Have you ever
thought about what makes homeschooling such a unique approach to
living and learning with our children? Have you ever considered
why it changes our lives in ways no other educational option can?
As we've written here many times over the years, for our family
and for thousands of others, homeschooling is more than just an
educational option; it's a completely different way of being with
children, and it's about much more than an academic definition of
learning.
Homeschooling
families are not tied to schoolish schedules and requirements.
They don't need to track school bus arrivals and departures, don't
need to plan family outings around school attendance demands, and
don't need to focus family efforts on studying a specific subject
just because it's what appears on the teacher's plan for that
week. Homeschooling families don't need to embrace the
competitive, conflict-filled atmosphere of the public school, and
their children are not subjected to the stresses and confusions
which so often lead to labelling kids and routine prescriptions
for psychoactive drugs and chemicals.
Homeschooling, as
many of us have come to know and love it, is giving our children
the time, the encouragement, and the freedom they need to examine
and explore their own interests, to develop their own confidence,
and to discover their own unique abilities to contribute to the
world around them. Homeschooling means showing our children how to
take responsibility for their own learning, and for their own
lives. Homeschooling means trying a path - and if it doesn't go
where we want it to go, taking the lessons learned and trying
another path, and maybe even another until we find what works and
what gets us and our children where we and they want to
go.
By homeschooling
our children we're changing how we all interact with the world.
We're changing our thinking and our lives in meaningful ways which
will reach beyond our lifetimes. This is no small thing we're
doing; we're changing the future from what it might have become if
we'd simply packed our children off to school each
day.
So to return to the
question, what makes homeschooling such a unique approach to
living snd learning? It's primarily the freedom, the autonomy, the
ability to make our own decisions about what is important and
worth doing in our lives and in the lives of our children.
Homeschooling means having the freedom to choose which talents and
interests we'll encourage our children to pursue. Homeschooling
means following their passions and ours wherever they may lead,
without needlessly worrying about the conventional limits and
restrictions of teaching and learning. Homeschooling means
following our own family dictates, our own individual muses, our
own wandering stars wherever they may lead us.
This freedom from
school's rules and regulations, this wonderful freedom from
schoolish routines and requirements, this important freedom from
unnecessary outside authority over our lives, distinguishes
homeschooling from conventional public schooling.
This distinction is
an important one, because as homeschooling families we are part of
a small minority that is, in a sense, in competition with one of
the largest, most powerful, and most pervasive institutions in our
society, the public school system. Designed to serve the interests
of government and big business, public schooling dismisses the
most basic needs of childhood. Public school demands performance;
it rewards those who perform well and punishes those who do not
rise to the objectives of age and grade level standards. The
expectation is to conform, to fit in, to lose the unique and
distinguishing features of oneself and become part of the larger
whole.
Homeschooling, in
contrast, encourages development of a child's own individuality
and presents a nurturing approach to learning. A child's innate
talents can be fully explored and his personal interests built
upon. Homeschooling means taking responsibility, taking care, and
taking the time to get learning right.
And yet, as the
homeschooling movement has matured and become just another widely
accepted option for educating children, many families have turned
back to the institutional schooling models for educational
resources and support. This has led us toward a gradual breaking
down of the important "wall of separation" between homeschooling
and public schooling, an invisible wall which divides family
responsibility from institutional responsibility. In part this has
happened because schools have come to be regarded as the
"keeping-places of wisdom" in our society, and their original
purpose has been largely replaced with a disingenuously benign
sheen of simply "helping children succeed."
Helping children
succeed? Success has come to mean conforming, following dictates,
observing the rules and regulations, the policies and procedures
of the institution of school. Success is defined as good
attendance records and high test scores. Homeschooling, on the
other hand, redefines success as the learner taking responsibility
for his or her own life.
There are important
differences between homeschooling and schooling under the
authority of a government-funded institution. If homeschooling is
to remain an option through which we can maintain responsibility
for our lives and our children's lives, we need to protect and
defend the right to homeschool without undue interference from
others. We need to acknowledge the differences between
homeschooling and enrolled public school options, and we need to
spread the word to others who can help us keep homeschooling as we
currently know it available to our children, and to their
children.
