I felt hopeful when I saw the blog post “How Common Core is Slowly Changing My Child” shared on Facebook. It was shared by a teacher which I thought was even more exciting.

But then I read it and when I came to this sentence I realized that the writer doesn’t even know what the real issue is.

The writer of the blog mrsmomblog states “No, those teachers need to  instill a love of school so when children get to our middle and high schools they are not burnt out.”

I recently started leading a Homeschool 101 group with our local homeschooling co-op.  While our support group has always offered a round table about this, it was usually just once or twice a year and it seemed to me that not just new homeschooling families were needing support but so were the ones that have been doing it for 5 or even 10 years.

So when our support group’s co-op classes started back up, my friend and I started a Homeschool 101 “class” that would meet each week while the elementary age classes were meeting.  I hoped it would be a place where people could come and ask questions like these:

“My daughter is just 4 but she already knows how to read, what can I do for Kindergarten curriculum?”

“I have a 2nd grader who loves airplanes but won’t focus on Math for two minutes, what does everyone else do in that situation?”

“How do you get all the laundry done and teach at the same time?”

You know…practical questions…

What has come up just as often are heart-wrenching discussions about suffering children.

“My daughter was lost, she didn’t understand why she was so different, a year after pulling her out of public school we are still working to unravel the harmful effects.”

“I have no support outside this room, my family doesn’t get why I want to homeschool.”

“I hate that it took so many years for me to get up the courage to start to homeschool.”

“My son is being bullied but I just don’t know if I can pull him out of school right now.”

What the writer said in her post about getting teachers “to instill a love of school” is way off base. 

Peter Gray, the author of Free to Learn writes “Children are pawns in a competitive game in which the adults around them are trying to squeeze the highest possible scores out of them on standardized tests.” (p. 9)

Who can “love” an institution who does not see or care about them as the individual people they are?

No child wants to be used as a pawn. No human wants to be.