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Your Letters
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Educating someone should be like lighting a fire, not filling a bucket! And my children have certainly lit a fire under me! There is a deeply entrenched prejudice in "civilised" society that we do our children a great service by sending them to school to educate them. Not only do our children miss out so much because of this blinkered and shortsighted attitude but so do we.
Quidditch Finals
Having children and choosing to "home educate them" has been a most enlightening and educational decision for me and Cliff. Since we had no previous experience and no manual to follow, home education in our house has been very much a learning experience for all of us.
As homeschoolers our regime is virtually unrecognisable compared our first efforts of homeschooling. For the first couple of years we would have very formal lessons in the morning with all the standoffs and frustrations that that implies. There were tantrums and I can't say I'm proud of them! In pursuit of coersion and in a panicky and paranoid frame of mind I would use every threat in the book. Producing "stuff" to demonstrate to education officers, relatives and neighbours how together I was, was a higher priority than my relationship with my children. As I grew as a person, and became more aware, I totally dropped the must do stuff and education became more child led.
However despite my non reliance on piles of schooling evidence, I have to admit to being a bit smug that my eldest daughter has graduated from college top of her class if only because it justifies the informal education she received at home. It is worth noting that she has been diagnosed as severely dyslexic with a spelling age of 10. This may or may not be due to her education, such as it was. What is interesting is that it has not cramped her style at all, and I would say that even if it is a result of her informal education it was clearly a price worth paying.
I remember once taking Joel to a home education club. The group had invited a maths teacher along to give the parents some ideas about fun maths lessons they could teach their kids. However I had deep reservations about this approach since it could still lead to frustration, and a sense of competition or failure. Indeed some of the parents were anxiously talking to the teacher about problems they'd had teaching the last fun maths lesson to their children.
The teacher had arranged various different numbers of "stepping stones" across the floor and was trying to get the children to calculate how many steps they'd have to take to cross the "river", and to reach a formula for the calculation (which was always going to be one step more than the number of stepping stones). Joel (then 6) was the only child who responded to the teacher and he said he knew it would always be one step more because when he broke a stick into pieces there was always one piece more than the number of breaks. The teacher was very excited and said that that was exactly what he meant about organic learning. So I took Joel home and let him carry on!
Children are constantly manipulating their environment (if they're not watching telly or reading) and this leads to solid and "organic" knowledge and confidence about how the world works, gained by practical experience rather than passed on information.
As your children get older, if they are motivated to get qualifications to gain entrance to college or a good job, they will do the work without you breathing down their necks. The most important thing you can teach your child is to be well motivated and enthusiastic and these are things that aren't taught in books!
I do sometimes suffer from anxiety about reading. My sons show little inclination to read and sometimes I sink under the weight of other people's disapproval. The only way for them to become good readers is to practice a lot and I know that if they spent a lot of time reading it would diminish the carefree quality of their lives. So why do I wish for something that I do not really want. Why do we try to hurry our children towards certain adult attainments? So we can compare their performance to others maybe. There is no age limit on learning to read and yet few adults retain the ability to play creatively. To my shame I sometimes give in to peer pressure and nag my sons about their reading; saying "you'll never learn to read if you don't make the effort" or "all the other cubs can read" (see socialisation). Yes I know it's really bad. Believe me I apologise for my crassness and pray for the strength to value them as they are, and for faith that they will learn what they need in their own time (see faith).
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"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
"I don't give a damn for a man that can spell a word only one way." Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
"To the small part of our ignorance we label and classify we give the name knowledge" Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)
"Attitudes are more important than facts"
Norman Vincent Peal (1898 - 1993)
"Whether you believe you can do a thing or believe you can't you are right" Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)
"A sense of curiosity is natures original school of education."
Smiley Blanton (1882 -
1996)
"The important thing is not to stop questioning." Albert Einstein
"The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge." Daniel Boorstin
"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell." Simone Weil
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