Why We Homeschool
by Brendan and Rachael Cooper
We think it is important from the onset to clearly state that this essay describes our motivations and reasons for educating our children and we don’t presume our choices are any better than yours. There are many ways to successfully educate a child. Discussing how and why to educate your children is like discussing religion. It can be polarizing and contentious. We all make the choices we believe to be the very best. If you have different reasons, or have pursued another path, we wish you all of the best. We know there are many successful paths. It is our intention to share our thinking on this topic and welcome your constructive thoughts on the ideas presented.
Our reasons for homeschooling have changed over these first seven years. Our journey has not been planned. It was not a path we knew anything about. We had no history and no expectations. It has been a course started on intuition and continued with growing anecdotal learning from the broad, ecumenical, eclectic, and devoted homeschooling community. We’ve learned from books, groups, the web, blogs and lots and lots of husband and wife dialogue.
We began homeschooling our first son after we placed him in a private school at the age of 3 1/2. Like all parents we want the very best for our child. We sought and found what we believed was the best possible school to “properly” educate him. It lasted a week. His separation from the nuclear family was extremely painful and emotional for the three of us. He hated it. We hated it. Our notion of what was best was turned on its head. What was best had nothing to do with foreign language acquisition, math aptitude, or structured learning. It had everything to do with our relationships. It had everything to do with snuggling, playing, eating and sleeping. It had everything to do with intimacy and our emotional lives. Emerson, our first son, helped us learn the primacy of our connections with one another. Nothing else matters to a three year old and we discarded our previous notions of what is best and we moved forward without any sense of how to see to our son’s education. We knew what we would not tradeoff.
We worked hard to learn how. We drafted a first curriculum outline that we felt was worthy of our children. We obsessed for several weeks over all of the important areas of knowledge we were going to need to stuff into our children’s heads. We found homeschooling resources on the internet. We found course curricula with full scope and sequence. We drafted a second outline. We looked at classical educations, Montessori, Emilio Reggio, Waldorf and the best private and public schools, modern and historical. We found other homeschoolers. We drafted a final curriculum.
We moved forward with our ideas on how to educate our children. And then we began the process of stuffing all of this information into their heads. It sounds uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable. We quickly realized that the stuffing process was not going to lead to long-term beneficial results. We learned that we could destroy the desire to learn. We were very fortunate to have a first child who was capable of saying – “Dad, that is not helpful,” at a very young age. This made us take a step back and ask if we were trying to accomplish the right thing.
We realized we were attempting to fill their minds with knowledge at the expense of their emotional lives, working against their natural impulses and interests. It was not an approach that we liked. We were transferring our own learning experience and our fear of offering a substandard education to our homeschool. But the habits of mind we wanted to develop weren’t developing. We asked, and circumstances begged the questions: “What are we trying to do?” “What do we want for our child?” “What do we want to do with our child?” and less often asked, “What does our child want to have done to them?”
People have a wide range of opinions on what to do with a child – what the goal is. Many are under the illusion that they will build the child they want. In truth, you lead, care, teach, and coach the child you get. Your preconceived ideas of what they can be, may have very little to do with who they are, their innate gifts, and personality. When we really examined what we want our children to be, it is a decent, moral, loving, strong and prepared person. All but the last of these attributes requires no formal education. All can be independent of their innate gifts and personality. The re-focus and statement of what we wanted to do with our child changed our perspective.
Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because after our first encounter with school our son’s enthusiasm for life evaporated and we had to try something new. When we set out to do better ourselves, and failed, we realized that we had absorbed an external definition of the task of education, but we had not defined the root task. Once we realized that there was no such thing as a complete education, and we realized we could not force feed an ideal formula of knowledge into the minds of our offspring, we began to ask the real question: What are we trying to accomplish in an education? What is the final goal?
We decided that teaching our children to use their minds was very important. Our first priority would be to teach how to use a mind and then worry about the facts you put in it. As we contemplated teaching our children how to use their minds we were forced to explore how we use our own minds and how we would like to use them. If you teach someone how to fish instead of giving them fish you have given them power. In the same way, we believe teaching someone how to think is giving them power.
Our minds are beautiful instruments. Education needs to focus on understanding how to use the specific instrument/mind. Each of us needs to find where our mind’s flow and rhythms are, and finding where it isn’t. Using an instrument is both something that requires regular practice and intrinsic desire. In our first attempts at homeschooling we focused on the daily practice and not fostering the desire. Fostering desire, or enchanting children with learning, we have concluded, is accomplished through making learning real and valuable.. Perspective gives you a sense why things are relevant. This understanding of relevance, this perspective is not something easily gained from standing in one place. It is not accomplished reliably in the process of teaching to a test. It requires that you move about your environment, interact socially with many different kinds of people, and understand the context and history of what you are learning.
Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because we believe the pillars of an education are those things that will make you a competent adult. Those things that will serve you best as you pursue life, liberty and happiness. They are not Latin, or the periodic table, A Tale of Two Cities or football - important and fun as these things may be. We believe the goals of an education are learning how to create and maintain relationships, gathering perspective and using it to inform your judgment, learning how to work with the mind you have been given, creating your own initiative, becoming resourceful, practicing courage and maintaining your health. And no school we know has chosen those same goals and works toward them as earnestly as we do and will.
Our Pillars
On the surface our homeschool curricula looks like other curricula, but the underlying pillars, which we discuss openly and regularly with our children, are different. And they inform all of our discussions, which are frequent. We believe that these goals are best served by homeschooling. The pillars are
1. The Value of People
2. Perspective & Judgment
3. How to use your Mind
4. Initiative and Courage
5. Resourcefulness
6. Health
The Value of People
Our first lesson, already related here, was the importance of our relationships to these young creatures we have brought into the world. This also extends to our relationships with other people and their importance in our lives. All things we undertake exist within a social context. This social awareness and capability is very important. We want our children, irrespective of their natural interpersonal gifts or limits, to develop the social skills necessary to build loving families, communities of friends, and constructively participate in organizations. Some of this can be taught and some of it is demonstrated every day of your life. So, for example, we can teach our children the value of knowing social context. We can place them daily in novel social situations and allow them to practice their conversational skills in varying environments. We can teach them salutations and social graces. But just as important, we must demonstrate love and patience every day. This is a smile to a spouse, a measured, instead of hostile, rebuke when poor judgment is used and a hug when you have the blahs.
Providing this environment every day fosters an environment that becomes the baseline expectation of your children. It’s the normative force of the every day emotional and ethical space created in your family. This becomes a child’s conception of human interaction and is extended to their conception of a properly functioning family, friendship, community or organization. We teach our children that relationships are most important. Our social beings start and end with the relationships, the connections, we establish with others. We teach the necessity of emotional resilience and thoughtfulness. We stress the importance of avoiding emotional brittleness and volatility. We teach that communication is a trade-off between truth and harmony. Social skill involves learning how to make the trade-off. We have and will continue to cultivate this so that our children can comfortably interact and build relationships in a wide variety of situations.
Another relationship skill we find we often use is teaching, even before becoming homeschooling parents. As we ask our children to learn about relationships we are purposefully placing them in situations where they must teach others. Aside from being an important social skill, teaching is also one of the most important ways to show people how important they are.
We have found that homeschooling is an excellent platform to develop relationships.
Perspective and Judgment
Perspective is having enough background to know what is important. Judgment is good decision making. We want these two things to be a way of life. Life is a continuous testing of thought and action. If you could follow our family you would hear a constant refrain “This is important because…” or “Why do you think this matters?” or “Is that good judgment.” We point out that good judgment is practiced daily. A spirit of wonder and connectedness is essential with these conversations, without it you can sound preachy and what should be a discovery becomes a perpetual lecture. Perspective is a habit of mind. Experience and pain seem to be the best teachers of perspective. With our children we ask and remind them of their perspective, history, and values. We constantly discuss others judgments and their perspectives. We know good judgment is important, and even kids in grade school can be taught to recognize it. If you disagree then go to youtube.com and look at some of the “life lessons” folks have videoed and get back to us.
We have found that we can provide a unique environment to enable both perspective and judgment building in a homeschool.
How to Use Your Mind
Knowing how to use a mind, and very specifically, your own mind, requires a great deal of experience and perspective. As parents, we have many years of perspective on how we use our own minds and we can use this to help guide our children to learn the workings of the brain they have been given. Specifically, we have noticed that our children often expected to quickly learn everything and would get frustrated if they didn’t. We want them to understand that learning can be difficult, that performance and learning aren’t linear. We believe that learning requires courage and honesty. We acknowledge some people learn things much faster than others and some brains are really good at some problems and not at others.
Kids seem to readily understand how to throw themselves into a problem. We teach our children to sleep on problems and revisit setbacks when they hit a wall. In our homeschool setting we can truly destigmatize failure and use it as the learning step it is. Setbacks happen as a matter of course and adapting takes practice. Learning to use the brain involves knowing that emotional states impact cognition, emotions have a release cycle, that counting to 10 really can help, sleep really matters, intuition is extremely valuable, and methodology is important. So we are teaching these things. Interacting with our children while learning every day gives us insight into their minds. We notice the frustrations and the “A-ha” moments and we can feedback perspective to them on how this happens. We notice if they have visual or auditory learning preferences and we discuss and explore these with our children. We notice the things they like and don’t like and we discuss and explore why. We discuss their own theories about how they think their brains learn best and then test these theories.
Teaching a child to understand their own unique way of learning and problem solving is crucial. We talk about this constantly. Sometimes we discuss it at a developmentally appropriate level with our children and sometimes we discuss it in front of them as adults.
