Yesterday, I wrote (here) a little bit about how Kelly and Christian learned how to read. Luke from the Sonlight and Homeschooling blog made a comment about the success of the reading dogs program in getting shy children to read. That made me think of a couple of special advantages my family enjoyed when it came to education. The first and maybe the greatest was the gift of a love for education that probably started with our grandmother, Grandma Sarah’s mom. Ida Jenkins was a small woman, the daughter of very poor Finnish immigrants who spoke only Finnish for the first eight years of her life. She had to wait until she was eight years old so her younger brother was old enough to go to school with her as they had to row a rowboat five miles each direction across Tenmile Lake and their parents did not want them to go alone. She taught third grade at Harrison Elementary School after having gotten a teaching certificate from Oregon Normal School. I think she must have gotten the certificate some time in the 1930’s. She admonished and advocated for my siblings and I while we attended school at Harrison for our early elementary years.
Grandma valued education greatly and instilled that love in our mother who graduated from Oregon State University in 1952 with a bachelors degree in pharmacy. She and another woman were one of only two women in their class, the second and third women to ever graduate as pharmacists from Oregon State. The competition for grades was fierce in those years as many of the students were veterans of the World War II and the Korean War, serious about getting a later than usual college education so they could on with life and support their already growing families. Grandma J. and our kid’s Grandma Sarah were passionate about education. Grandma Sarah gets genuinely excited about people who finish their college well. That excitement has been an encouragement in all my educational endeavors. I truly want to pass the gift of that excitement along to my children.
The second advantage we enjoyed was that we did not have a television in the house when we were growing up. The motivation for our not having a television when we were children was mostly religious. Almost no one in our church had a television. We were slightly embarrassed about that and tried to make up for it by reading as much as possible so we could talk about the things the other kids saw on television. I guess the thinking was that if we read the book, we could at least sound like we might have seen the movie. It did not work so well with the weekly television programs. I well remember the first family in our neighborhood who got a color television set and the excitement around the school centered around the first full color episode of Bonanza. We kind of got stuck on the outside looking in. What we did not realize is that, even in those days when television programming was a lot more wholesome than it is today, the fact that we did not have a television gave us a huge academic advantage. I think the greatest benefit for us kids was that it gave us a whole lot more time to read, play, do projects, and engage with other people than those kids whose parents let them watch a lot of TV.
It is kind of funny. Now, when I tell people we do not have a television a typical response is, “Good on ya!” Even the kids are proud to not have a television. Still, we try to find appropriate ways to enage with video and television so the kids are not completely divorced from popular culture. Now, though, when secular and materialistic worldviews, bad morals, and other negative influences are added to the waste of time, we make a big effort to manage their use of those media. I think that not having a television in the house is still a huge academic advantage. Now we just need to figure out what to do about the internet.
