"We have chosen to be free and to educate our children in freedom....Those who choose freedom almost always seem to be eccentric misfits, and those who choose slavery almost always seem well adjusted by comparison.  Our freedom is always at risk, but we are its only real threat.  The smoke of idols, the clang of cymbals, the shouts of apostates din the creed that freedom is too risky, too uncomfortable, too painful to bear.  We've seen people start for freedom and then pause to consider how unreasonable a choice it was in light of what everyone around them knew to be true.  Many have choked off their lives by limiting their choices to what they could see.

For example, when we married many assumed that in order to live with dignity one had to achieve a certain annual income and a certain stability of career before having children.  The perverse message was that the young should not live, should not give life, should not take risks.  We know plenty of people who took this message to heart and waited until they had the income and the cars, the house and the second house, the savings and the career post before having children.  Many of them waited too long.  We took a different view and made a different choice.  We found that conventional wisdom was false.  Many things that people say are impossible are in fact very possible if you simply live in the present moment, deal with the challenges of that moment, and let the future wait until it becomes present.  We found that these two ways of living form two different habits of thought and life.  The practice of taking conventional wisdom to heart and always preparing for the future often means that you never really live in the present, and therefore that you never really live at all, because life is only in the present.  The future, with its fears and opportunities, is always a figment of our imaginations.  The practice of living in the present moment anchors us in reality and truth, and there is enormous power in reality and truth.  Anything is possible then...

 

We found in the course of our homeschooling that the most important part of education is a close personal relationship that folds a child in arms of love and deep respect.  This is a relationship in which the parent makes a perpetual self-gift.  It means that the parent never has a moment for herself (or himself), never ever tries to take anything just for "me."  This idea now seems as counter cultural as our attachment to freedom.  America is all about the self: self-esteem, self-sufficiency, self-improvement, self-service, self-development, self-satisfaction.

It seems to be as much about the self as it is about fear and anxiety, and the more time we have spent trying to make a gift of ourselves to our children, the clearer it seems that there is a connection between attachment to selfishness and fear.

It seems that self is something like the dragon in those pictures of Saint George--it is something hungry and dangerous and you must kill it.  You kill it every moment by small choices, little cuts from the sword of love.  T.S.Eliot wrote in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" of the artist's continual self-sacrifice, the artist's choice to annihilate his own personality in the effort to obtain something more valuable.  To be a homeschooling parent is to make a similar choice.  A child, though, is not a work of art.  A child is far more than that, so much more that there simply is no scale of comparison...

 

Parents can make it easier or harder for a child to live and choose and love.  many of our social institutions, and especially schools, make it harder to live and choose and love in freedom.  We homeschool so that our children will be able to live and choose and love, to seek the truth in freedom."

~Home Schooling A Family's Journey

Gregory and Martine Millman