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Will children homeschooled during the pandemic be scarred for life?

My friend Becky O’Malley, the Berkeley Daily Planet’s editor, has asked for my thoughts on that—given my own childhood experience spending years outside a classroom.

My missionary parents took me to West Africa in 1948 when I was three—first to the Gold Coast, then to Nigeria. Until I went to a mission boarding school at 13, I did most of my learning at home—except for second and sixth grade, when we were in the United States on furlough.  

Like other children in the mission, I worked my way through the Calvert correspondence courses—excited to open new boxes of books and, starting in third grade, reading instructions for each day myself. When I needed help, Mother (who had been a teacher) paused from her office and housework to help. 

I remember that third grade year as a high point in my life. We lived on a spacious compound on the edge of the venerable city of Oyo, and I was free to roam on my own – studying the red ants under one tree and climbing up on a fallen giant trunk of another. 

On rainy days, I sat on the upstairs veranda and read comics my aunt sent me from Kentucky or nestled into a chair in my bedroom with Smiling Hill Farm, an introduction to the idea of history. I began a lifetime of piano playing under the instruction of another missionary. I helped Mother pick cucumbers in her spreading cucumber patch and loved digging in the earth and growing things. 

Meanwhile, Nigerian life flowed in and out of mine. I watched our gardener burn rubbish—and started my own fires from the embers in the early mornings from ashes he left behind. I observed the food he and our steward ate on their breaks—and sampled some myself from street sellers. 

I realize my experience with home schooling in the 1950s in West Africa was quite different from that of children learning at home during the pandemic today. I had the advantage of parents who had been teachers and who had flexible work schedules that allowed them to give me a few minutes of their day when I needed it. I had an excellent correspondence course. I was living a mix of cultures. 

And above all, I was free to roam—exploring my hospitable environment – trees to climb, warm weather, and only very occasionally a car on the compound roads. 

We moved on from that compound after my third-grade year—and only one of the places we spent time in could match that Oyo compound. My life became more bounded, and I usually lacked child companions, except for my brother. My mother observed in letters home that she could see I was lonely. Indeed, I was glad, at thirteen, to go off to boarding school with other missionary children. 

But even three years of boarding school did not prepare me for the regimentation and dullness of American high school life when I was dropped into it in 10^th grade. I felt lost in the rivers of students that flowed through the halls. 

Yet I prospered in college and in my later life, which has brought a wide range of experiences, friendship, family, love—and a lifetime of work focused on learning and teaching. I believe it was not in spite of but rather because of my early schooling experiences outside a classroom that I became, in an educational phrase du jour, a lifelong learner. 

When NPR asked a former school superintendent to comment on how educators should respond to children returning to the classroom after learning at home during the pandemic, she said something that struck a chord with me. Children "have been growing and maturing and thinking” throughout this difficult time. Some of them have lost more than a classroom: they have lost love ones. But they have also had a year’s worth of unprecedented experiences living through a pandemic. Schools need to acknowledge the complexity of their experience and their ability to respond to it—and make space in the classroom for them to share what they have learned. 

“I think,” she said, “that sometimes we underestimate the capacity of the human child.”