We didn’t realize it until we started to teach our children how idiosyncratically we used our own minds. All the kids we know are fascinated when we discuss some unique or bizarre way in which our mind works. For example, if Rachael needs to think creatively she needs a pencil in her hand. The ideas don’t flow without the pencil. Brendan can’t think clearly about a problem until he has done it while moving. Some people can only learn something after they have written it. Other people can’t learn while writing – taking notes impairs their cognitive processes. Sharing this frees our children to think about what they discover about themselves as they learn.
We have noticed that we sometimes have difficulty transitioning from one problem to the next. In particular, we find that transitioning from very detailed work to skillful and empathetic interpersonal communication is difficult. A case in point is finding yourself immersed in a good book and then having to interact socially. Knowing that transitions in brain function can be difficult, or even exist, lets you manage, anticipate and reframe those transitions.
We have read books on learning styles to our children and helped them pick out the parts that resemble, or do not resemble themselves to help them better understand their own learning style. We encourage our children to try learning another way if a concept is having trouble cementing in their minds. Our eldest, a dyslexic, looked at us with mixture of shock and fear when we said he needed to tell us how to teach him to read. But he wanted to learn and knew that if he was going to read he would need to tell us how to get it into his head. And he did. He did as much evaluating of reading programs as we did, noting which things worked and when they worked best. It was a powerful learning moment for him.
Another part of learning your brain is learning what you love. The subjects to which your mind is inherently attracted. We all learn best what we love to learn. And we all do best what we love to do. Mihaly Cziksummihaly describes “flow” as a state of mind where time stops to have meaning and the application of your mind to solving a problem is uniquely fulfilling and meaningful. Finding this flow state is pretty easy in children. Just watch them play and they will seek flow. We are teaching our children to seek this throughout their lives. And we remind them that the amount of flow increases in a subject as you move up the skill curve. Making sure that our kids can exercise their initiative to keep themselves moving up the skill curves in the areas that fascinate them. We keep them in flow while at school as much as possible.
Finding flow is supremely important. It is a natural place for the mind. This is where you want to direct your children’s interests if it involves making, creating, exploring in the real world – passive flow is a trap and the human mind is easily captivated in it. We keep TV and computer games out of our lives as much as possible for we believe the passive flow it offers is seductive and largely not instructive.
Homeschooling allows our kids to know flow, and live with it for gratifying periods of time, hopefully creating a baseline conception of how to use a mind. As our children grow, they may not find the flow they need in their professional or academic lives. But knowing the difference between a mind in a state of flow and one that is heaped and tasked will give them the perspective they need to endure those stretches of life when there is no flow. Knowing what you don’t have keeps that lack from defining you and how you experience the world.
Initiative & Courage
Initiative is the will to start something new or to see something through. It is a personal, internal, formulation of what one ought to do and the drive to do it. Learning that you have the power of self-determinism is not something one gets from a textbook. Independence of mind and character is a trait strengthened only by use. We teach our children that they can gain power as a result of sustained and concentrated self-directed effort. Initiative is a habit of mind born from an imaginative mind and the will to realize your imaginings. As teachers and coaches we stand ready every day to develop initiative.
Peter Kostenbaum defines courage as sustained initiative. Courage is often required when learning subjects or performing essential tasks that you don’t want to do – where there is no flow. Sometimes it is hard to memorize the 50 states, the Gettysburg address, or the Latin vocabulary for the week. Likewise the dishes and the laundry. But life demands courage. Life demands ”small courage” which is the steadiness/steadfastness to attend to the bureaucratic detail and activities of daily life that need attention every day. Life also demands ”big courage” which is the heroic effort or the big push to make something happen. We read about these, and hopefully, demonstrate them in our lives, in person.
Every day, initiative is the quality most desired in the workforce, in our fellow citizens and in our community. It is what is required to keep hope and to keep faith. Without it we are stalled, moribund, stagnant, static, and no longer learning, no longer growing. We want children with initiative. At home, they get to see it as a way of life. Their daily posture is forward, in command of their work, their questions, their resourcefulness.
It seems contrary to logic to say that homeschooling is less restrictive, less sheltering, than public school. But in many ways it is. Our children spend more time out in the world interacting with people than most. They have more say in the things they do and accomplish. As there is no particular year when a bit of knowledge must be learned (so that it can be quantified) the children have much more room to stimulate their inner drive. They have the right to exercise their own initiative which is an essential skill for life and an integral part of the citizenship of a free people.
