I had a long and very interesting discussion on the telephone about homeschool Saturday night with a woman I have never met in person. She is a friend of a friend who has pulled her two daughters from a “Classical Christian” school because it is too rigid. Her plan, for various reasons, is to put the oldest daughter into government school and homeschool the younger one. Her reasons for pulling her kids from the private school ring very true to me. One of the things about which I was most worried when we went back to homeschooling three and a half years ago was whether Kelly and Christian were going to have a childhood. I had no qualms at all about removing them from the toxic environment of the government school system controlled by union thugs and graduates of the abysmal teacher education programs here in the United States. We were very happy to get them away from the negative socialization endemic in the government school systems. We have always understood that a superior academic education was possible, even probable, in a homeschool setting. The problem was how to provide a nurturing environment that allowed the kids to excel both socially and academically.
Our problem with “Classical Education” has not been so much the theory behind it, rather it has been the rigidity by which it is often practiced both in homeschool and private school settings. The end product of such systems seemed to be little lawyers. While that may be a fine end for many, we did not want that for our children. Couple that with a parent’s valid desire that their children excel and you get a system that pushes children into learning things they can handle on a mechanical level, but with which they struggle spiritually. An example of that was what I feel was a mistake we made early on with our oldest daughter when we started homeschooling her in the first grade. Kelly was an early reader, so one of the books we have her to read was Little Women. It is a fine book. Kelly could understand the words and the sentences, but many of the concepts that had to do with some very adult struggles during the Civil War were impossible for her, at that stage, to understand. The book was not enjoyable for her at all.
In the end, it is I who learned the lesson. We made fundamental changes to the way we did things by slowing the program down so that the kids could get more enjoyment out of the materials with which they were engaged. We feel like they actually started to learn more when the learning became more enjoyable and understandable to them. They are still ahead of the game with good performances on nationally standardized tests, but we are not planning to graduate them early because we enjoy having them with us so much. In addition, our goals for their homeschool education have changed so they have more to do with humility and kindness than with academic achievement. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail, but the funny deal, is that the academic achievement seems to come more easily when the primary goals are spiritual rather than academic.