APROPOS of the discussion here on homeschooling, I recommend this essay by William C. Michael, director of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy for homeschoolers. He writes:

Working in education and being a father of 5 young boys, I face the same questions any time someone learns that I live on a farm and teach my own children at home:

“Do your kids play video games?”

“Do your kids watch TV?”

“Do you kids play sports?”

My answer: “No, they don’t.”

While that may be shocking to American adults, what is really shocking is the fact that these three activities have somehow become the tests of “normal” childhood. I don’t believe these activities can be considered normal at all.

It is safe to say that children have roamed the earth about as long as men and women have. If you’re an evolutionist, that would mean, oh, several million years. I’m not an evolutionist, so I’d prefer to think that children have been around for closer to 6,000 years. If they’ve been around longer than that, we don’t know anything about them anyway, so it wouldn’t matter, and it won’t matter much for this article. Now, if we can agree that children have been around for at least 6,000 years, wouldn’t the “normal” childhood experiences be at least a few thousand years old? [cont.]

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