For the past week or so I’ve been feeling more than a little stressed. Its been just the typical family stuff: money, the kids, the constant cleaning, the extra 20lbs I’m destined to never lose. So after the kids went to bed I ran some hot water in the tub, poured in my vanilla sugar bubble bath, grabbed a good book, and soaked. About five minutes into the soak and Dearest came in with a bottle of wine and a chilled glass, then went to watch TV and left me in peace. Never let it be said that he doesn’t understand the importance of a mom on the edge.
The book I grabbed to read was A Reasonable Life: Toward a Simpler, Secure, More Humane Existence
. It is one of those books that if I suddenly came into a huge sum of cash I would buy a million copies and left them on everyone’s doorstep with anote pleading them to read it. Every time I start to feel sucked into the world of prepackaged, mind numbing, convenience I read it and remember why I made the choices I did.
He talks about our cultural drive to buy more, more, more in a misguided attept to fill some empty spot. About people who think that vegetables come from cans and have never even seen fresh foods growing in the dirt. He compares his childhood, when him and the neighborhood kids would play baseball in the park with an old, chipped bat to kids today needing $100 shoes and special uniforms. He talks about how parents used to be their kid’s heros by fixing a broken toy. But not toys are made of hard plastic and if they break you just toss them out and buy a new one, and the heros have become strangers with their faces plastered all over cereal boxes and 30 second TV spots.
Last night I only got as far as the chapter on children before the wine started affecting me and my water started cooling. What he says reminds me a lot of Gatto’s 6 Lesson Schoolteacher. Maybe that is part of why I love this book so much. Gatto was one of the first things I read when E was little that set me firmly in my decision to homeschool. Especially the fourth lesson.
Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!
Or, as Mate says in A Reasonable Life
In other words, our children are not learning to think, they are simply perfecting the act of trasfering information from one piece of paper to another without putting any of themselves in between. They are not learning to form opinionsor gain experience, feel passions or even make interpretations; they rely on all the answers from outside. It is no wonder that they grow up to accept the most mind-numbing careers, and elect the most half-witted politicians, because they’re used to doing as they are told; they have taught themselves that the answers lie in someone else’s condensed view of life.
simpler life, 
children, 
society, 
John Gatto, 
Ferenc Mate
Bill O’reilly
Lesbians
wordless wednesday
in the used books for sale. It was sheer luck, or fate, that I found it. I haven’t checked out the used books down there in monthes. Not since I made off with a huge bag full of old National Geographics for E to enjoy. Yet this day, as we were leaving, I happened to glance over at the shelf and saw it standing out. 
Summerhill school
unschooling
books
homeschoolers
fun
life
funny
talking
