Crisis of Faith

I've been reading Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch. Terrific book. The main point of it is that background knowledge is key to reading and communicating with each other. It's what you bring to the table and really facilitates comprehension. It's what makes an inside joke "inside". His point is that people can not just be taught reading skills, you need literature and history and a sort of working knowledge of a bunch of different topics to be able to read well. Let's use our country's history as an example- Do you have to have read the complete federalist papers, no but should you know what they are and who wrote them and what their significance is? Yeah. Do you need to know about every battle fought in the Civil War? No. Should you know what a civil war is, that we had one and have an idea of when it occurred and who the major players were? Definitely.

My worry is that as much as I love HVSS and think that the kids are thriving there, will the inevitable gaps in their knowledge hinder them? I compare the Sudbury experience to me homeschooling them. If I were to homeschool them I would definitely have a plan and a curriculum. I wouldn't be rigid about when and how they had to learn it but I would have definite objectives in mind. At Sudbury the idea is to trust that the child will learn what they need to know. I'm not there yet.

At the same time, I am still their mom. I'm the answer girl for a lot of people. Except my dad(it's actually a family rule that we are not allowed on the same team for trivia games). So, living with me is going to expose them to a lot of stuff that they might not even hear about in regular school. Oof I know that sounds like I'm bragging but, well, I like to know things, its my hobby. The joke in our house when they ask me a question is "Do you want the long answer or the short answer?" because I am happy to expound...on anything. :) I'm also often admonished by Desmond to "please use some words that I understand" because I don't dumb down when I'm talking to kids. Unless they ask me to.

I've also thought of just tutoring them outside of school in whatever areas I think are essential. To sort of cover my bases. But is that violating the spirit of Sudbury or defeating the purpose of sending them to this type of school in the first place?

I think I'm falling prey to the "Just what the hell do they do all day there anyway?" syndrome.