Organically Inclined

Sarah writes:”How does this [unschooling] enable your children to get their diploma and college level education? I don’t know what it’s like in Vermont, but in Ontario certainly having some sort of post-secondary accreditation is necessary to get a decent paying job.

“I am for homeschooling to some degree, although I also see some benefits in public education for Christian kids, and also like the ideas of Montessori. I plan to homeschool my daughter for her first few years and then supporting and tutoring her through public school, but my main desires are to a) bring her up to know and choose God; b) to equip her for life and work in the world; and c) to give her a basis on which she can understand and relate to others to effectively be a witness in the world. If I can accomplish these goals, she will have the best foundation I can give her.

“While I understand the concept of tailoring education to a child’s needs, particularly as advocated in Montessori, I’m not sure how you can truly allow child-directed education without ending with gaps in their knowlege bank / skill set.”

First off, thanks so much for writing.

Ahh…the “decent-paying job,” it’s the foundation of our motivation for almost everything in our first 18 years isn’t it? Getting rid of the notion that I had to gear my life and my children’s life in order to get a decent-paying job is one of the first hurdles I had to leap. I have found that the majority of very unhappy people I have known in my life work in “decent-paying jobs.” I don’t want my children to have that as their motivation for living. I don’t know how else to say it. Working hard at something you love must be paramount. I’ve learned to be very frugal so that I could work for $12 an hour as a reporter for a daily newspaper. Without that experience, I would never have had the opportunity to publish books and articles with major publishers and publications. I’ll leave it at that for now…I have much more to write on the topic, but I risk losing the main idea behind this particular article.

The wonderful thing about homeschooling and unschooling is that one can pretty much do whatever they feel is best for their own child. My own philosophy is such that I don’t believe that there is a specific curriculum that every kid should follow. I believe that while every child should have command of the language, know math, and know how a bill becomes a law, it is our job as parents to expose them to as much as possible - but not force it down their throats. I try and expose my children to as much as possible when they are young, so that they know if they want to fly airplanes, I will help them get there and learn what they need to do that. If they want to be a veterinarian, I will help them navigate that path.

My job as mom and primary educator is to provide the tools and resources…and the room to learn to love learning. There is a lot of time in school “learning how to learn.” Kids don’t need to learn how to learn. They already love learning. And if a parent can provide opportunities and tools without making it about another “lesson” then kids will suck it right up.

I hate going to the fair in the fall on “education” day and watching all of the kids with their papers, running around trying to find answers to inane questions about the cows. We don’t have to know everything about everything. We go to the same fair every year…the Tunbridge World’s Fair…and each year a different child is interested in something else. Sometimes for one child it’s the farm machinery, or the cows, or the oxen pull. We don’t have to have a lesson about every animal every year. I encourage my children to talk to the people who own the cows - or the antique tractor. To them, it’s just an interesting conversation, but later, when they explain to me how the confounded steam engine works, I know they learned something. They might even come home and look up the history of steam engines on the computer. They might not. They might feel like they learned enough about it at the fair.

Because I have six very different children, I have six (OK, five, as number six is only 5 months old!), very different educational experiences going on.

Matt is almost 16 and very independent. He has his own ideas about his education - and his life. While I may have imagined that he would either be a physics professor or an economist, right now, he is exploring the worlds of business, religion and politics through online college classes. In addition, he plays varsity and AAU basketball; he will play baseball in the spring; he taught himself how to play guitar; is taking drum lessons and has a part-time job in an insurance agency! He also babysits for me on occasion and is a wonderful writer.

Because his interests are so diverse and because he is a voracious reader, I have had to do little to “fill in the blanks” as it were, when it comes to his education. In fact, I went to high school - and college - and Matt is much more fluent in many subjects than I am, particularly world history and math and science. Matt is the oldest, and so, I have had some concerns through the years about his high school diploma and college aspirations. I talked with a number of admissions counselors at the colleges he was interested in…Stanford being one of those schools. Homeschooling is much more accepted than it used to be and colleges have made various adjustments accordingly. Many don’t require a “diploma” in order to be considered for admission - as long as a child has done something. Matt, for example, won’t have a diploma, but will have an associates degree by the time he’s 18. The GED is also an option Matt is considering, just to have a document.

Alex and Liam, on the other hand are almost 10 and 12. For them, I make sure they are reading a good book always (and sometimes make suggestions) and are doing “grade” level math. Other than that, we take topics as they come. We recently studied the Civil War and slavery, which brought us into slavery reparations and the civil rights movement. This brought us to King, and then Johnson and RFK - then Vietnam, Nixon and back to JFK - the study goes on…

Kiara is 5 months old, but my pregnancy and her birth gave us a lot of opportunity to study human biology, the reproductive behaviors of other species and then life-span development.

But again, I don’t think to myself, “Oh, I must make this a learning experience.” Having children who have grown up around brothers and sisters and parents who have always been interested in all kinds of things has brought all kinds of subjects to the foreground.

If when it is time for them to take their SAT’s and we find there is a topic we missed, well, we’ll study it. And contrary to popular belief, it is not hard. I’m not exhausted from “teaching” all of the time (I’m exhausted from all the driving I do!:-) …as I don’t stand in front of my “class” and teach. We just go about our lives and interests. We work the farm. We go to museums. We go to a lot of basketball games. We go to concerts and plays. We sit around and watch movies. We play games. We read. We have campfires. Just being is the true learning.

I have found that when learning is just a part of you, and not your “job,” it’s a lot easier to do. I’m learning all of the time. I’m always reading and watching and learning. I didn’t just decide that I was going to be a writer and now that’s all I do. I’d have very little to write about if that were true! My children know that I need to keep learning in order to do my “job.” But they also know that I write because it’s what I am compelled to do. Compelled by what? The phone bill? Sure. But I could pay the phone bill by working in the local convenience store. I am compelled by the universe to be a writer. And that’s all I want my children to do - find what they are compelled to do…and do it. And if they don’t learn about electoral votes in the process, well, then, they can figure that bit out later…I didn’t understand electoral votes until 2000!