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I choose not to "school" in the conventional way. We do not have textbooks,
we don't "do school" every day in the sense of sitting down and doing
lessons. I try to incorporate learning into our lifestyle, making it a
natural, everyday thing. So when you ask the kids "what did you do for
school today?", they are not going to be able to say "we learned about ______."
Most of the time they don't even realize that learning is happening. They do not consider time spent playing "Math Blasters" to be "school," but it is. They don't consider our reading time as school, even though they are spending several hours a day doing it. They don't notice the way I slip science and history and social studies into our normal conversation, but the information is being stored just the same. I honestly think they have a better grasp of these concepts because we go over them so often and from so many different perspectives. Most of their learning comes in the form of "did you know that...." or "why do you think that happens?" The goal is not to see how much they can memorize, but what I can help them to understand. I want them to continue this lifestyle long after they are past "school age." I am 31 years old, and learning new things all the time! I don't think I would be learning so much if I had not chosen to homeschool. It has really helped me deepen my thinking. I find myself contemplating complex philosophies and ideas, and not just wondering what to fix for supper. I find myself wondering why things happen, how things work, and why we should or should not do the things we do. I don't want my kids to just watch life going by from the window of a car, not getting out and touching things or spending time studying them in depth. I want them to experience life. Not to see a bug and automatically swat it, but to look at it and notice it's color and shape and design and to wonder why God made it the way he did. To wonder why God made the grass green? Why did he make color at all? I guess I want them to continue to find WONDER in the world. Everything you can see was created to show you something about God. I want my kids to see this and to value things the way God intended. I think too many times we approach education as "accumulating information," and that at some point, you are done and you quit. This produces people who think they "know" everything and don't ask questions anymore. They put the right labels on things and think they know all there is to know. One of my favorite scriptures is: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night worketh knowledge, there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice is gone out to the ends of the earth and their words to the ends of the world."When we try to put God's creation in a box and put neat little labels on everything, we rob it of the vitality that God intends it to have. Conventional schooling methods tend to do this. It is like taking a bear, killing it, stuffing it, and putting it in a museum and saying "this is a bear." Outwardly, yes, it is a bear, but the life is not there. The thing that made it a bear is gone, and now it is just an image of a bear. If you had never seen a bear, you might go to a museum, study it, and think that you know all there is to know about it. But really, all your knowledge is superficial. You know nothing about what bears are like, only what they LOOK like. We are too quick to dissect things, to take them apart and cut them into little pieces to "see how they work." The trouble is, we can't put the pieces back together again. Isn't it better to start with the LIVING thing first and study it than to start with a dead thing? Then why do we parse nouns and verbs before children are really even reading well, cutting up learning into little bits before children ever get a good look at the "real thing." By the time we send them into the world, they think they "know" what a bear is like, and yet they have still never seen a bear. The Bible says "Above everything get wisdom, though it costs all you have, get understanding." About the accumulation of knowledge it says "knowledge puffeth up." Knowledge without understanding is like having a tank of gas without a spark. You may be full of it, but you aren't going to get anywhere! -- Stephanie (Ivywild913@aol.com) |