One of the subjects dearest to my heart is education. Funny to hear that coming from the mouth of a college drop-out, but it's true. If you want to engage me in a heated debate, start theorizing about our educational system.

Personally, there are times I feel I was missing out by never attending public school. As with most life-long privatized school beings, I started feeling the "itch" at the end of eighth grade when faced with the reality that after the summer, most of my friends would be entering the lovely socially diverse and wonderful sphere of public high school, while I'd be left with the whities, practicing the PSAT at a school with no wrestling team or cheerleaders, and only eight black people in my class. I am grateful for my education, however flawed it may have been, but there are times I wish I could go back and do things differently.

Over the last three or so years, I've come to the conclusion that I would have been a good candidate for homeschool. Both my parents worked so there was no way this could happen, but in a perfect world, I think this would have been my preferred method of learning. I have never been an enthusiastic classroom student. When it came to formalized education, I was a devout dualist. I treated school like a job. Teachers were the boss, my classmates, they were my associates and co-workers with whom I cracked jokes during the day but rarely spoke to or saw in the night, and who by the weekend, were merely figments of my imagination. I excelled in the arts and all the humanities (history, philosophy, social studies, religion) except English (go figure). Perhaps that could be the cause of my distaste for the classics. Since I've never been too fond of the three-part essay, most of my English teachers hated my writing, and I mean HATED. As for the mathematics and sciences, well, let's just say medical school has never once been even a faint consideration. It wasn't grades, but my love of knowledge and learning that was the driving motivation for me to think independently. High school was pretty boring for me and college was too. A more independent approach to learning would have probably worked well for me.

Homeschool advocates can be pretty diehard. Opposition to institutionalized education seems pretty futile to me. At this point, we've got to make something of our current schooling process. These days people have lots of philosophies about the classroom. Some good, others downright sac-religious. It's commonly known that studies show in secondary education, girls learn better in a less-competitive, all-female environment. I mostly agree, although being a black woman in a predominately white environment tends to be a bit different so this didn't really apply to me as I was rarely intimidated by the guys in my classes. Translate the same philosophy of female-dominated learning to higher education, and nowadays you get extreme feminism and lesbianism (I kid you not). The 2003 film Mona Lisa, Smile touched on this, although they barely treaded water in their plot. Your modern day, all-female institution of higher learning is no longer the place of "grooming" and "intellectualism" Radcliffe used to be. The halls of prestigious schools like Bryn Mawr, Mills, Scripps, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley (which produced none other than Senator Clinton herself), are steeped with man-hating, self-sufficient, feminist philosophies and liberal ideologies. I'd be kidding myself if I didn't admit that everyone in the "Seven Sisters" schools as we called them knows that they're churning out more lesbians than the film industry. There's a reason for that, but I digress.