Resourcefulness
Resourcefulness is the ability to figure out what you need to get in order to do what you want to do. We teach resourcefulness as a habit of mind. Knowledge is a tool to be wielded against the problems they wish to solve. Our children are encouraged to ask themselves “What do I need, to do what I wish to do?” In order to make this a valid lesson the children must believe that once they figure out what they want to do they will be allowed to do it. Our surface syllabus can and does change based on the initiative of our children. Being resourceful means determinedly seeking information and answers on these new problems. This involves letting a person have a question and to spontaneously get online and start with Google, or the Wikipedia, and then get on the phone and call an adult, professional, family friend, or go to the store to procure the necessary materials, or to engage in extended dialogue to refine their understanding of the question. Then go to the library and get all of the books on the topic, or to drop the current assignment to pursue a line of questioning that is more in-depth. These activities comprise the successful modus operandi of adult life – we do these things every day. We want the habits of mind formed in these first eighteen years to serve what they will do as adults, so that what is expected of adults is not foreign to our children’s every day experience. Knowing that they can choose a path, that they must choose a path is easily demonstrated in a homeschool environment. And the daily example of us, the parent teacher, trying to facilitate that path is a lesson in resourcefulness. Because we have the time for the children to ask questions and lead the lessons, they very often take us out of our knowledge areas. And as they participate in the finding of these answers it provides a space for the demonstration of self-directedness
We want them to have experience wielding their own minds as we believe that they will develop an independence in character and thought because they trust their mind. An adult brings value to the community by being prepared to contribute. We aim to teach our children to know who they are, to figure out what needs to be done and to have courage in their ability to do it.
Health
The importance of exercising and practicing good health is something we find important and strongly tied to learning. We continually teach the importance of diet and that our food choices matter. An uncomfortable child, an ill or restless child will not learn, will not find flow as well as a healthy one. The flexibility of being at home allows us to identify the time the children are most able to learn and gives us the freedom to adjust if they are not. Fidgety children can be exercised, hungry children can be fed and tired children can nap. We value exercise and believe that using the body frees minds to concentrate. Many studies have shown the importance of physical activity in mental health and have tied exercise to learning. While all schools devote some portion of their attention on fitness, nutrition and health, we live what is often relegated to a thirty minute class once a week. Ironically, being homeschooled allows our family the opportunity to be much more active outside the home. We teach our children to monitor their bodies and minds. By homeschooling, we insure that caring for the fabulous machine that is the human body receives the primacy we feel it deserves.
Summary
These are the things we teach, demonstrate, coach and foster in our children. We believe we can do them best homeschooling. Modern homeschools draw on vast resources in the community. These resources include multi-family cooperatives, play groups, clubs and continuing education classes. Most people are surprised at how much time our children spend outside of the home. We think other schooling options involve institutions that are structurally incapable of developing what we prize most in our children.
Obviously there are many, many valuable institutions in our society and they play a vital role in our lives. To say that institutions have limits is not to demolish them wholesale but to recognize them as tools for the purposes of people. Institutions give collectivities focus, pooled resources, and power. To do this institutions make demands of you. They subordinate your needs to the functioning of the institution. This is true if it’s a business, government, church, family or public school. A person is socialized in the institution where their minds are occupied for most of their waking hours. They learn institutional thinking; their perspective is from within the institution. The institution influences how you exist in the world. In fact, it does more than influence you but shapes how you think and moulds you. Anyone who has spent a significant part of their working life in one business and then leaves to work for another knows what we are talking about. Another example is spending a long time in a particular church or congregation and then moving to another one. You learn new behavioral expectations, new ways of saying things, of communicating, of thinking, of presenting ideas, of negotiating the mental space that is always particular to the institution. It is this “institutional think” that is problematic for us. It has limits that are of great importance and consequence to the development of children. It is at times obvious and at other times insidious.
Public schools are institutions that of necessity must control the student body; they must test them, measure them, and standardize their learning. It’s the only way we know how to build operating leverage into the education process. Schooling institutions must be economically viable and are therefore production oriented enterprises. One teacher to “x” students. Scale upward or downward this ratio depending on the economic resources of the institution and the limits of control of the one teacher. It can and does work for many. However, we believe the ratio categorically limits the objectives that can be achieved.
The habits of mind developed from institutional thinking don’t develop initiative or resourcefulness. By definition social control, hierarchy, scheduling, and structure are placed above these two attributes. You learn to think like the institution thinks – it is universal and unavoidable. Institutions can’t help but to teach to the test and you can’t help but to learn how to be tested. It does not foster independent thinking or flow. The character of person is built in thought and action. To develop character a person must face choices, real choices and practice failure and success.
Of course, institutions have capabilities that families cannot muster. Organizations are very exciting to learn and move through. Their physical space and culture are interesting to people. They have resources, football stadiums, teams, PTA and business alliances that the homeschool community cannot match. They can provide access to wonderfully educated professionals who work with children every day. They can bring years of teaching expertise to bear on the challenges facing your child. They can teach your children things you cannot or won’t. They can teach children you cannot or wouldn’t.
But, the goals we have set aren’t answered best by traditional school. Schools consume resources on initiatives and objectives we wouldn’t. They can teach our children things we don’t wish taught. They create habits of mind that we find are not helpful. They offer an insular world that doesn’t create the meaning or worth we wish for our children. And so we homeschool.
