. Here we had another set of “challenges” to add to the old ones. We still felt that Charles and Damon’s teachers weren’t sure how to react to two smart, confident black children. There were almost no other black kids—and absolutely no black teachers. The lack of black teachers was something we were able to handle. Our sons had a dad, two granddads, two uncles, a godfather, a pastor, and an assistant pastor, all strong black men, so the absence of black adult males at the school in any position other than janitorial was something we wished we could have avoided, but not a deal breaker because we could address it easily and openly with the boys. What we had a harder time with was our sense that the school was running contrary to the values we were trying to instill at home. The values issue was more complex, because social conduct and morality require personal discipline. We often felt as if the school was providing a kind of acceptable “out” facilitated by the dangerous belief that money creates more than economic privilege.
Conflicts over values aren’t racially segregated and are often insidious, so we tried to be vigilant, having learned the hard way how completely clueless we could be about what was going on with our own kids. While we adored them, we knew our “little darlings” were far from perfect. Like many bright children, Charles, Damon, and Evan weren’t always especially tolerant or understanding of kids with fewer abilities. C and I were intent on helping our kids understand that intellectual ability, or more specifically academic aptitude, is but one element of what it is to be fully human. We didn’t want them to be academic snobs, unable (or unwilling) to interact comfortably with people regardless of their educational achievement or lack thereof.
We were unprepared for the challenges those simple social values presented in school. I was surprised at how often the same little boys were not invited to birthday parties openly discussed at school, and how embarrassingly grateful their mothers were when their sons were invited to our kids’ parties. I couldn’t believe the seeming callousness of the moms of the kids having those parties. I was shocked when Charles and Damon told me their English teacher used, as they phrased it, “the D word” in class. This was one of their earliest experiences with a male teacher and they were pretty excited about this guy, as he was fairly young and presumably “cool.” Our sons were clearly confused by the obvious contradiction between what they had been taught at home and what they were hearing from a teacher. I didn’t see anything cool about a middle school teacher using profanity in class and fully expected the teacher to apologize and at least pretend to be sincere about it. Imagine my surprise when he explained that that was the way boys and men talk to one another. Now imagine his surprise when I explained that we wouldn’t accept his use of profanity in class with our sons and that if it happened again I’d let their father discuss it with him.
When their math teacher returned tests in declining grade order she too seemed surprised when I told her how upset Charles and Damon were. She felt that as each received an A they shouldn’t have been concerned; further, she felt public humiliation was a good form of motivation. We began to feel that each of these instances collectively wore down the lessons about social responsibility we were trying to teach our sons at home.
But the issues of racial diversity and our conflicting value systems weren’t our only challenges. On top of everything else, we simply couldn’t afford private school, so we were perpetually on edge and broke.
It’s one thing to be broke, to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering how you’re going to pay the tuition bill. But that moment of panic should be assuaged by the calming and self-validating knowledge that you are providing your children with the absolute best education money can buy. That awareness is supposed to lull you back into some semblance of restful slumber for the remainder of the night. Then you get up the next morning renewed and refreshed with a revitalized burst of energy to “go make that money!” But it wasn’t like that for us; when we woke up in a debt-induced cold sweat, our thoughts were gut-gnawing questions: Is this environment causing irreparable psychological harm? Are our children destined to join the ranks of successful black folks with great credentials but no sense of cultural or collective identity? How much adaptation and assimilation can occur before one loses one’s sense of identity and becomes alienated from the self? Ultimately we would drift back to fitful sleep, broke and worried about the kind of men our sons would become.
So we spent the next few years doing what lots of parents do, namely monitoring and critiquing interspersed with confrontation and appeasement, plus hour upon hour upon hour of field trips, bake sales, book fairs, classroom parties, and regular discussions about the bill. But in the final analysis, we just couldn’t make it work. In September of what turned out to be the boys’ last year in school, I hosted a picnic for all the black families. I thought it would be helpful for all our sons to have a stronger sense of collective affinity at the school. The picnic was seen as a school event—one that I hadn’t cleared with the administration—and that transgression, combined with the boys’ tuition being late (again), resulted in them being unceremoniously expelled. To be certain we understood just how serious the school was about the expulsion, we were told that if we tried to send the boys, the school would “embarrass” them.
Our parents and grandparents had the consolation of being pioneers and opening the doors of integrated education for their children. And because it was so new, certain pitfalls were inevitable and part of the challenge. But for C and me none of this was new. In fact, it was the very repetitive nature of the challenges that made them so distasteful. We were essentially going over the same ground and explaining the same kinds of things our parents and grandparents had covered decades earlier. We felt we were stagnating even as we followed the example set before us. Our parents and grandparents adapted, adjusted, and outwitted the status quo because they believed that was necessary to provide the best for their children. But finally, C and I simply lost interest in the status quo. We didn’t lose interest in the goal of providing the best for our kids; we just lost interest in the whole adaptation, adjustment, and assimilation part. After you do all that adapting and adjusting, what you’re left with, having penetrated the status quo, didn’t seem to be worth it or in the best interest of our kids. Proving we could do it, encouraging our children to rise above it, holding the moral high ground, setting an example, perfecting the “exceptional Negro” role—none of that held nearly the allure of simply doing the entire educational thing ourselves.
