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Go here to see the first part of my interview with Jeanne.

Do you think you would have decided to homeschool if you had remained in your house in California?

Yes, almost certainly, although I may have dipped into schools here and there if it seemed right or useful, like for language immersion. I love the freedom of homeschool. I’m really sorry that you had a bad experience with homeschooling, as I think that is rare. I’ve known many happy and successful homeschool families and my grown niece (who is a chemical engineer who graduated early from Rice, the top university in her field, got a 6-figure job before graduating, and bought her own home while still a teen) is a very successful example, so I have confidence in the method.

I’m not convinced that your homeschooling wasn’t a benefit for you, as look how well you have turned out, although it seems some differences could have helped a lot. I can’t help but be curious as to what would happen if you had been totally homeschooled, or if you had been totally schooled, as I think mixing school and homeschooling is more difficult. I was totally schooled (public schools) as was my husband (parochial school) and we tried many schools with our child (public, private, Montessori, Waldorf, gifted). Frankly, I think homeschool is a far superior method because you can gear it uniquely to the child. I sometimes think if I had to do it all over again, that I would not do ANY schooling with my child, as even with the best and tiniest schools, there is indoctrination, dogma, conformity, compliance and rigidity.

It’s truly a myth that homeschool is not good for socialization and that schools are. The opposite is true in my experience and the many studies that I have read. I think it is unnatural to keep kids imprisoned all day, doing mostly boring, rote learning for tests, and to only socialize with kids born their same year on short recesses. I think kids should be part of the community and socialize with people of ALL ages, have plenty of free time for self development and self-led learning, and that they are much better off being parent-attached and not peer-led with a Lord of the Flies mentality. Teachers are much too busy to monitor the ugliness, name calling, brutality and viciousness that goes on in schools between kids. NO ONE will love your child like you do and loving is the key to socialization. You know I’m a big fan of the book Hold Onto Your Kids:Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers and admire the Colfax family for living off the grid and sending three homeschooled boys to Harvard.

Mozart went to an amazing private kindergarten in California on a rural, 15-acre farm with animals, orchards and gardens they used to teach hands-on; with innovative, creative teachers trained in standard teaching as well as Montessori and Waldorf methods. They had classes as pottery, archery, unicycle, plays, stilt walking and juggling, etc. I volunteered daily, but even in that wonderful school with just 6 other kids in her class and less than 50 in the whole school and very involved parents, I was amazed at how hard it was to give the kids individual attention. It was still a mass-produced, dogmatic, inflexible experience. I learned that I could do much better on my own and save a ton of money to boot! I spent one full day there a week inside the classroom helping with literacy skills and could see for myself how much easier it was to just work with my own child. Two parents to one child is MUCH better odds. I also volunteered at her excellent public school and I observed it as even worse, despite it being a small, rich school with many volunteers and an assistant in every room. The school in Spain works, because we are there strictly for the language immersion. It’s very short hours and short months, and they let us come and go as we please.

Schools are usually extremely rigid and political places (families who volunteer and add money to the school have more clout). They are not made to deal with exceptions – but every child is unique. Schools, sadly, are about learning for the test, and learning how to obey rules, not learning for learning’s sake. There are wonderful teachers out there, but most are hampered by the system and number of students. I don’t think our education system has worked for a long time and is totally not suited for the “new economy”.

When I see bright young adults who were unschooled like Ev Bogue or Eli Gerzon, or think of ones in the past like Margaret Mead, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Edison, Jane Austen, etc., I feel confident that thinking and schooling differently will be the most supportive way to educate my unique child.

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Jeanne Dee, her husband and their young daughter have been traveling the world for four years, RVing throughout Europe for most of the year and returning to Spain for some months. As such, their little girl is mainly homeschooled; they’re moving “base camp” to Asia so she can become fluent in Mandarin as she is in Spanish.

I’ve been a reader of Jeanne’s for years, loving their travel stories. But I admit that I disagreed with the concept of homeschooling. I was homeschooled until I was nine, and based on my experience, I’d never choose or recommend it. I’d been left to focus on what I liked at the expense of what I didn’t like or wasn’t introduced to, and that left an awful lot to catch up with. Obviously, my homeschooling wasn’t global, but nor was it structured or, in my opinion, done for the right reasons. So it’s with interest that I saw what homeschooling looked like when it’s done differently.

That’s why I asked Jeanne if she’d talk a bit about her daughter and their experience. She was kind enough to agree, and I’ll be posting her interview as a series, edited very slightly. I don’t know if our conversation is changing my mind, but it’s certainly opening it up, and I do agree with Jeanne that that’s always an invaluable thing.

The first thing I wanted to know was how she and her husband decided to homeschool. Here’s what she had to say.

Like most parents, we were interested in doing what was best for our child. We see parenting as a big responsibility to be taken seriously, as we think it can contribute to peace on this planet, and each child can affect generations to come. For us, loving, peace and education go together.

