Simply Mother

So homeschooling.

Me.

Right.

Here’s the thing: I was completely, adamantly, 100% NOT going to homeschool. It was not even CLOSE to being something I wanted consider. It’s just not something I ever thought I would enjoy; patience is not a virtue I possess in great abundance, and of course, I wouldn’t want to make my kids weird. (Thanks for the link, Rachel.)

But suddenly my first baby was approaching five. And I knew traditional schooling would be so wrong for her.

• I wasn’t terribly afraid to send her away from me for a few hours a day. (She loves being with me, but she’s also plenty social, and would have loved the interaction with other kids.)
• I wasn’t worried about her behavior. She wasn’t overly rambunctious or “out of control”; I didn’t fear she would be the “difficult” student. (Though how she might be tormented internally by feeling the need to suppress all those normal 5-year-old impulses — to bounce and wiggle and make noise — was a concern.)
• I wasn’t completely horrified at what things she might pick up from other kids. (I mean, I’d certainly prefer my young children aren’t exposed to too much vulgarity or meanness, but I figured I could counteract whatever she might encounter well enough with discussion, example, and a strong relationship.)
• I wasn’t very intimidated by the anti-religion bent our schools are taking. (I wouldn’t be sending her to school to learn religion in the first place, and anything a teacher might say contrary to what she’s been taught at home would serve as an impetus to learning about other people’s ideas and beliefs, which often leads to greater understanding and appreciation for our own.)
• It wouldn’t have been an unbearable burden to have to get everybody up and dressed and fed and shuffled out the door bright and early every morning. (Though a leisurely breakfast with the family sure sets a lovely tone for the day.)

None of those factors — even all of them compounded — would have been enough to push me “over the edge” into the land of homeschooling.

Schooling the Problem

For me (actually, for Sarah — because she is who I was considering this for at the time) it was the whole concept of schooling that caused my unease.

Here I had this inquisitive, self-motivated, independent, creative, analytical little scientist, just absolutely driven to learn and explore and make meaning and figure out her world.* She had no idea that learning could be boring or dull or hard or anything of the sort. She didn’t even think of herself as “learning” at all, though that is unquestionably what she’d been doing every day, all day, for the past five years.

(*Note, I am not saying I had some kind of child prodigy on my hands or any such thing — just a regular ole’ kid, but, wow! How amazing are little kids?)

Anyway, so this is what I saw — a free and happy child, delighted to explore any and all ideas that interest her at the moment, excited about life, family, community, culture, and the world, with all its richness and beauty and complexity … And I was supposed to turn her over to an institution that would teach her that she needed to quiet down and sit still and “learn” whatever some committee had decided it was critical every five-year-old should know.

It was all so wrong for her. But we lived in this little tiny town and the one very traditional public school was the only option. No such thing as alternative charter schools or even private Montessori-type schools. Homeschooling was THE only alternative, and it was so not an alternative.

Another Philosophy of Learning

Enter John Holt. He was an educator in the 60’s who started out trying to change the exact things that disturbed me about schools and eventually realized it was hopeless — the whole system was broken — and became a prominent advocate for homeschooling (actually unschooling, as it turns out, though he mentioned not really liking that term — he would have preferred the word “living”), and wrote ten books on the subject of learning.

I read How Children Learn and Learning All the Time and several of his articles available online.

His ideas just really, really resonated with me. He described exactly what I had been watching my daughter do her whole life and made an excellent case for how it could just keep going on like that if I didn’t send her to school and have her drive, her intense enthusiasm for learning, squelched.

I know this doesn’t happen to every child, and some are more affected by all the things adults do to try to convince kids that “Learning Is Fun!” than others, but this is exactly what I was afraid of for Sarah, Miss Independent, who’s sweet personality has always whispered (okay, and sometimes shouted), “I want to do what’s right, but I want to do it because I want to do it, not because you’re making me.”

Facilitating Learning

The approach he takes toward facilitating children’s learning is just what we’d been doing up until that point: Following her lead, getting excited with her about the things she was excited about, helping when asked, involving her in our lives as much as she wanted, introducing things we thought were interesting in a non-threatening, non-coercive, and not-overbearing manner, and then staying out of her way! She was obviously thriving, learning a ton — at five she could do all the things my teacher-friend said were the “learning goals” for kindergarten — and it just felt right to continue with what we were doing.

Because John Holt explains the philosophy of child-led learning better than I can, and because I was at first very much turned off by the idea of “unschooling” when I heard about it from random people on the Internet (I kind of thought they were crazy; I even wondered if it amounted to child neglect!), I’m just going to provide a few really excellent articles for anyone who’s interest is piqued.

Great Links on Natural Learning

This is an interview with John Holt (from 1980; he died in 1985), where the basic philosophy is outlined: A Conversation With John Holt

This is not by John Holt, but it’s a great article flowing from his ideas, and he is quoted heavily: Nurturing Children’s Natural Love of Learning

Here Holt answers pretty much every question you’ve ever had about homeschooling: Common Objections

And here is a short little snippet from Holt on respecting children: The Needs and Rights of Children

In my next post, I’ll write a little about my experience with school, because that has had a huge influence on my decision; and then I’ll write up a post on exactly what it is we do all day.

Filed in: family • home education | September 30, 2009