It’s a stereotype that I’ve run into many times as a homeschooled graduate, that people assume I must have been sheltered. That I must never have “rubbed shoulders” with the crowds and masses, never learned “street smarts”, and never encountered people profoundly different from myself. My answer to that, is that you cannot send a young girl out into a major American city, riding the Metro bus to get to her classes, alone, and keep her sheltered. You want an education in the “masses”? Use mass transit. I could go on and on with the tales of my early adventures, but they did teach me one version of “street smarts”. I learned how to focus on a book in such a way that men would not talk to me. I learned how to pretend I could not hear crazy people shouting things at me. I learned how to talk to homeless people in a normal way, and in the process learned that they are just people. I learned that I could get about by myself. People always assumed I was older than I was, and my peers were not riding those buses with me. But this is not unusual for homeschooled kids, who are not kept in a large box with their age peers all day. The world is out there, and going out into it is the opposite of being sheltered.
In Swallows and Amazons they say “better drowned than duffers - if not duffers won’t drown”. We had to look up “duffers”, and it means incompetent or bumbling. The idea in the book is that having these adventures without adult supervision ensures that these kids will not be duffers - they will learn competence by flirting at the edge of danger. Danger is frequently part of learning, but it is something that we are so afraid of exposing our children to. Who can blame us? We love our kids and fear that harm will come to them. I’m not sure how my mother let me ride that bus - I’m sure I’d be nervous letting my kids do it. But cushions that constrict too much can be just as harmful as the bumps they were supposed to prevent.
Others who have written about danger (far better than I have):
Willa in A Spacious Place writes that All Literature is Dangerous
There is a whole new blog about this topic called Free Range Kids
And the wonderful Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning writes about Living Dangerously
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