We think it is important from the onset to clearly state that this essay describes our motivations and reasons for educating our children and we don’t presume our choices are any better than yours. There are many ways to successfully educate a child. Discussing how and why to educate your children is like discussing religion. It can be polarizing and contentious. We all make the choices we believe to be the very best. If you have different reasons, or have pursued another path, we wish you all of the best. We know there are many successful paths. It is our intention to share our thinking on this topic and welcome your constructive thoughts on the ideas presented.
Our reasons for homeschooling have changed over these first seven years. Our journey has not been planned. It was not a path we knew anything about. We had no history and no expectations. It has been a course started on intuition and continued with growing anecdotal learning from the broad, ecumenical, eclectic, and devoted homeschooling community. We’ve learned from books, groups, the web, blogs and lots and lots of husband and wife dialogue.
We began homeschooling our first son after we placed him in a private school at the age of 3 1/2. Like all parents we want the very best for our child. We sought and found what we believed was the best possible school to “properly” educate him. It lasted a week. His separation from the nuclear family was extremely painful and emotional for the three of us. He hated it. We hated it. Our notion of what was best was turned on its head. What was best had nothing to do with foreign language acquisition, math aptitude, or structured learning. It had everything to do with our relationships. It had everything to do with snuggling, playing, eating and sleeping. It had everything to do with intimacy and our emotional lives. Emerson, our first son, helped us learn the primacy of our connections with one another. Nothing else matters to a three year old and we discarded our previous notions of what is best and we moved forward without any sense of how to see to our son’s education. We knew what we would not tradeoff.
We worked hard to learn how. We drafted a first curriculum outline that we felt was worthy of our children. We obsessed for several weeks over all of the important areas of knowledge we were going to need to stuff into our children’s heads. We found homeschooling resources on the internet. We found course curricula with full scope and sequence. We drafted a second outline. We looked at classical educations, Montessori, Emilio Reggio, Waldorf and the best private and public schools, modern and historical. We found other homeschoolers. We drafted a final curriculum.
We moved forward with our ideas on how to educate our children. And then we began the process of stuffing all of this information into their heads. It sounds uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable. We quickly realized that the stuffing process was not going to lead to long-term beneficial results. We learned that we could destroy the desire to learn. We were very fortunate to have a first child who was capable of saying – “Dad, that is not helpful,” at a very young age. This made us take a step back and ask if we were trying to accomplish the right thing.
We realized we were attempting to fill their minds with knowledge at the expense of their emotional lives, working against their natural impulses and interests. It was not an approach that we liked. We were transferring our own learning experience and our fear of offering a substandard education to our homeschool. But the habits of mind we wanted to develop weren’t developing. We asked, and circumstances begged the questions: “What are we trying to do?” “What do we want for our child?” “What do we want to do with our child?” and less often asked, “What does our child want to have done to them?”
People have a wide range of opinions on what to do with a child – what the goal is. Many are under the illusion that they will build the child they want. In truth, you lead, care, teach, and coach the child you get. Your preconceived ideas of what they can be, may have very little to do with who they are, their innate gifts, and personality. When we really examined what we want our children to be, it is a decent, moral, loving, strong and prepared person. All but the last of these attributes requires no formal education. All can be independent of their innate gifts and personality. The re-focus and statement of what we wanted to do with our child changed our perspective.
Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because after our first encounter with school our son’s enthusiasm for life evaporated and we had to try something new. When we set out to do better ourselves, and failed, we realized that we had absorbed an external definition of the task of education, but we had not defined the root task. Once we realized that there was no such thing as a complete education, and we realized we could not force feed an ideal formula of knowledge into the minds of our offspring, we began to ask the real question: What are we trying to accomplish in an education? What is the final goal?
We decided that teaching our children to use their minds was very important. Our first priority would be to teach how to use a mind and then worry about the facts you put in it. As we contemplated teaching our children how to use their minds we were forced to explore how we use our own minds and how we would like to use them. If you teach someone how to fish instead of giving them fish you have given them power. In the same way, we believe teaching someone how to think is giving them power.
Our minds are beautiful instruments. Education needs to focus on understanding how to use the specific instrument/mind. Each of us needs to find where our mind’s flow and rhythms are, and finding where it isn’t. Using an instrument is both something that requires regular practice and intrinsic desire. In our first attempts at homeschooling we focused on the daily practice and not fostering the desire. Fostering desire, or enchanting children with learning, we have concluded, is accomplished through making learning real and valuable.. Perspective gives you a sense why things are relevant. This understanding of relevance, this perspective is not something easily gained from standing in one place. It is not accomplished reliably in the process of teaching to a test. It requires that you move about your environment, interact socially with many different kinds of people, and understand the context and history of what you are learning.
Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because we believe the pillars of an education are those things that will make you a competent adult. Those things that will serve you best as you pursue life, liberty and happiness. They are not Latin, or the periodic table, A Tale of Two Cities or football - important and fun as these things may be. We believe the goals of an education are learning how to create and maintain relationships, gathering perspective and using it to inform your judgment, learning how to work with the mind you have been given, creating your own initiative, becoming resourceful, practicing courage and maintaining your health. And no school we know has chosen those same goals and works toward them as earnestly as we do and will.
Our Pillars
On the surface our homeschool curricula looks like other curricula, but the underlying pillars, which we discuss openly and regularly with our children, are different. And they inform all of our discussions, which are frequent. We believe that these goals are best served by homeschooling. The pillars are
1. The Value of People
2. Perspective & Judgment
3. How to use your Mind
4. Initiative and Courage
5. Resourcefulness
6. Health
The Value of People
Our first lesson, already related here, was the importance of our relationships to these young creatures we have brought into the world. This also extends to our relationships with other people and their importance in our lives. All things we undertake exist within a social context. This social awareness and capability is very important. We want our children, irrespective of their natural interpersonal gifts or limits, to develop the social skills necessary to build loving families, communities of friends, and constructively participate in organizations. Some of this can be taught and some of it is demonstrated every day of your life. So, for example, we can teach our children the value of knowing social context. We can place them daily in novel social situations and allow them to practice their conversational skills in varying environments. We can teach them salutations and social graces. But just as important, we must demonstrate love and patience every day. This is a smile to a spouse, a measured, instead of hostile, rebuke when poor judgment is used and a hug when you have the blahs.
Providing this environment every day fosters an environment that becomes the baseline expectation of your children. It’s the normative force of the every day emotional and ethical space created in your family. This becomes a child’s conception of human interaction and is extended to their conception of a properly functioning family, friendship, community or organization. We teach our children that relationships are most important. Our social beings start and end with the relationships, the connections, we establish with others. We teach the necessity of emotional resilience and thoughtfulness. We stress the importance of avoiding emotional brittleness and volatility. We teach that communication is a trade-off between truth and harmony. Social skill involves learning how to make the trade-off. We have and will continue to cultivate this so that our children can comfortably interact and build relationships in a wide variety of situations.
Another relationship skill we find we often use is teaching, even before becoming homeschooling parents. As we ask our children to learn about relationships we are purposefully placing them in situations where they must teach others. Aside from being an important social skill, teaching is also one of the most important ways to show people how important they are.
We have found that homeschooling is an excellent platform to develop relationships.
Perspective and Judgment
Perspective is having enough background to know what is important. Judgment is good decision making. We want these two things to be a way of life. Life is a continuous testing of thought and action. If you could follow our family you would hear a constant refrain “This is important because…” or “Why do you think this matters?” or “Is that good judgment.” We point out that good judgment is practiced daily. A spirit of wonder and connectedness is essential with these conversations, without it you can sound preachy and what should be a discovery becomes a perpetual lecture. Perspective is a habit of mind. Experience and pain seem to be the best teachers of perspective. With our children we ask and remind them of their perspective, history, and values. We constantly discuss others judgments and their perspectives. We know good judgment is important, and even kids in grade school can be taught to recognize it. If you disagree then go to youtube.com and look at some of the “life lessons” folks have videoed and get back to us.
We have found that we can provide a unique environment to enable both perspective and judgment building in a homeschool.
How to Use Your Mind
Knowing how to use a mind, and very specifically, your own mind, requires a great deal of experience and perspective. As parents, we have many years of perspective on how we use our own minds and we can use this to help guide our children to learn the workings of the brain they have been given. Specifically, we have noticed that our children often expected to quickly learn everything and would get frustrated if they didn’t. We want them to understand that learning can be difficult, that performance and learning aren’t linear. We believe that learning requires courage and honesty. We acknowledge some people learn things much faster than others and some brains are really good at some problems and not at others.
Kids seem to readily understand how to throw themselves into a problem. We teach our children to sleep on problems and revisit setbacks when they hit a wall. In our homeschool setting we can truly destigmatize failure and use it as the learning step it is. Setbacks happen as a matter of course and adapting takes practice. Learning to use the brain involves knowing that emotional states impact cognition, emotions have a release cycle, that counting to 10 really can help, sleep really matters, intuition is extremely valuable, and methodology is important. So we are teaching these things. Interacting with our children while learning every day gives us insight into their minds. We notice the frustrations and the “A-ha” moments and we can feedback perspective to them on how this happens. We notice if they have visual or auditory learning preferences and we discuss and explore these with our children. We notice the things they like and don’t like and we discuss and explore why. We discuss their own theories about how they think their brains learn best and then test these theories.
Teaching a child to understand their own unique way of learning and problem solving is crucial. We talk about this constantly. Sometimes we discuss it at a developmentally appropriate level with our children and sometimes we discuss it in front of them as adults.
