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Dear verga,

Head cold - I understand. I've been sick since December 7. Three back-to-back colds. Yech. It's all my son's fault. He came home from college for Thanksgiving with a cold and I think he infected us with all those college germs, which, being COLLEGE germs are, of course, way smarter than our antibodies. ;-)

Anyway, no that wasn't really my point. Fletcher J made a broad-brush attack on homeschoolers generally in order to attack wintertime, who, I admit, deserves what comes her way. It was just a matter of turnabout-is-fairplay.

Obviously, young Mr. Lanza had something wrong with him. It's been variously reported that perhaps he had Asperger’s. As far as I know, choice of schooling method is not an underlying cause of Asperger’s. But if someone wants to talk about how inappropriate it is to ping this as Another Reason to Homeschool thread because Mr. Lanza was a homeschooler, well, heck, then it's time to have some fun with such a cretin.

I think that perhaps to folks who have never homeschooled, homeschoolers may seem defensive. It's because we are.

I can't count how often my wife and I were verbally attacked for our choice to homeschool. We had neighbors who variously: asked whether we were doing something illegal and whether we should be reported to Child Services (a chilling thing to hear when you've just moved to a new neighborhood); told that we were abusing (that's the phrase that was actually used: child abuse) our children by homeschooling them; called us traitors for not supporting the local public elementary school by refusing to sacrifice our children to the public school system (something similar to something you said in another thread recently); told that our children would grow up to be social misfits; asked whether we were part of some strange religious cult (we're just ordinary, church-going Catholics); told that we should have to be certified to teach like all the public school teachers; told that we should be carefully and regularly administered by those masters of successful education, the public school system, which fails to graduate from high school 30% of its charges; asked whether we're just too lazy to take our kids to school every day.

In my state, from time to time, legislators have introduced actual legislation to move toward criminalization of how we homeschool. Some legislators in my state have occasionally voiced the opinion that homeschooling should be illegal.

So, where we see an attack, we attack back. With just cause.

Perhaps Fletcher J thinks he's a real homeschool lover. I guess it's remotely possible, but he seems to be of the sort of homeschool “lover” like you, which is to say that you acknowledge in theory that we should be free to homeschool, and that there should be “choice,” but then when speaking about actual homeschoolers seem to only be able to focus on the few who fail.

With friends like these...

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