play date

A friend who has a two-year old has been inviting me to the play dates she organizes. I went to the second one today, conveniently happening at a playground right by my house. Most of the children that come are around two, but moms with babies show up too. It's nice to talk about baby and mom stuff, to compare notes, and to watch the older kids run around, tumble, go down the slide, and fight over snacks.

I like to imagine Jonah in the future... as a two-year old, as a six-year old, as a teenager... I wonder what kind of a person he will be, I wonder if he will speak or at least understand Czech, I am curious about what his talents will be, how he will interact with us, his parents, other kids...

School. Another friend with a little boy told me all about the preschool her child attends. That he loves it. The children there go to watch and feed chickens, they grow vegetables and flowers in a garden, they make food... and he loves it. That sounds like a good place to be, though I can't imagine my son in school yet. Do I even want my son in school or do I want to homeschool with other parents who are like-minded and homeschool? All those questions are still open to debate. I definitely don't want my son to go to school just to be babysat. I want him to be enriched by the experience and not traumatized like many children are by institutions. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of great early education options for children. The older they get, the slimmer the choices.

I've been in institutions most of my life. Nearly 19 years of schooling including kindergarten. That's well over half my life. That's almost two thirds of my life, in fact. Wow! What would life have been like had I learned from my neighbors, artists and other professionals, had I spent more time in nature and out in the world, and less behind a desk quietly and obediently completing assignments, at least half of which served just to pass the time? What if my learning had been steered by my own interests, desires, and curiosity like it was after school when I played with friends or alone? Those are the times I remember most. School days mostly blend into one long blur. But I remember the times I went roaming the fields or the woods with friends or with my sister. I remember buidling cities or houses for my dolls, I remember setting up a make-shift store and selling whatever we could find to people passing by. I recall preparing and performing plays for adults and charging admission, organizing an international children's day celebration for the kids in the neighborhood, learning and playing songs on the guitar while singing along, reading, drawing, writing poems, stories, and even a young adult novel which I never finished... Life outside of school kept me busy, it was what I looked forward to. It's when I learned the most. So I wonder, if the opportunities for learning abound in the world about, is school really necessary?