When I was in elementary school, I read an article about the Robinson family in Mary Pride’s Practical Homeschooling.
The Robinson story fascinated me. Lots of kids left without a mother, end up essentially “homeschooling themselves” with classic books.
I was always about being self-taught, thought that was the most wonderful thing. I wished I could be the Robinsons (without the mother being dead, of course).
Of course, even though my family wasn’t using the Robinson curriculum, I could still be really smart and self-taught. I wouldn’t be surprised if that article wasn’t partly responsible for my decision to read Plato’s Republic in sixth grade.
But there was one part of the story that I envied intensely and had no way of replicating myself. Mr. Robinson, a Ph.D., wrote of how he’d have other Ph.D’s over to dinner, where his children would listen to the technical and intellectual conversation, seeing how bright minds are always asking questions of the world.
Oh how I longed for a Ph.D. around our table, spurring my mind to ask big questions.
Fast forward twenty years. I’m sitting around the table with my husband and his parents. Daniel asks his mom if she still has those CDs from the Robinsons.
“Rebekah would like to homeschool our kids someday,” he said, “and I think she might find them interesting.”
And my mother-in-law begins telling the story of when a Mr. Robinson was visiting the institution where my father-in-law was doing his post-doctoral work. Mr. Robinson was a widower and he homeschooled his children, so he’d brought his whole family along.
The Robinson family came over and had dinner with the Garcias, where the children notably refused brownies and ice cream, on the grounds that sugar was bad for them. They’d told of hiding their father’s sweet stash from him – not because they wanted it for themselves but because they knew it was bad for him.
At the end of that visit, Mr. Robinson gave my mother-in-law a copy of their family’s homeschool curriculum on several dozen CD-roms.
Yes, the Ph.D. dinners I’d so longed for as a child? They were a reality for my husband.
I never got a Ph.D. dinner growing up, but my children will. Every time they go to visit their grandpa, my children can have dinner with one of those same Ph.D.s the Robinson children had dinner with.
That’s pretty awesome!