I have a passion for education and child-rearing – innovative, brain-research-based studies and classical ways. I think no matter what method one chooses to educate a child (public, private, homeschool, virtual, unschool, combination, etc.) it’s always the parents’ responsibility, not a responsibility to foist on others blindly. I also believe in conscious conception and prenatal psychology, and was researching these things long before even meeting my husband. He is less of a researcher, but we are pretty much on the same page.

We chose to do this even before conception. As a monolingual, I’ve always been interested in raising a bilingual or trilingual child from birth, as it’s the easiest way to learn another language, has many advantages for the brain, and I think it will be important for global citizens in the 21st century to have the advantage of knowing several languages.

A baby starts to learn language at three months in utero. Thus, we started “homeschooling” even at that point. We are big believers in attachment parenting and the continuum concept. Those 9 months are a sacred time.

I think we are still answering the question of how to do this. It is not a static question. All parents “homeschool” their children for the first 5 or 6 years, whether they realize it or not, facilitating everything from walking to talking to routines like meals and brushing teeth. Parents are the first teachers. Thus, for us, it was never just one answer, but many answers that keep evolving as our child and family evolves. It is a conscious and value-based perspective and reminds me of this quote: “Be as steady as the north star and as flexible as the wind.”

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Today we have an accidental guest blog from Karen.

“Accidental” in that she wrote me an email and I’m swiping it. With permission of course.

But seriously. Girl can write. It fits five categories at once. AND she gave links. She blogs better in one email than I have after eight years!

Hey lady,

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to it, but there’s this thing that’s been going on that made me think of you, being the social networking/new media guru.

Basically, this week, Kevin Smith (yeah, the Clerks guy) got removed from a Southwest Airlines flight because the staff assumed he was too large to fit in one seat and the flight was too full to afford him a second seat. In reality, he did fit in one seat, but that’s kind of incidental. They embarrassed him in front of a planeload of people and inconvenienced the heck out of him, and in the course of the story unfolding, he met another regular SWA flyer who was a person of size and had been treated poorly, and basically deduced that SWA treats people of size poorly as a practice.

What made me think of you was Smith’s response. As the incident unfolded, he Twittered about it. Afterwards, he blogged about it. He then recorded an episode of his podcast about it as a central place to tell his side of the story (as opposed to going on a bunch of talk shows). And then when a lot of audience who were not Kevin Smith fans, just regular people, wanted to know about it but were unwilling to listen to a 90-minute podcast about it because they are used to digesting short Internet videos, not long audio broadcasts, he made a series of YouTube videos – partially to satisfy that need, and partially because he couldn’t leave to go on talk shows because paparazzi had surrounded his house. Dissatisfied with Southwest’s response, Smith resolved in the videos that he was “not too fat to fly, but too fat to fly Southwest” and would refrain from using them, explaining he viewed them as a luxury he could no longer afford; a luxury not for the rich minority, but for the thin minority. He also released a shorter followup podcast with the woman he met who had been mistreated by SWA.

Whatever you think of him or the situation or whether or not he might be blowing the situation out of proportion or just loving to hear himself talk about himself (I don’t think he does; he keeps saying, essentially, “I don’t want to keep talking about this, it’s embarrassing to have to keep talking about how fat I am, but the story of the injustices made by SWA needs to be told”), I think it’s interesting how much social media influenced the WAY his reaction was brought to the public.

It amuses me that this occurred to me on the first day of your Social Networking Lent Blackout 2010. I guess it’s really true that you won’t be able to avoid this stuff much longer.

Seriously, I should pay her. If I was getting paid for this, anyway.

I also read about this, after her email, on the Upgrade blog, which mentioned Southwest’s own blog response. My reaction at first blush is similar to both Karen‘s and Mark‘s. Yes, obviously Southwest handled the live situation very badly. But looking at their crisis-comms response, they seem to have addressed it as adeptly as they could have from a social-media perspective. They talked to him personally and updated the interested public a couple of times, briefly and conversationally.

Whether that was enough for the fans, I don’t know (but I doubt).

Whether they would have done the same if he wasn’t famous, I don’t know (but I doubt).

But I agree most of all with Karen’s final sentence. This kind of situation is only going to become more common.

(Yes, partly I’m referring to the ever-widening (heh) crisis of obesity. But check out Jamie Oliver’s TED speech for more on that. How I love that man.)

The sea change that our culture has undergone in the last 15 years is, very simply, this: we can all now broadcast at will.

So I can reach just as many people as Kevin Smith or Southwest Airlines or the Queen of England, if (very big “if) what I have to say is worth their attention. That is the main point.

The secondary point, relevant here, is that complaints are often more interesting than success stories. This is not news to anyone in retail.

The reason this kind of situation is going to become the norm becomes obvious when you consider those two points together. Complaints don’t go into a box anymore or into a neatly typed letter. They go public at the same time that they go to the recipient of the complaint. We don’t need the Nightly News Problem Solvers. We can do it ourselves.

And companies will continue to get burned until they realize this, and shift their QA and customer service resources accordingly.

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