Homeschooling and Careers
My sons are 19 and 21. Technically, they are no longer being homeschooled. So why do I still hang out on a few homeschooling lists? Well,
neither one has a job and neither one is in college. They want to found their own company. Do I really belong here in the homeschooling world?
Heck if I know. But in some ways, our lives are not all that different from when we homeschooled. We still have rigorous discussions.
I am still working on teaching them some things. They still spend a lot of their time on making sure they meet their intellectual needs daily.
So I still feel more at home on homeschooling lists than in most other places.
When the USA was founded, it was a country of entrepreneurs. I believe cottage industry was the rule, not the exception. And I believe cottage
industry is important to preserving free-thinking, free-acting people in sufficient numbers as to preserve the culture and ideals this country was
founded in hopes of creating.
Some years ago, I saw a movie that made a big impression on me in that regard. The plot was that a married man with 3 kids gets contacted by a
woman he knew while he was stationed in Vietnam. She is dying of cancer and wants him to take responsibility for the teenaged son she had by
him that he never knew about. He goes to a friend and asks his friend what he would do. His friend basically tells him that he would take
care of the boy but then remarks on the fact that he owns his own company, so he can basically do whatever he wants, whereas the man asking
the question works for his father-in-law and could lose his job if he ticks of daddy's little girl.
I have always told my sons that there would be no sheepskin to help them get their foot in the door and, therefore, they had to have real skills.
I always told them "There will be no king's stamp to make the gold good, so you actually have to be golden". They have always been fine with that.
As time went on, it increasingly became clear that we were talking about making them into successful entrepreneurs rather than good little employees.
I have thought about that a fair amount over the years. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I have not succeeded (yet) at supporting myself
with some kind of entrepreneurial activity. But I did get to be a homemaker and homeschooling mom and that required many of the same qualities
that entrepreneurs have. This was brought home to me recently when I read an article about start-ups called
Be Relentlessly Resourceful.
That's a good description for what makes a successful unschooling parent. Or a successful parent of
special needs kids.
Why have I not succeeded as an entrepreneur? One reason is that addressing my health problems has taken up so much time and energy.
Another is that raising and homeschooling my special needs kids took up a lot of time and energy. But I also always wonder how much of it is
rooted in the fact that I attended public school for 13 years and now have somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 years of college. One mark of a
successful entrepreneur is that many of them don't finish college. They are too busy getting on with life to bother. (Think Bill Gates.) I have
an Associate's but can't seem to finish my Bachelor's. Part of me feels that my still unfinished Bachelor's (after 20-some-odd years) is a measure
of what a failure I am. Another part feels that it holds out hope that I might yet make it as an entrepreneur.
My kids should have a leg up in that regard. They dropped out of the 3rd and 6th grades. They have had little exposure to the culture of doing
as they are told. I hope this bodes well for their future success as entrepreneurs.
14 March 2009
|
