I saw a post on one of my Facebook groups recently that jarred me. Someone was talking about an online virtual school for their kindergartener and asking if it was “enough.”
I’ve seen a lot of these posts recently. Parents desperately trying to piece together a full curriculum for their kids – math, reading, language arts, science, history, computer, PE, art, music – all for their 6-year old.
I myself have talked to a few friends about being worried if what they were doing is enough. I tried to reassure each one, but honestly, my oldest is in 6th grade, and so I think they were taking my advice with a grain of salt. After all, none of my kids have got into high school or college yet, and so I’m far from a barometer of a “successful homeschooler.”
Some respond to my reassuring with: “But I want my kids to be able to go back into regular school next year.”
As if by homeschooling, you are guaranteed to fall behind.
When the truth is the exact opposite.
In fact, many homeschoolers do entire grade levels in a matter of a few months, because when you’re at home, working one-on-one, you’re working so much faster than in a classroom of over 20 students.
These new homeschoolers are panicked. Sometimes I want to yell from the rooftops to these parents – you’re missing the point of homeschooling! The point is not to have a “complete” curriculum, in which your child sits in front of a computer for 6 hours a day. But I also want to reassure each and every one. And I still try to do just that. I tell them that school is only a relatively new invention, and children have been learning from their parents for thousands of years before that. You don’t have to be a teacher to homeschool successfully, you just have to like your kids.
Then they ask me about assessments. I want to scream. I hate tests. As a kid, I thrived on them, but do I actually remember anything I learned that I studied for a test?
Tests are the enemy of learning. As John Holt, an American educator, author, and proponent of homeschooling, wrote in How Children Learn, “…our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning and even in time most of the capacity to learn. In How Children Fail, I said that the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.”
When you are teaching your kids one-on-one, testing becomes unnecessary. In schools, it’s a barometer for how well the teacher is doing their job (and even then, it may not be accurate).
At home, we don’t need to do that.
Even if you argue that we do, what’s the point? If you majored in English in college, do you really remember all the parts of a cell? And if you’re a biology major, do you remember how your teacher explicated Oh Captain, My Captain? If you need to know it for the test, you remember it until Friday. If you love the subject matter, you remember it for life.
Therein lies the key to homeschooling. It allows students to be free to focus on what truly excites them. They can become an expert in zoology, or coding, or gymnastics, or gardening. I want to give my kids the space to figure out what they love. I want them to jump off the hamster wheel of getting into middle school to get them into high school to get them into college, where they are then hastily pushed off the wheel themselves, bewildered and perplexed at where to go next.
I want them to step off, look around, and figure out what really moves them.
Relax, people. Enjoy this time with your kids. Don’t teach at them. Learn with them. Foster curiosity and their love for learning will be with them their whole life. And I promise, homeschooling will be just as magical as you hope it will be.