So after the boys were expelled, we decided that instead of continuing to critique the extant educational system, we would create our own. One of the first reading assignments we gave them was Stephen Biko’s insightful essay on black consciousness, “I Write What I Like,” even though they were just eleven and nine years old. C and I had read it years before, but it took on a new patina of urgency and encouraged us to think and talk, in very specific, concrete terms, about what kind of family we wanted to be, not just how we wanted to educate our kids. It was through this process of independent creation rather than adaptation, adjustment, or complaint that we began to make ourselves more of what we wanted to be.
That first conscious step of creating our own educational environment was helped by our nonparenting-related work. My husband and I have been self-employed for many years; in fact, I began our company in 1986 and since about 1990 we, like most entrepreneurs, basically eat what we can hunt and kill. There is no payroll check every two weeks, so we’re pretty serious about our work. And a big part of that work is demographic research in which we collect information on immigration, employment, and education trends and break it down by race, gender, and national origin. Because of our work, we were well aware that with the exception of athletics, most black boys are consistently at the bottom of every measurement standard. We also knew that that statistical fact is deemed inelastic, meaning whether the parents were married or unmarried, college educated or high school dropouts, whether the kids went to public, private, or parochial schools or whether those schools were in urban, suburban, or rural communities, none of it affected the outcome. Black boys almost always finish last.N
While I am among the first to concede that provocative assumptions, polarizing views, and conspiracy theories are ideal as conversation stimulants, especially when presented collectively, they do absolutely nothing to help craft workable solutions. C and I decided to step away from the emotional energy bound up in both theories and engage in, dare I say it, a paradigm shift. It wasn’t that we were bored with the theories of condemnation or conspiracy as much as we just couldn’t afford the time to pursue either one. We had three boys who needed to learn and we needed to find answers. We were okay with the idea that there could be multiple answers, including some as yet untried.
We decided to rationally examine education as a process and identify opportunities for what is called in manufacturing “continuous process improvement.” If you’re making cars and all the blue ones are missing the fourth wheel, the thing to do is to examine the manufacturing process. It would be absurd to assume that (a) blue cars are somehow inherently inferior or (b) the assembly line workers are consciously conspiring against blue cars. Granted, either a or b is possible, but neither is probable. What is more likely is that there is an unidentified design flaw in the process, and all available energy should be focused on the identification and eradication of that flaw; that’s process improvement. Based on this theory, C and I began to examine our educational ideal. We moved from affixing blame for the problem to identifying alternative solutions to fixing the problem itself. This was the next step in the process of homeschooling making us more of what we wanted to be. Rather than fight the power, we decided to begin flexing and exercising our own.
C and I began to question precisely what we wanted for our sons at our deepest level of analysis. Not surprisingly, this was far more challenging than pointing out what was wrong with every school the boys had attended. We knew the answers to the question of what we wanted for our sons would start us on the path of improved process design. After prayer and discussion, we came to the conclusion that we wanted Charles, Damon, and Evan to be fully committed to discovering and becoming who they were intended to be in the world. Now, as wacky and esoteric as that might sound, we knew it meant at a baseline level that they would have to come to conscious awareness of themselves as part of God’s creation.
With that admittedly esoteric hypothesis in place, we moved to the quantitative aspect of crafting a curriculum. Here we began simply with the desire to allow Charles, Damon, and Evan to have some choices when the time came to decide about their future, especially college. We figured if we developed a curriculum challenging and comprehensive enough for Ivy League admissions, they would be assured of some choices. What we didn’t want was for them to get to that point and find themselves essentially locked out of what they wanted to do because of our lack of forethought and preparation. The focus on future choices led to the relatively easy task of deciding on a core curriculum.
Ultimately, Charles and Damon attended Princeton and Evan went to Amherst. In our family the process of reentry into the arena of institutionalized education after homeschooling was intense. Fortunately, in each instance Charles, Damon, and Evan survived, strong and intact, with a clear sense of purpose in the world. So now they’re adults, but some things haven’t changed. There are some things we still know, unequivocally and beyond the shadow of a doubt. We know we love Charles, Damon, and Evan abundantly and beyond measure. We know they are each unique and fascinating people. We still aren’t concerned with the question of what they will become quantitatively, and we still aren’t interested in whether they become doctors or lawyers or engineers. We’re still interested in the qualitative, and we are delighted they have become healthy, conscious, and contributing members of the world’s community. We know we still really, truly enjoy their company. We know they deserved a holistic, well-balanced launch into the universe, and we are happy we were able to help them receive it. And as a corollary to all of the above, I can attest that homeschooling helped us become what we always wanted to be, a fully functional family, not just a bunch of people who share some genetic material.
Excerpted from One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love by Rebecca Walker. Courtesy of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA).