One of the lines from this beautiful poem by William Blake is the following: And the skylark sings with me. That (capitalized exactly that way) is also the title of the most beautiful book on homeschooling (or home education) that I have ever seen -- I tell people that if they can only read ONE book on education, I think they ought to read THIS one -- written by David Albert about how he and his partner homeschooled their two daughters (both adopted, and not related to each other -- so, any genius they showed was NOT genetic!!!!!), covering the period up till the girls were about ten years old. For a taste of his writing, heres an article that David sent me called Growing Out. Growing Out Our children have this nasty habit of growing up, while we fight a seemingly losing battle against growing out. Actually, the metaphoric “growing out” is likely more accurate than “growing up” in any case, as many of the kids reach their full physical height at 13 or so, even as they are beginning to reach out and embrace a world of which they still have only the barest inklings. My older daughter Aliyah, then 17, returned to South India last summer, by way of Cambodia and Thailand. She raised the funds for the trip herself. We had been there together, as many of you remember, following the tsunami, providing what little assistance we could (with the help of many of you), and reporting back through our web log (shantinik.blogspot). Aliyah continued the blog this summer, which I believe you will find a good read, as well as completing a short history of the organization with whom we are working [Land for the Tillers Freedom (LAFTI) – lafti.net )]. We had initially planned to go to celebrate publication of a book I edited - The Color of Freedom - about the life and work of the organization’s founders (which you can find on my website – skylarksings – all proceeds go to support their continuing efforts.) Sadly, the fates had other things in store for us. Also sadly, though on a much smaller scale, as the children grow out, in our case we get to see less and less of them. Honestly, I shouldn’t be allowed to complain, though I do anyway. As I tell folks, somewhat wistfully, and trying to hide my little regret, I have always wanted to raise world citizens, so I can’t complain when they’re not home. Only they are. Home is becoming a bigger place. * * * * * Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that’s got his own. My little sister Meera’s voice floats out of the living room, sounding, well, not quite like Billie Holiday, but pretty good anyway. It’s certainly a lot better than I sounded at 15, or would ever sound on that particular song. My voice teacher currently has me working on unknown Bellini arias and songs by semi-anonymous 18th-century English composers. Last September, when my Dad asked me to guest-write an article for his column, I jumped at the chance. I had just come back from a two-month trip to India, Cambodia and Thailand, and wanted to tell everyone about it. However, I am also a sophomore at Smith College, with Italian quizzes and music theory papers and operas to work on, and this article got lost in the shuffle. Now, however, I’m home for two weeks, and I ought to be able to finish this, even as my Dad demands that I help him with his Italian correspondence. So what does my trip to Asia have to do with my sister’s jazz singing? They are both expressions of a growing independence from our families and from tradition. Meera’s music, was, in fact, perhaps her version of adolescent rebellion, coming from a family of serious classical performers and composers. My travels were certainly not rebellion, (I have never been a particularly rebellious woman; stubborn, yes; but I never attempt to cause trouble to anyone else without very good reason). But all the same, they were a literal moving away from the territory which I have lived in and explored all the 17 years of my life. I spent two months in a country where I didn’t know the language, with people who, although I already loved them dearly, I had only met a few times before in my life. I spent a week in Cambodia, in a country which no one else I knew had ever visited, landing in an airport, almost a euphemism, alongside Angkor Wat. I learned numerous things while I was there, including random Tamil words and phrases (mangalam means mango), and a bit of Malayalam and Gujarati, various methods of transplanting wild water lilies to the tank behind the building where I was staying, never to drink Vimala’s sugared milk, colored brown with, tea if I could help it (I never learned how Veerasamy managed to get his tea without sugar), and not to use a pressure cooker when making soup. I met Gandhian activists, the District Collector of Nagapattinam – the town that was the center of the tsunami damage in south India, Sulak Sivaraksa, a famous Thai activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and Beth Goldring, a friend of my Dad’s from his graduate school days, now a Buddhist nun running AIDS hospices in Cambodia. I witnessed 50 houses being built (thank you for helping, fellow homsechoolers), from making bricks to plastering walls, by and for some of the poorest people in Tamil villages, in a nearly miraculous display of organization and cooperation. Although I had been to India three times before, and had been attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for more than a year, I had never really traveled abroad alone before (though I have been traveling solo within the United States for a very long time.) I wasn’t really alone, however. Aside from all of the friends and family I already had whom I had met previously, there was Lila, the LAFTI worker and community organizer who arrived from Kanyakumari “to be arrested” (she had been arrested during a protest several years before, but the police had only now decided to press charges, and she didn’t want to damage her reputation by being arrested in the district in which she worked); the college student on the train from Chennai to Thiravarur who asked me about my family and shared her jackfruit with me (which I was too polite to refuse, though I find jackfruit almost sickeningly sweet); and my uncle Bhoomi’s odd collection of international friends in Phnom Penh. It was very different traveling without my family. At large gatherings of people, I tend to stick next to my Dad and let him do the talking (he’s much better at it, and he likes talking much more than I do) but that wasn’t really an option when traveling by myself. I did make mistakes, and I became known as “Aliyah Uh-huh” to some of people at Kuthur because of a lack of communicativeness (my Tamil never did reach conversational level, though I usually knew when was going on), but I provided some amusement to the hostel boys, especially by proving myself a slower runner than almost any of them, and I quickly and completely exhausted my repertoire of songs, because they kept asking me to sing. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that I could build upon the relationships I had inherited from other people and add to them. This forming of my own personal community, separate from that of anyone else, is perhaps my most important task of the past two years. I have learned that I am capable of doing well in challenging situations, and that I can make my own new connections. I went to see my grandparents and found out that I had grown up. Or grown out. * * * * * David has also written another book called Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow. Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love. You can visit his website skylarksings, or write to him at [email protected]
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:45:05 +0000
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