Home Education Magazine

March-April 1997 - Articles

Mary Griffith joined the Northern California Homeschool Association (now HomeSchool Association of California) in 1988, and was editor of their NCHA News (now California HomeSchooler) from June 1991 to April 1994. She served on the NCHA/HSC board 1991-1994, and is now back on the board for a two-year term . She also temporarily (for no more than a year) started editing California Homeschooler again with the January/February, 1997 issue.

Mary wrote & published a booklet titled The Homeschooling Image: Public Relations Basics, based on the Homeschooling Information Clearinghouse Spotlight newsletter she published from 1994 to 1995. She wrote her new book, The Homeschooling Handbook, with the help of homeschoolers around the country who voluntarily told her all about how and why they homeschool. She is currently beginning work on an unschooling book.

Mary and her husband, Dave Griffith, a physicist working as a software engineer for a company that makes physics education apparatus, have two daughters: Kate, 12, and Christie, 8. Mary writes that they are "Confirmed unschoolers all the way."

Mary describes herself as a compulsive reader (always with too few bookshelves) who loves chocolate and good bagels (although not together). She adds "I'm learning to play the guitar badly, and I plan one day to get a loom of my own and get serious about weaving instead of fiddling around with little fiber projects now and then."

This interview with Mary was conducted via email and edited by Helen Hegener.

Tell us about your new book, Mary, how you found a publisher, your goals for the book, where you found the contributors, etc.

It's actually kind of funny how the book came about. A few of us involved with HSC had had it in the back of our minds to eventually do some kind of a basic, introductory book about homeschooling, but we'd never done more than fantasize about it. Then while I was producing my Spotlight newsletter, Prima Publishing was looking into the possibility of producing curricular materials for the homeschool market and called me, just for information about homeschoolers and the kinds of resources we look for. I sent them a bunch of stuff - copies of HEM and GWS, old California HomeSchoolers, just general information - to give them some ideas. A few weeks later, they called again, saying they'd decided there was a market for a trade book on homeschooling, and asked whether I'd be interested in writing one. I'd always thought finding a publisher would be the hardest part of doing a homeschooling book, but that turned out to be the easiest, much to my surprise.

My goal with the book was to come up with something that answers all - or at least most - of the questions families have about homeschooling when they're first getting started. I kept asking myself, "What would I have liked to have known during that first year?"

The really fun part was hearing from all the other homeschoolers who helped. I wanted to make sure I covered the whole range of approaches people take, so I sent out a questionnaire to homeschooling friends from Sacramento and California and to others I knew all over the country from AOL forums and Internet mailing lists on homeschooling. I ended up with about two dozen responses I used throughout the book - opinions on everything from why they homeschool to dealing with support groups to finding and using learning resources, all sorts of ideas to give a glimpse of the variety of possiblities with homeschooling. It's the one thing about the homeschooling community I've always enjoyed most - how generous people are about sharing ideas, how willing they are to help new homeschoolers who are just starting to find their way.

When you first learned about homeschooling did it seem like something you immediately wanted to do, or did you need convincing? What were your perceptions of homeschooling at the time? Was it just another alternative to school, or something more? Can you tell us how those perceptions may have changed over time?

I happened across Holt's Teach Your Own before Kate was a year old, and it hit me instantly that homeschooling - unschooling, specifically - was what we would do. Out loud, I was terribly rational about it all - I told my family that we were "considering" homeschooling, as though we were just casually looking into the idea, but even though I worried about some of the details now and then, there was never any doubt in my mind that we would do it.

Partly it's a reaction to my own experience: I was an excellent student who attended good schools, got good grades, excellent test scores, scholarship offers, all that sort of thing. I was the epitome of what most people would call a success in school, and it took me at least ten years to recover from it. Once I was out of college, I had to practically start from scratch to learn how to really learn, to ask questions, to evaluate ideas, to think for myself. There was just no way I was going to make my kids waste all that time and energy on school like I did.

I'm probably like most in starting out reacting to something about school and later finding that homeschooling is a great deal more than just an alternative educational approach. It's an insidious and subversive process, the way it starts affecting other areas of your life, making you question your assumptions and really think about what you do and how and why. Jill Boone, who's in the book, puts it well - she says it becomes a way of life that doesn't end when the kids leave home. I think that's a very hopeful idea.

Mary, as an author and a newsletter editor you undoubtedly talk with lots of homeschoolers. Do you see any broadly definable trends in homeschooling today, like more families opting for a favorable relationship with their local public school (maybe wanting to use ancillary services like band or sports), or perhaps more families whose children have never been to school - or both?

Oh, both, definitely. The basic trend is that there are just more homeschoolers, period. So, of course, there are more who'd like to use public school services of various kinds and there are more who've never been to school and never intend to go. I get a bit testy about some of the more experienced homeschoolers who complain about all the new homeschoolers who "aren't like we were" and worry that they're somehow ruining the homeschooling movement. I'm not going to fault anyone just getting started for not having as much experience or information as I do after seven years of homeschooling - I'm going to share the information I have and make sure they become aware of the whole range of possibilities open to them. Beyond that, we have to let people make their own choices.

There are a lot of weighty social issues facing homeschoolers (and all parents) these days as part of Goals 2000 and similar programs: business interests influencing education, a push for reliance on educational goals and standards, school-to-work programs. Can you talk about a few of these - which ones concern you the most, and why, and what we as homeschooling parents can do?

I don't feel terribly threatened by specific programs like Goals 2000 and School-to-Work - the school system has a remarkable capacity to assimilate and neutralize reform efforts.

Certainly they bear watching, though. I think they will ultimately prove futile because they're solutions aimed at the wrong problems, but the attempts to implement them will cause a lot of unnecessary damage.

Most of this comes from business, which is not at all new, of course. Much of the impetus behind the common school movement in the nineteenth century was industry looking for factory workers who would be punctual, obedient, and tolerant of boring, repetitious work. It's amazing - if you read criticisms of schools from the turn of the century, lots of it is exactly what you hear today: kids know less than they used to, standards have declined, morals are nonexistent, and so on. Business keeps asking for the same reforms and keeps getting the same lack of results. I'd dearly love to hear people talk about education as good for something besides getting a good job and "making America competitive again." If we actually valued children and learning for themselves, we might see some real change.

But I think a lot of homeschoolers get into this fear-based mindset and see threats in proposals that won't go anywhere anyway. It's almost as though they feel there's something abnormal or odd about the fact that they homeschool, and they overcompensate by getting defensive. Our best defense is to be open and upfront - instead of talking about how there's nothing wrong with homeschooling, we should be talking about all the ideas homeschoolers have to offer traditional educators, ideas which could vastly improve schools for that ninety percent of American kids who are and will continue to be schoolkids.

Mary, what do you consider the most important skills we as parents can instill in our children to help them face an increasingly complex world?

Curiosity. Tenacity. And a killer sense of humor.

The homeschooled teens I've met at our California conferences are terrific examples of this. They're eager and curious and capable - they ask questions, and jump into things, and ask more questions. They're the kind of people who aren't afraid of the unfamiliar, who dig into finding out what's what, who are willing to work hard to do what they think needs doing. They're people I'm going to like having around for the next few decades - I expect really interesting things from them.

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