Raising Dragonslayers

In case it's not clear at first glance what is going on in this picture, this was taken during an interrupted dragon battle a month or so ago in my front yard. Dragons have long been the scourge of our neighborhood, hoarding gold, burning crops, eating livestock, etc. Fortunately for the Leawood district of Littleton, these two fierce youths moved into the neighborhood and have been fastidiously hunting down the local dragons, ministering the cold justice of forged steel to their scaly hides. Again, though it seems perfectly clear to any keen observer of dragon warfare, the weapons my children are wielding are as follows:

1) In my son's left hand is a sword for, and I quote, "stabbing into the dragon's flanks."
2) In my son's right hand is a dagger which some fools may dismiss as an inappropriate weapon for combat with a large, fire-breathing beast. Au contraire, the dagger is for stabbing the dragon's eyes. Furthermore, the dagger is a more fitting tool for this task than the sword, because "I can be more precise with a dagger." 
3) The black rope in my daughter's hand is so very clearly a whip that it barely merits mention, except to say that the purpose of the whip is to keep the dragon at bay while my son goes in with the dagger. 
4) The curved piece of wood in my daughter's hand is a bow for engaging the dragon from a distance while my son runs in with the sword for a good flank stab.

Do you even need to ask if they killed the dragon? With such tools at their disposal and a strategy worthy of Sun Tzu combined with the iron will evinced by their determined looks, how could they possibly have lost?

I came home to this scene after a day of work, a day spent thinking about how to educate the students put under my charge. As most of you know, we homeschool our kids. They spend their days at home with the exception of Thursday when they go to a homeschool group for science projects, music lessons, and group play with other kids. They know Latin declensions, can recite a 14 minute long timeline of world history, can skip-count up through the 15s, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology (we're about to start in on the Norse and Celtic myths), use metaphors in everyday speech, and regularly throw out such words as "cumulonimbus," "precise," "antagonize," and "articulate." 

And this knowledge accumulation is important to me. I trust that down the road it will help them to be wise. I wish more of the students that I teach had received this type of training in their youth.

But that's not precisely why we homeschool. 

People obviously have all of these preconceptions about what homeschooling is (usually how bad it is for the kids) and assume that the reason we are doing it is to shelter our children from the world. And to be quite honest, that is part of the reason. This world sucks. I am not scared of it, but I am cautious of the dangers it has for my children. I don't want to expose them to its worst features because some people think it's wrong to "shelter" your kids. Those people are free to do what they want with their own children, and I frankly don't give a tinker's damn what they want me to do with my little charges.

As to the concern of whether or not kids will socialize, I can't help but ask: "Why in the flip would I want them to socialize to their peer groups?" Just to use a small sample size, my son is playing soccer this fall with a cohort of five year olds from our wealthy suburb. Of his five teammates, I have heard three of them swearing, calling other kids mean names, and shoving people to the ground for no apparent reason. Again, they're five. And any notion that we can dismiss this because "boys will be boys" or "they're just kids" is an attitude that enables the sort of culture that creates five year olds like that (and also, incidentally, allows people like Donald Trump to exist). I don't want my son and daughter (and son on the way) to be "just kids." I do not understand why I would have to accept that.

The more positive reason that we homeschool is because I want my kids to be wild. I want them to slay dragons in my yard so that they can grow up and slay dragons in this world. Metaphorically, of course. Everyone knows the great knights already rid the world of real dragons. I want Owen to pull the (real) sword I bought for him in Kenya out of its sheath and freak out his grandma; I want him to polish it in the morning because Arthur polished Excalibur. I want him to be courageous and full of virtue. Say what you will for our contemporary system of education, but those two qualities are decidedly not the goal.

I am not interested in merely training the minds of my kids at home. I am interested in training their affections. I want them to not only know the Good but love it. We homeschool because I am convinced this process can take place best within the home.

We live in a culture bereft of wildness. And I want my kids to be wild. I don't want their noses buried in iPads even if they are playing "educational" games. I want their noses buried in books, bringing to life the stories they read through their imagination and not through passive sensory receptors. I don't want their minds shaped by movies and television shows, again even the ones that claim to be educational, and oh dear God especially not Veggie Tales. I want their minds shaped by the written word and by conversation with people smarter than them. I want them to build things and use their hands and pursue their passions.

I want to come home and find, as I did today, that my son has made himself a pair of missile shooters for each arm (toilet paper roll and construction paper for the strap, obvs) and that he colored a picture for his best friend using every different marker color and that he read the story of Beowulf and that he makes jokes out of mispronouncing names of Greek deities (he does it in all reverence, Hephaestus) and that my daughter has her history timeline memorized up through St. Augustine and can sing along with her terrible enunciation to dozens of hymns. 

I want other adults speaking into their lives and taking on key roles, but I want the number one influence to be my wife and me for as long as possible. Because no one will love our kids like we do. Ever. It is a sacred duty and an ineffable privilege. It is a limited period in which I can exert this influence. I will not squander it. To make a reference to Hamilton and a line that Elle runs around the house exclaiming, "I am not throwing away my shot." 

This gift is precious. And needed. This world is full of dragons. But it is perilously short on dragonslayers.