Monday Musings - The Paradigm Shift that Frees the Homeschool

Photo taken from http://www.childrenandnature.org/connect/

There are two maxims that I believe lead to freedom when it comes to home educating your child. Realizing these was a real paradigm shift for me.  The two maxims are:

1)  Your child was designed to learn.  This is how we have survived for millions of years.  Human children develop slowly but they are sharp as tacks when it comes to absorbing knowledge.  They are little sponges that are consciously and unconsciously soaking up everything around them.  You can see this as babies develop into toddlers and acquire language.  They begin to ask why about everything.  They learn through imitation, conversation and play.

2) The drive to grow into a competent adult is in every child.  Again, I look to our existence on this planet for millions of years.  The end goal of that slow development where so much time is spent absorbing enormous amounts of knowledge is to become a competent adult.  Competent enough to survive, mate and raise the next generation.  This is why we are still here on the planet!

These two things are inborn to human beings.

If you accept these two maxims as true, then it is quite freeing!  The burden is not so heavy on the home educating parent.  You really don't have to do much except give the child something to imitate, someone to talk to and lots of opportunity to play.  And as for the second maxim, as the child approaches adulthood, your job might be to guide the child in determining how to become a competent adult; we know he already wants it, but getting there might require some help.

The bad thing we can do is to diminish the insatiable curiosity and drive that children innately have.

One way to do this is to doubt that the child truly does have the wherewithal to learn.  We can see them as the proverbial empty bucket that needs filling (and if we don't fill it, we are failing, we think).

 We can force the child to develop in ways that are unnatural, for instance not letting them imitate, converse and play but forcing them to learn in ways that turn their natural excitement to learn about the world into a drab and onerous confinement.

We can panic about the child's possible slow development when compared to others and then we can try to push the child into keeping up with others, not honoring his innate, personal developmental arc.

 We can decide that sound sleep, nutritious food, lots of exercise, and creativity are all 'extras' that can be ignored or dealt with shabbily and that this somehow won't affect the child's maturity or stunt his natural drive to learn and to grow.

I love this painting.  I am sure Baby Jesus never ate dirt or bugs.

Since I am Catholic I see these innate drives as God designed.  God has a plan for each of us and his plan is reflected in how our children respond to the world we provide them.  We need to honor the innate drives God gave his children and then we need to let our children blossom in God's good time.  For many children the institutionalized scope and sequence is not reflective of God's timing.  It does violence to the basic drives and needs of these children.  It expects each child to follow some abstract average for things like learning to read that run contrary to the child's own personal developmental arc.  This damages the child's desire to learn and to become competent.

If we really accept that we are made in God's image, then we should respect God's design.  Let children learn through imitation, conversation and play and don't destroy that desire to grow into a competent adult by forcing arbitrary and unnatural practices on them that cause alienation from their healthy drives.

The hardest thing is to hold on to these two maxims as the children grow.  Raising children is a long term project and often times it is hard to see the forest for the trees.  Especially when we are constantly inundated with the idea that we must follow these abstract, institutionalize standards if we want to be good parents.  Our children must learn to read at 5 or 6 or they are 'late.'  All our children should be able to study calculus at age 17 or they won't get into college and will be failures as adults.  This is the brainwashing we must constantly be vigilant against.  It is an uphill battle that must be fought under constant scrutiny, judgment, and pressure.  We are under constant bombardment!  Our culture is toxic in so many profound ways.  Even the best intentioned persons often don't realize the faulty assumptions they are operating under.

Why isn't Joseph wearing his kippah?

There is release and joy in embracing these two maxims.  It is freeing, truly freeing, to be able to relax and know God is with us and if we trust in Him,  our children will be fine.  We need to love and care for them, rejoice in their being, marvel at how they unfold as they grow.  We need to nurture and guide them. We need to teach them to love love (and God is love).  We need to let them be free to do as God wills, for doing God's will is the only true freedom (since He is Love).

A lot of secular unschoolers use the phrase 'trust the child.'  But I prefer to think of it as trusting God.  I trust the inborn drive to learn and to become competent that He placed there, because He loves His own.