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.
  • 3 more annotations...

  • •      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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