Dorisanne

2/27/2008 8:49 PM UTC

Life isn’t always easy. Some say life is a struggle, a challenge. We often hear the saying “up a creek without a paddle.” Life can be a test, you’re either prepared or unprepared. Who we become as adults is greatly influenced by the way we are raised as children. The abilities and skills to survive and excel in this test of life are forever ingrained in us by our parents and educators. In this fast-paced ever evolving world, the prepared are able to rise to the challenges of life and fortune of success. For the unprepared, life is not so. I believe that living a sheltered life at home and home-schooling is not the best way to raise your children. I was a sheltered child at home and attended a private school. Private schools have since improved in time, with legislation to accredit the institution and greater attendance. Home-schooling, however, has been left on the back burner without much legislation to monitor it and has turned into the private schools of the past. Who is ensuring that the home-schooled children are receiving an education that will enable them to be socially acceptable? I wrote The Torments of the Modest, Secluded Farm Life with three main purposes: to show the bonds of living a pure, simple, moral life, to display of the wake-up call of entering the cruel, harsh, world, and to serve as a learning tool for our officials holding office on the subject of home-schooling and the detrimental effects of such an upbringing. My book paints a very clear picture of the closeness of families who live a protective, sheltered life going to a private school. One’s only friends are those also living under that protective blanket, or in my case, only my siblings. One is raised to believe the whole world lives this way. Individuals only speak the truth because one is taught a person is only as good as his word. It is also emphasized that everyone treats others with kindness as that is the pure moral way to live life. I give details of how my life was lived year after year. Readers will clearly see that what is instilled in a child be it right, wrong, or naive, becomes a permanent and lasting part of one’s being. No matter the direction life may take, make no mistake, one’s childhood mentally follows him throughout life, causing doubt in every move because one knows how naive he was raised and things are just not the same in the world he now must live in. Which takes me to the second reason for writing The Torments of the Modest, Secluded Farm Life: the mental trauma of having lived a protective, sheltered life and entering the cruel, dishonest, harsh world as an independent adult. One is first hit with harsh language he can not begin to understand. The lying and cruelness of how people treat each other is enough to make him want to run back under that umbrella of protection. Just think for a moment, if you were raised with no conflicts in child’s play. How does one expect you to have developed the skills needed to handle adult conflict? Do you do as you were raised and just shut up and become victims in this harsh society? Do you just run home in fear and cry? That life style creates fear and fear is a powerful thing, especially for women. An individual gets confused as to what is right and wrong in life because the world is not what he was raised to believe. He feels like there must be two different worlds and he needs to find the other kinder one as the other world scares him to the point of total disbelief. My book, The Torments of the Modest, Secluded Farm Life, shows us all as parents the need for proper transition from one world to the other that our home-schooled children need from us in order to not only grow up physically, but also mentally. A proper transition of such would save the children from an adult life of mental therapy. Finally, the third reason for writing my book is based on the fact home-schooling rules differ from state-to-state. Some states have no regulations at all, and with the No Child Left Behind law I feel that these rules contradict each other. Where the states fail our children with proper accountability of education for home-schoolers, the government needs to take notice, step in, and make a change. I had a conversation on one of the political sites on Myspace where a man said “I quit school at 16 because school was nothing but a waste of my time.” This same man said he was going to home-school his children. Can you just imagine the education his children are going to receive? And how are they going to adjust into society when they turn eighteen? Schools are all being academically measured up, but what are we going to have for these failing parents? What kind of society are we creating? In the year 2003 there were over one million children being home-schooled and various forms of unschooled. Yes, you heard me right “unschooled,” where counting eggs while picking them is math. That was 2003 and the numbers have more then doubled since that time. We as a nation need to wake up fast and take a real hard look at this area of education. Let my book in part be a wake-up call to the society being created and let us worry much less about stepping on toes and let us as a nation do what is morally right for the children in our nation. Every child deserves an equal shot to an education and for this education to allow growth, not only physically, but also mentally. Read my book, The Torments of the Modest, Secluded Farm Life, for the heads-up on the society that is being created and as a good starting point for making changes to help the children here at home in America. Thank You Doris Anne Beaulieu