More Decisions – How? Choices (Part 5)
Categories: Choices, Léo’s Insights 2022-2023
Now that you have decided to home educate and a sponsoring school has been chosen, there remain yet more decisions to be made.
I remember when my wife and I first determined to bring our children home for their “schooling”. Though we knew the school system was not meeting our children’s needs, we brought the school home and tried to make it fit our children. This did not go so well for us. Why could we not see that bringing home a broken system, only brought a broken system home? It was not fixed by having a new venue or application. An example I often use is, when a broken vehicle is dragged home, it remains broken. The same can be said of schools.
Not only were we brainwashed with school ideology like most everyone else, but since both my wife and I were trained as school teachers we were even bigger believers in schools knowing where, how, when and what we should be teaching our children. We had it so bad, we even entertained creating report cards in early November of our first year, until we came to our senses and realized we would be reporting to ourselves. This was probably the beginning of the unravelling of our school-based thinking and transitioning to become unschoolers.
Unlike you fine folks reading this blog, there was precious little information for home education, much less for leaving school out of the home when we embarked on our journey, long ago. In fact, the internet was very much in its infancy, with no googles to help us out. Today, there is likely more than enough to put you into information overload.
The biggest decision you will have to make, now that you have determined to do the job of teaching your children, will be whether or not you have the courage to step away from the status quo education system. Your success at this new venture will be directly related to how much “school thinking” you will entertain. Home education is far less likely to fail if school is left at school and learning becomes more natural, dynamic, or, to use a modern misnomer, “organic”.
It should not be difficult to understand that if “school” fails to work at school it will also fail at home. Parents who try to make school work at home are more likely to get frustrated and start believing school could do a better job if the children were in fact in school. This is true, but returning to what didn’t work is not the solution.
The decision to home educate must be accompanied with a decision to leave school at school and do something different at home. In essence, this is what is meant by unschooling. It is simply a determination to not do what schools do, perhaps even to do what schools don’t do and simply learn and grow together as a family. This is natural learning in the environment created by God for children, namely the family. This should answer the “how’s” of home education.
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