My son finished Driver's Ed classes yesterday. He is glad for the information and to be one step closer to legal driving. After he completes driver's training on the road with his instructor, he will be legal to drive with (for) me and his father for the next year. That's great. We are all excited. He did well.

The class was run at our local high school--which is an excellent facility. The school has a good reputation, is beautiful (even if it does "smell like suffering"), and you can't help but feel impressed walking through the halls seeing the kid's work on display. Apparently, kids in high school are learning about DNA and the exchange of ATP through mitochondria. I didn't learn about ATP until Biology 101 in college. I noticed projects indicating a deep exploration of psychology, and a wood/shop class I would love to enroll in myself. All very impressive.

The driving course was 6 weeks long, meeting four afternoons a week. During that time there were three teacher work days. The school had to communicate with me directly, four times. Three times were bungled in miscommunication on the part of the school. One of those times the miscommunication was mine, because I was flustered at being confronted by an armed guard in a school hallway.

Most homeschoolers wonder if their education is inferior  and worry about what they might be missing in school. My kids have been taunted by schooled kids: "You don't learn anything; I'm in school learning math!" On a more subtle level, there is pervasive worry surrounding homeschoolers, from parents, grandparent's, and society in general. To have carried those feelings and then take a walk through the system briefly, surrounded by all the grand impressiveness of the institution, might invoke a moment of reflection.

My son was especially worried about the final exam. I told him to try and relax before the exam and to also pause during the exam to breathe and relax. I told him he would do better if he could relax and also that the test would be much easier than he was expecting. All of which turned out to be true. How did I know? It was the first test he's ever taken. I love that the results of the first test he ever took mattered to only one person: himself. Sometimes in life we are tested and the test matters.

The instructor asked my son if he was one of those semester homeschoolers or a yearly schooler? My son didn't know the answer, which worried him. The question suggested a correct answer, the not-knowing of which implied something stupid. He told me he understood his education was his own responsibility, he could see what the school wanted him to see about the education of student's in that institution, and if he could not even say what kind of school he was in, was his school not inferior? He was worried about all of this before the exam.

After class was over, I told him the same stuff I have been saying on these blogs for years. The thing the institution does consistently well is look impressive. Schools don't really know what makes children intelligent nor how to best maximize that tendency toward intelligence. If you carefully separate every choice the school could control about what my son saw there from what actually happened to my son while enrolled, you glimpse the truth. The class was mediocre. The instructor was what we might politely call uninspired or more to the point, lazy. The information was simple, overblown, conveyed in the most boring way possible, over too much time. The exam was easy for my son. He could have read the manual and aced the exam. Most kids could. Yet, if we made a presentation of Driver's Ed and hung it in the hallway, it would look really good. Vocational and artistic training are where schools shine: theater, shop, sports. All of which are considered secondary to academic training.

Most homeschoolers tend to go through a phase in early adulthood, between 16 and 20, where they fear they aren't competitive with their peers. They step onto campus and are, perhaps, a bit staggered by the load and maybe also by the weight of the system. But by 25 most will tell you they are grateful they were homeschooled. After proving themselves, they see the institution just doesn't matter that much. There isn't anything in basic college classes you can't catch up to very quickly with a bit hard work---and you should be there for hard work. What kind of homschooler are you? A kind so apart from what is happening institutionally, there isn't a simple answer for the question. The kind whose parents emphasized neurological complexity, basic skills, and love over collections of facts on posters.