We didn’t realize it until we started to teach our children how idiosyncratically we used our own minds. All the kids we know are fascinated when we discuss some unique or bizarre way in which our mind works. For example, if Rachael needs to think creatively she needs a pencil in her hand. The ideas don’t flow without the pencil. Brendan can’t think clearly about a problem until he has done it while moving. Some people can only learn something after they have written it. Other people can’t learn while writing – taking notes impairs their cognitive processes. Sharing this frees our children to think about what they discover about themselves as they learn.
We have noticed that we sometimes have difficulty transitioning from one problem to the next. In particular, we find that transitioning from very detailed work to skillful and empathetic interpersonal communication is difficult. A case in point is finding yourself immersed in a good book and then having to interact socially. Knowing that transitions in brain function can be difficult, or even exist, lets you manage, anticipate and reframe those transitions.
We have read books on learning styles to our children and helped them pick out the parts that resemble, or do not resemble themselves to help them better understand their own learning style. We encourage our children to try learning another way if a concept is having trouble cementing in their minds. Our eldest, a dyslexic, looked at us with mixture of shock and fear when we said he needed to tell us how to teach him to read. But he wanted to learn and knew that if he was going to read he would need to tell us how to get it into his head. And he did. He did as much evaluating of reading programs as we did, noting which things worked and when they worked best. It was a powerful learning moment for him.
Another part of learning your brain is learning what you love. The subjects to which your mind is inherently attracted. We all learn best what we love to learn. And we all do best what we love to do. Mihaly Cziksummihaly describes “flow” as a state of mind where time stops to have meaning and the application of your mind to solving a problem is uniquely fulfilling and meaningful. Finding this flow state is pretty easy in children. Just watch them play and they will seek flow. We are teaching our children to seek this throughout their lives. And we remind them that the amount of flow increases in a subject as you move up the skill curve. Making sure that our kids can exercise their initiative to keep themselves moving up the skill curves in the areas that fascinate them. We keep them in flow while at school as much as possible.
Finding flow is supremely important. It is a natural place for the mind. This is where you want to direct your children’s interests if it involves making, creating, exploring in the real world – passive flow is a trap and the human mind is easily captivated in it. We keep TV and computer games out of our lives as much as possible for we believe the passive flow it offers is seductive and largely not instructive.
Homeschooling allows our kids to know flow, and live with it for gratifying periods of time, hopefully creating a baseline conception of how to use a mind. As our children grow, they may not find the flow they need in their professional or academic lives. But knowing the difference between a mind in a state of flow and one that is heaped and tasked will give them the perspective they need to endure those stretches of life when there is no flow. Knowing what you don’t have keeps that lack from defining you and how you experience the world.
Initiative & Courage
Initiative is the will to start something new or to see something through. It is a personal, internal, formulation of what one ought to do and the drive to do it. Learning that you have the power of self-determinism is not something one gets from a textbook. Independence of mind and character is a trait strengthened only by use. We teach our children that they can gain power as a result of sustained and concentrated self-directed effort. Initiative is a habit of mind born from an imaginative mind and the will to realize your imaginings. As teachers and coaches we stand ready every day to develop initiative.
Peter Kostenbaum defines courage as sustained initiative. Courage is often required when learning subjects or performing essential tasks that you don’t want to do – where there is no flow. Sometimes it is hard to memorize the 50 states, the Gettysburg address, or the Latin vocabulary for the week. Likewise the dishes and the laundry. But life demands courage. Life demands ”small courage” which is the steadiness/steadfastness to attend to the bureaucratic detail and activities of daily life that need attention every day. Life also demands ”big courage” which is the heroic effort or the big push to make something happen. We read about these, and hopefully, demonstrate them in our lives, in person.
Every day, initiative is the quality most desired in the workforce, in our fellow citizens and in our community. It is what is required to keep hope and to keep faith. Without it we are stalled, moribund, stagnant, static, and no longer learning, no longer growing. We want children with initiative. At home, they get to see it as a way of life. Their daily posture is forward, in command of their work, their questions, their resourcefulness.
It seems contrary to logic to say that homeschooling is less restrictive, less sheltering, than public school. But in many ways it is. Our children spend more time out in the world interacting with people than most. They have more say in the things they do and accomplish. As there is no particular year when a bit of knowledge must be learned (so that it can be quantified) the children have much more room to stimulate their inner drive. They have the right to exercise their own initiative which is an essential skill for life and an integral part of the citizenship of a free people.
