In support of the crazies

Over at The Independent, they're putting on a battle, an adversarial either/or. In the teacher's section (it's school vs. free school, not school vs. no school) one commentator casually dangled a morsel of bait.

Some students, however, are, in fact, kinda crazy - and cause all manner of chaos whilst in the system. ... There is: plain 'crazy'; followed by 'batshit crazy'; followed by 'home-schooled crazy'.

I have never met a student, coming from a home-schooled background, who was anything other than severely lacking in social skills, lonely, immature, barely educated, deeply unhappy, paranoid, suspicious and profoundly 'odd'.

Made me smile. I thought, Yup, you pretty much described Tiger - my home educated beautiful bonkers creation - at this stage of life right now. Not the paranoid. I wouldn't include that. We haven't yet got to where she thinks butterflies pass secret messages in wing flaps to spook her. (Hey! There's time!)

But the lack of social skills, loneliness, unhappiness, suspicions? That's a fair assessment for Tiger's plight if you judge her today.

I'll maintain though, that being crazy in this shape and form is not a result of her education. Tiger's special form of crazy comes about because she is a unique expressive person. One given extra sufferance, sure, by living life with people like us, her mama and papa: we're the sort of selfish types who seek out work and life experience and take the kids with us. We weird home educating parents lifted up our Tiger, along with her two sisters, took her away from her normal community, culture, background, friendship groups, and dropped her in Asia.

One daughter is doing quite well, thanks. She's autonomously exploring the island, learning Chinese, making incisive comments on the culture. The other has traded her hat and is considering setting up a craft stall, so she's doing something mainstream folks can call business studies.

Unlike her sisters, Tiger feels she doesn't belong. She has trouble knowing what to do in the local shops. Heck, some of the shops are people squatting at your feet with a bamboo basket busting with skinless fish. I have some sympathy. Lonely, yes, because she misses the other crazies; the home educated kids she sees back home for lessons and in playgrounds and woods. Worse, she doesn't speak Cantonese. She can't read Chinese, although she's learned the word for ladies, which by itself has a limited literary range. So she's not communicating well. You could say she's poorly equipped for this world, and even barely educated.

Is her type of crazy wrong? In my view, no. She's a person, expressing herself in the world. Like people do, like children do, sometimes because they're made that way, and sometimes as a reaction to challenging life circumstances: relocation, job change, divorce, bereavement, family stress, new contexts, culture shocks. All those circumstances can create people, large and small, who are utterly and completely bonkers by any narrow definition of normal. And if those people screw up your system - cause chaos in it - then it's your system that's wrong, not the people in it.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest it is quite a healthy experience, to be a little crazy. If we arrived here, sent Tiger to school, just like normal, where would she have expressed her fears and anxieties? Maybe not at school. She'd save the demons to let out at home. I'd have two hours to slay them all, settle her down, then wrestle her into bed to start the day again.

That doesn't sound to me as healthy a response as the day we spent today. Tiger asked me to come with her to the basketball court two minutes walk from home - the one her sisters skip to freely. She needed a parent to be there, reassure her, tell her it's OK, it's not strange, that's the expectation here, this is how things are done. She played, then came home, a little quieter, less lonely, just for an hour. The fact that she is home educated, I'd say is a positive support.

So my point in response to this commentator, is that people are wonderfully complex, nuanced, and much more interesting - crazy ones and all - than ever represented in a mainstream institution.

There, I could argue that socialisation takes a limited form. People are well adjusted to a type, succeed to a norm, hide their unhappiness, cover up their loneliness, present the education required, keep their inadequacies hidden for fear of exposure, hide safely in places where their immaturities don't show, and be always suspicious that a merciless member of staff will seize upon failure and use it for power and humiliation.

I'm coming out then in support of the crazies; the home ed crazies I hold in particular affection. I like the expressive, the strange, the outside school range.

I'm a little far gone myself, so I'll support all our rights to be crazy. To move, as we need to do with life circumstance, between states of madness, illness, sanity, health, composure, off the wall bonkers, stone cold sober. To do that means we're people, living life, and maybe not normal, not crazy, but healthy.