The View from the End of the Road—Slow Down

Graduate 2023, by Whitney Cranford Crowell

Almost weekly, I talk to a panicked mom of a very young child—not old enough to tie his shoes, sometimes not even potty-trained. She’s new to homeschooling, or she’s been planning it since the day she saw the double pink line, or she thinks she might want to try it sometime in the future, possibly—yeah—definitely, okay, maybe.

She looks at that cherubic little face and sees nothing but potential. (She’s still in that honeymoon phase of motherhood before the B.O. and bad attitudes and midnight breakdowns have made her jaded.) “He’s so smart!” she gushes. Or, “She just amazes me!” And then, almost without fail: “I know he (she) could do it if she’d (he’d) just sit still!”

It’s not just the parents of preschoolers. There’s the mom of the sixth-grader who’s scrambling to get her twelve-year-old started on college classes. The dad who’s pushing his son to graduate high school before he can legally drive. The kid in the newspaper who passed the bar but can’t buy a beer. Homeschoolers do a great job of stripping the inefficiencies out of the education system and capitalizing on the impact that individualized attention can have on a child’s progress.

And sometimes—sometimes—those are just the right paths for those very particular kids. As an advocate for parent-led education, I’d never presume to make that decision for someone else’s family. But the more trips I make around the sun, the more I realize how much quicker those trips seem to get with every revolution.

I had that precocious kid. The one who figured out multiplication on her own at four. The one who read Stevenson at nine and Dickens at eleven. The one who studied topics like astrophysics for fun. The one who soaked up knowledge so voraciously that I couldn’t have slowed her down if I tried. I am intimately familiar with the impulse to rush her out of the nest to see just how fast and far she could fly.

That child graduates from my homeschool in seventy-two days. By the time you read this, she may very well be gone.

So these days, I am compelled to ask those families who are always looking ahead but seldom looking around: What’s the rush?

Giving your child room to soar doesn’t have to mean traveling at warp speed. The Concorde gets to Paris in three hours, but the hang glider gets to enjoy the view. Education is a process, not an endpoint—there’s no prize for finishing early, unless you count rent and utility bills. Adulthood is long, but the years our children have to spend in quiet contemplation, simple pleasures, and innocence are so very short.

The transition happened gradually, but somewhere around middle school, I’d made the decision to throw all of my energy not into rushing my daughter headlong into the world—though she very easily could have done so and been just fine—but into intentionally slowing down. I came to appreciate education not as the checking of a series of career-and college-ready boxes but as the formation of a full human person. I cultivated an educational experience that valued drinking deep instead of skimming off the top. I took advantage of her natural talents and interests and developed coursework that challenged her to spend hours in thought, examining ideas from new and different angles and solving problems. I can’t guarantee that she will ever have those opportunities again—not in college and certainly not in the workforce—so I promised myself that she would have them while she could.

And yes, if you’re wondering, I managed to do it while also ensuring that we still checked all the boxes for college admissions—nine of them, to be exact, from a wide range of institutions. It turned out that when I stopped treating education like a series of hoops to jump through and facts to download into my child’s brain and started focusing on her formation as a scholar and a person, all of those little skills fell into place too.

Last night, while discussing plans to book a hotel for the family to stay in this August while we move our daughter into her dorm, I was reading to my husband from the university website: “Once your vehicles are unloaded, our staff will direct you to park all vehicles in the designated parking area,” I intoned. “Depending on proximity to the building, shuttles are provided to bring you back to the building. Meet up at the resident’s room and—”

I fully intended to complete the sentence: “—let the unpacking begin!” I really did. Instead, I burst into tears.

I didn’t even see it coming. I wasn’t choked up or sad or feeling the least bit nostalgic. Remember when you were drunk on a cocktail of pregnancy hormones and lost it without warning because you dropped a sock and couldn’t pick it up?

Yeah, it was like that.

I’m not a sentimental person. But believe me when I tell you that the end of the road comes out of nowhere, no matter how well you’ve anticipated it. Don’t purposefully hasten its arrival. Don’t wish away the precious years you’ve been given.

Don’t get me wrong. To borrow from Freddy Mercury: “And bad mistakes…I’ve made a few.” Maybe someday I’ll tell you about them. But right now, looking back down the road of our homeschooling journey, I want to celebrate the one thing we got very, very right. And to encourage you, too, to slow down and enjoy the view because it all looks different from the end of the road.

Whitney Cranford Crowell knew she’d reached peak homeschooling when she bought a custom nine-foot by six-foot bookcase with matching ladder and still didn’t have room for all the books. She lives in her childhood home outside High Point with her husband of twenty-two years, their seventeen-year-old daughter, and their twelve-year-old son. She can be reached at whitneycrowell@gmail.com.