Welcome to Boldschoolers. Today, we’re talking about two worries I frequently hear: The worry that a child isn’t learning enough content and the worry that a child is not doing enough work.
It's all connected
Children are continually learning, even when we don’t think they are learning, and everything can be learned through anything. Solid learning (and what I mean by that is learning deemed worthy by traditional learning standards) can be achieved through most any topic. We can embed math into a study of graphic novels, into a study of story construction into a study of grammar into a study of the development of historical languages, etc. Learning is all connected in some way. The world is vastly inter-related.
Usually, when I hear a concern of a lack of learning, it’s because we are measuring learning against the benchmarks with which we are most familiar…traditional models of education. Those traditional models of teaching and learning work for some children, but they don’t work for all children and many families that are homeschooling, have chosen the path because they wanted something different than traditional education. Unfortunately, a traditional education, is all most of us know. It lives in our bodies and our minds because that’s how we were educated and it’s very difficult to step away from the indoctrinated safety and security of what’s always been done. It’s the path of least resistance centered around listening to the experts.
Comparing apples and oranges
Traditional schools, do not typically embrace an integrated curriculum, but rather separate learning into discrete subject areas which allows for an organizational ease of delivery. Homeschooled children may not learn the same things in the same years or in the same order as traditional school curricula as many of those decisions are arbitrary. Some content is best understood in a particular order, as within mathematics or early literacy, but many topics in traditional education are randomly introduced, not even following developmental milestones. If you are comparing your homeschooled child’s learning to a traditional model it becomes all the more challenging when different topics are learned at different times and in different ways.
Will my homeschooled child be prepared for college? For the workforce? Will they be able to function as whole, competent adults without checking all of the traditional boxes in the traditional order? We may know in our minds that traditional education has plenty of holes and gaps all by itself. It has its own inadequacies and negative consequences, whether it be in the realm of the interpersonal, such as bullying, coercion, ridicule or shame or in the diminishing of creativity and free-thinking, but it also feels safe. It feels comfortable. It feels familiar…and therefore it calls to us. It’s the safety blanket of conformity that many of us sleep with at night.
We may venture out into something new, but we take the blanket with us…just in case. So, what do we do? For some of us, we desperately want to throw off the shackles and run headlong into the opportunity on the other side of the fence, but for others, we’re just not there yet. Maybe we don’t even think we want something different. Afterall, we turned out just fine as products of a public education. Didn’t we?
What do you want for your child?
I think it comes down to what do you want? What we practice every day, we become better at. We take on the color of the dye we soak and saturate ourselves within. What do we want for our children? We may want our children to ignite the fire within them by following a curiosity, but we may also want the safety of traditional learning found in the local school’s mathematics books. I completely understand the challenge.
When my oldest son was in elementary school, he attended an alternative Waldorf school…and unable at the time to step out of my traditional teacher role…I had him doing traditional learning at home many nights after school…because I was nervous. It was also me that had him studying traditional content before state tests when those tests and the content in them, did not matter in the slightest to his own elementary school learning trajectory. As a now twenty-something adult, he laughs at all the ridiculous hoops I made him jump through as I straddled both worlds. I believed in the alternative education, but I wasn’t quite ready to leap into the unknown and I certainly wasn’t taking the chance to screw up his life in any way. I let fear lead my decision making.
Looking back now, I see a different reality. I’ve worked with enough homeschooled kids to see education unfold in alternative ways. I go back to the question: What do we want? And how do we get there?
We want children who can think deeply, and concentrate fully on work that matters to them, write and communicate with clarity, depth and detail, kids that can self-regulate their emotions and express their feelings, kids that are kind and able to focus on the needs of others, while holding a steady vision or goal in mind, kids that can collaborate and be followers or leaders on a team, kids that read for pleasure and growth and exploration, kids that can problem-solve and find alternative ways to accomplish goals, kids that can put disparate information together in novel ways and create something from nothing, kids that can grind it out under pressure and rise up to meet challenges when needed. If a child has a practice of deep work, the ability to focus, and can break information down into smaller, manageable pieces, that child can learn anything. Some of these off-the-top-of-my-head ideas are taught in schools, but many are not and they certainly aren’t mastered there. Most are mastered in real-life, with real people, real stakes and real investment.
Our children can practice all of these things, in the real world with real purpose. Sitting in a school desk being told to accomplish someone else’s goals for some unknown purpose, without meaning, ownership or buy-in, is a hard sell for most kids. And still we bring this coercive experience of school into our homes because we straddle. We straddle what we want for the future with what’s familiar from the past.
Processes over content
I can look back at my successfully launched child and tell you it isn’t because of the extra work I gave him at night. It isn’t because of any traditional school knowledge he possessed. It may be because he was willing to work hard, was willing to do extra to achieve the results that other kids didn’t have to work so hard to achieve. It may be because he knew how to grind out a deadline instead of simply not doing it. It may be because life gave him some hard circumstances that he had to navigate to be successful in his goals. Perhaps, it’s not the content per se that makes the most difference, but instead the processes in which we wrap that content that make all the difference.
Instead of asking is my child learning enough content? Perhaps, the better question is Is my child putting forth the effort and grit to learn passionately and with purpose? When we focus on the processes, much of the content doesn’t matter. Sure, there are things all adults need to know how to do well, but if a child knows how to learn and can understand the processes that surround optimal performance, the rest just falls into place or falls away as irrelevant noise.
If you know someone that might benefit from this discussion, please pass this along. If you would like to join a group of like-minded homeschoolers, head on over to Boldschoolers Blueprint to find out more.
I’d love to hear from you. Does this resonate? Do you ever have these feelings of trying to straddle both worlds? Where’s your truth in the discussion?
