Grief and Homeschooling - The Diigo Meta page

• 04 Nov 08
  

  Elena LaVictoire

  A very good article about how grief is mishandled in our society and how the natural losses of a family can really be beautifully incorporated into homeschooling. This is an excellent essay!

  grief death sadness

  •     Grief is normal and natural. If we weren’t deeply  affected by the loss of someone we loved, how much could we really have loved  them? It would be weird if we could go about our lives as if nothing had  happened. And yet to children, that’s often how it appears, because they are  separated from their families on a daily basis by school. They don’t see the  grieving that goes on while they are gone.  
  •    Contrast this with the experience of a friend of mine.  After several years of hemming and hawing over homeschooling, she finally bit  the bullet one August and pulled her 3rd and 5th grade children out of  school. Only a few weeks into their new life as homeschoolers, she received  terrible news: her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  •      Since the children were no longer enrolled in public  school, the three of them were able to fly to the eastern state where he  lived. They spent the next three months caring for him there. The children  were able to get to know their grandpa in a way that, up until then,  geographic distance had never allowed. My friend spent far more time with her  father than she had since leaving for college many years earlier. Those three  months were a tremendous blessing to all of them.

     

            Sadly, her father passed away shortly after Christmas.  Needless to say, she and her children did not “do school” that spring.  Instead, they grieved together by sharing thoughts and feelings about their  father and grandfather, and reliving the many memories they made during those  precious last three months with him.

     

            No, they di
  • do any math that year. But they learned  far more important lessons, and they learned them with their mother. Once  they become adults, they will have a tremendous advantage in that they will  know how to grieve and that it’s ok to do so. Most of the adults our grief  support group works with do not have that knowledge. They come to us  completely bewildered about what they are going through. They are in  tremendous pain, made worse because they’ve bottled up their grief,  encouraged by family and friends who are uncomfortable seeing them cry or  repeat over and over stories about the loved one they lost.
  •    While locking our children up in the artificial  environment of school prevents them from living in the real world,  homeschooling lets them live a genuine life, complete with love, laughter,  and yes, sometimes grieving. If every child learned at home, maybe someday  there would no longer be a need for grief support groups.

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