Resourcefulness
Resourcefulness is the ability to figure out what you need to get in order to do what you want to do. We teach resourcefulness as a habit of mind. Knowledge is a tool to be wielded against the problems they wish to solve. Our children are encouraged to ask themselves “What do I need, to do what I wish to do?” In order to make this a valid lesson the children must believe that once they figure out what they want to do they will be allowed to do it. Our surface syllabus can and does change based on the initiative of our children. Being resourceful means determinedly seeking information and answers on these new problems. This involves letting a person have a question and to spontaneously get online and start with Google, or the Wikipedia, and then get on the phone and call an adult, professional, family friend, or go to the store to procure the necessary materials, or to engage in extended dialogue to refine their understanding of the question. Then go to the library and get all of the books on the topic, or to drop the current assignment to pursue a line of questioning that is more in-depth. These activities comprise the successful modus operandi of adult life – we do these things every day. We want the habits of mind formed in these first eighteen years to serve what they will do as adults, so that what is expected of adults is not foreign to our children’s every day experience. Knowing that they can choose a path, that they must choose a path is easily demonstrated in a homeschool environment. And the daily example of us, the parent teacher, trying to facilitate that path is a lesson in resourcefulness. Because we have the time for the children to ask questions and lead the lessons, they very often take us out of our knowledge areas. And as they participate in the finding of these answers it provides a space for the demonstration of self-directedness
We want them to have experience wielding their own minds as we believe that they will develop an independence in character and thought because they trust their mind. An adult brings value to the community by being prepared to contribute. We aim to teach our children to know who they are, to figure out what needs to be done and to have courage in their ability to do it.
Health
The importance of exercising and practicing good health is something we find important and strongly tied to learning. We continually teach the importance of diet and that our food choices matter. An uncomfortable child, an ill or restless child will not learn, will not find flow as well as a healthy one. The flexibility of being at home allows us to identify the time the children are most able to learn and gives us the freedom to adjust if they are not. Fidgety children can be exercised, hungry children can be fed and tired children can nap. We value exercise and believe that using the body frees minds to concentrate. Many studies have shown the importance of physical activity in mental health and have tied exercise to learning. While all schools devote some portion of their attention on fitness, nutrition and health, we live what is often relegated to a thirty minute class once a week. Ironically, being homeschooled allows our family the opportunity to be much more active outside the home. We teach our children to monitor their bodies and minds. By homeschooling, we insure that caring for the fabulous machine that is the human body receives the primacy we feel it deserves.
Summary
These are the things we teach, demonstrate, coach and foster in our children. We believe we can do them best homeschooling. Modern homeschools draw on vast resources in the community. These resources include multi-family cooperatives, play groups, clubs and continuing education classes. Most people are surprised at how much time our children spend outside of the home. We think other schooling options involve institutions that are structurally incapable of developing what we prize most in our children.
Obviously there are many, many valuable institutions in our society and they play a vital role in our lives. To say that institutions have limits is not to demolish them wholesale but to recognize them as tools for the purposes of people. Institutions give collectivities focus, pooled resources, and power. To do this institutions make demands of you. They subordinate your needs to the functioning of the institution. This is true if it’s a business, government, church, family or public school. A person is socialized in the institution where their minds are occupied for most of their waking hours. They learn institutional thinking; their perspective is from within the institution. The institution influences how you exist in the world. In fact, it does more than influence you but shapes how you think and moulds you. Anyone who has spent a significant part of their working life in one business and then leaves to work for another knows what we are talking about. Another example is spending a long time in a particular church or congregation and then moving to another one. You learn new behavioral expectations, new ways of saying things, of communicating, of thinking, of presenting ideas, of negotiating the mental space that is always particular to the institution. It is this “institutional think” that is problematic for us. It has limits that are of great importance and consequence to the development of children. It is at times obvious and at other times insidious.
Public schools are institutions that of necessity must control the student body; they must test them, measure them, and standardize their learning. It’s the only way we know how to build operating leverage into the education process. Schooling institutions must be economically viable and are therefore production oriented enterprises. One teacher to “x” students. Scale upward or downward this ratio depending on the economic resources of the institution and the limits of control of the one teacher. It can and does work for many. However, we believe the ratio categorically limits the objectives that can be achieved.
The habits of mind developed from institutional thinking don’t develop initiative or resourcefulness. By definition social control, hierarchy, scheduling, and structure are placed above these two attributes. You learn to think like the institution thinks – it is universal and unavoidable. Institutions can’t help but to teach to the test and you can’t help but to learn how to be tested. It does not foster independent thinking or flow. The character of person is built in thought and action. To develop character a person must face choices, real choices and practice failure and success.
Of course, institutions have capabilities that families cannot muster. Organizations are very exciting to learn and move through. Their physical space and culture are interesting to people. They have resources, football stadiums, teams, PTA and business alliances that the homeschool community cannot match. They can provide access to wonderfully educated professionals who work with children every day. They can bring years of teaching expertise to bear on the challenges facing your child. They can teach your children things you cannot or won’t. They can teach children you cannot or wouldn’t.
But, the goals we have set aren’t answered best by traditional school. Schools consume resources on initiatives and objectives we wouldn’t. They can teach our children things we don’t wish taught. They create habits of mind that we find are not helpful. They offer an insular world that doesn’t create the meaning or worth we wish for our children. And so we homeschool.
