The (Changing?) Face of Homeschooling

It used to be that before I went to a homeschool seminar/fair, I’d feel the deep urge to don a denim jumper. 

[Off-topic: I remember one time we went to a anabaptist-ish "revival" meeting.  Even in my denim jumper (which I found out still wasn't okay---it  had embroidery on it, and it was denim, which is a masculine material, and I didn't make it myself), I royally flopped at fitting in.  They were really nice to me, though.  The other ladies had their hair up and under white coverings.   I had my long hair up in one of those black scrunchy things, and when I popped that out to rewind my hair, I thought the sweet lady I was talking to might pass out.  For her part, she gasped in an exceedingly gracious (and inadvertant) way, though I'd at least enough sense to realize that I did something REALLY wrong.  Later, when I heard their teaching tape on how a woman's hair is a sexual thing and to be reserved for a husband's eyes only, I sort of figured out where I messed up, similar to what I'd think if someone ripped off their clothes in the middle of the grocery store.  Like I said, she handled it really graciously!]. 

Though I’ve heard that homeschooling was started by secular and religous forces alike (and at one time it was a very bonded community, despite the huge differences in philosophy and practice), that tight community would later to be destroyed by a “Christian” coalition calling for all “like-minded” homeschoolers to remove themselves from the “worldly” homeschoolers (and/or kick them out of your local and state organizations) and “take back homeschooling for the Lord.” 

But I attended a (secular, though full of Christians) homeschool fair last week and noticed during the breakfast that many of the people in the room looked just like me. Yes, there were still the moms with long braided hair and dresses. But they were a welcome part of the group, not the dominant force in the group.  There were faces (dad’s, too) that represented just about every aspect of economic class, family size, and clothing styles.

And instead of talking about how great our particular curriculum choices were and how wonderfully everything was going at our home, brag, brag, brag, a lot of us had fellowship over the fact that it’s really hard to homeschool sometimes and to feel like you’re doing a good job with everything—how it’s hard not to get completely burned out (which is, actually, why a friend and I are starting a co-op next year).  It was a neat experience.