I think that home education is an all or nothing activity. We are either 100% in or we are out. There is not much room for the 50/50. I have been reflecting on several conversations I have had with families who were tentatively entering into home education with a view to ‘try it for a year and then decide’, and the intention to ‘keep an eye on the National Curriculum’.
I do understand this way of thinking. It seems prudent to leave the back door open when we are taking such a big and bold step. The trouble is that constantly second guessing ourselves can leave us as Reuben, ‘unstable as water’ (Genesis 49:4), unable to fully profit from the many blessings of home education. I often wonder whether hesitancy cramps our style.
1. Hesitancy Means a Bad Day is a Reason to Give Up.
Bad days are a fact of life, and they happen to every doctor, postman, teacher, gardener, physiotherapist, 5-year-old and home educator. I have had lots of bad days, but the majority were weighted towards the first few years of home education. You see, my mentality has changed. Several years ago, a disastrous day would leave me questioning my whole philosophy. We would begin the morning slightly off-key and before I knew it everything would spiral out of control. Instead of setting my mind to coax what remained back to life, I would dwell on the niggling question of whether we were out of our minds to home educate (!).
Today, I am far more experienced and rational about blips. If something goes badly awry, I run a brief mental post-disaster assessment as to why it went wrong. It goes something like this:
– Was I as organized as I could be?
– Am I pitching my lesson too high or too low?
– Do I need to occupy the twins better?
– Do we need a few days off?
– Is a child feeling stressed by something?
– Do we need to try this again with sweets?! (I find quick quizzes with a bag of haribot rapidly cheers up the whole house!)
The 50/50 home educator considers abandoning ship after a bad day whereas the committed home educator rises to the challenge and asks what she has learnt and how she can do things better the next time around.
2. Hesitancy means we spend too much time worrying about the National Curriculum.
Over the past few weeks, here are a list of topics we have studied that have not made it onto the National Curriculum:
– Latin – I decided to give Latin a go and it has secretly become my favourite lesson to teach.
– Poetry Memorisation
– The library of Ashurbanipal – I know, I had never heard of it either.
– The brain – I am not joking. I looked in the KS3 science curriculum and there was nothing about the brain. Did we pay a blind bit of notice to this? Absolutely not, we ploughed on and covered the topic anyway.
Your list probably looks completely different to mine.
I have grasped the concept that all knowledge is God’s knowledge, and we study because we want to know God and his creation. We do not study with a view to ticking a box designed by somebody who does not know our children.
3. Hesitancy means we do not give home education our best shot.
A huge amount of energy can be spent on worrying whether we are on the right track or not. If we are undecided about what we are doing it is so easy to become half-hearted and despondent. We give up trying to improve. The same amount of energy can be put to much better use working out how to negotiate the track we have chosen to take. Paul writes, ‘whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.’ (1 Corinthians 10:31) Home educating counts as an activity to be done to the glory of God!
Finally, hesitancy says ‘I might not be cut out for the job’ whereas the 100% home educator says ‘God cut me out for the job and I refuse to quit while I am ahead’.
