Deciding to Homeschool

Our son is a preschool dropout.  It’s true.  I cannot describe the pain and indecision I felt at that time.  I was hurt by friends who did not support us and thought we would teach him to be a quitter.  I gave far too much consideration to their opinion that kids just have to learn to deal with the harsh realities of school if they want to succeed in life.  Our son did not enjoy preschool and begged not to go.  The ”sweet voiced” teacher was nice enough and the classroom *looked* exciting enough but it was the wrong environment for our child.  In the end, my husband made the decision to pull him out.  I was too emotional to make the decision nearly two years ago, in April 2008. 

I read everything I could find about homeschooling.  I read about the myth of socialization and the basics of *how* to homeschool.  I stumbled upon Charlotte Mason and connected to the idea of plenty of nature study, short lessons, living books and the use of narration.  Artist study and composer study is interesting and cultured.  Handcrafts are something we already love to do.  I am also impressed by the fact that children study Shakespeare starting in elementary school.  There is much more to like about Charlotte Mason.  A summary of the Charlotte Mason method is difficult to write but this is pretty good. 

I read “The Charlotte Mason Companion” by Karen Andreola. Then I read Volume 1: Home Education from The Original Homeschooling Series by Charlotte Mason.  I have read several other Charlotte Mason books, including “When Children Love to Learn” by Elaine Cooper, and delved into Ambleside Online and Simply Charlotte Mason websites.  Then Secular Charlotte Mason came along to inspire me.  All of this culminated to change the way we educate our sons.  The pearls of wisdom found in Charlotte’s life’s work are impressive.  Best of all, she really seemed to understand the way our son learns best.  Several modern books written about education, the power of play, and children in nature seem to channel Charlotte Mason in my opinion. Perhaps these authors do not realize she had the idea first or great minds think alike.  Either way, I can see a consistent thread that forms truth. 

As much as I love Charlotte Mason, I realize that modernizing some of her recommendations is necessary.  I do not mind the use of educational videos or computer software for teaching difficult subjects, if it works well for the child.  I am pretty sure Charlotte would have disapproved because of the endless stream of images.  She made it very clear that children should learn to form their own mind pictures.  Yet, we now live in a modern, high tech world.  I love living on a hobby farm in a farmhouse built in 1900 but we are not living in the Victorian Era. 

Of course, videos are a small part of our education and we rely mostly on living books.  I love the way a living book brings the subject to life and touches the heart of my child. I remember the dry-as-dust textbooks from my school days and I do not want to suffer through them a second and third time since we have two children to educate.  We do have a few well written “spines“ for history and science to help us organize our studies but the majority of our learning comes from living books and real life experiences.

I am also influenced by “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv.  Statistics about safety are exactly what I needed to know to fully enjoy nature today.  One of my favorite quotes in “Last Child in the Woods” is this:

“The back page of the October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him—but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work. The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.”

Now I am happy my son is a preschool dropout.  I feel more confident about our choice and enjoy the freedom that comes from setting our own course.  To help us plot, we use the Charlotte Mason method in a Tidal Homeschooling fashion.  This post by Melissa Wiley aptly describes our homeschool.  At times, friends have expressed concern over our lack of schedule.  I say we have a good routine. We have the flexibility that my children need for spontaneous learning which I believe is more effective than a clever lesson plan in an artificial setting.  In case you are still wondering about socialization, our children have several friends and enjoy plenty of ”free play” instead of structured activities throughout the week but not every day.  It is more than enough time to learn social skills and develop lasting friendships.

———————————————

Charlotte Mason Volume 1:

The Child should be allowed some Ordering of his Life.––The details of family living will give him the repose of an ordered life; but, for the rest, he should have more free-growing time than is possible in the most charming school. The fact that lessons look like play is no recommendation: they just want the freedom of play and the sense of his own ordering that belongs to play. Most of us have little enough opportunity for the ordering of our own lives, so it is well to make much of the years that can be given to children to gain this joyous experience.

Helen Keller.––I think what I have said of natural development as opposed to any too carefully organised system is supported by a recent contribution, of unique value, to the science of education––I mean the autobiography of Helen Keller.

When she was nineteen months old, Helen had a severe illness, in which she lost sight and hearing, and consequently speech. She never recovered the lost senses and here, we should say, was a soul almost inviolably sealed, to which there was no approach but through the single sense of touch; yet, this lady’s book, written with her own unaided hands (she used a typewriter), with hardly any revision, should rank as a classic for the purity and pregnancy of the style, independently of the vital interest of the matter. How was the miracle accomplished? Of her childhood Helen says herself that, save for a few impressions, “the shadows of the prison-house” enveloped it. But there were always roses, and she had the sense of smell; and there was love––but she was not loving then. When

vol 1 pg 195

she was seven Miss Sullivan came to her. This lady herself had been blind for some years, and had been at the Perkins Institute, founded by that Dr Howe who liberated the intelligence of Laura Bridgman. But Miss Sullivan is no mere output of any institution. She is a person of fine sanity and wholesomeness, trusting to her personal initiative, and aware from the first that her work was to liberate the personality of her little pupil and by no means to superimpose her own. “Thus I came up out of Egypt,” says Miss Keller of the arrival of her teacher, and the voice which she heard from Sinai said, “Knowledge is love and light and vision”; and then follows that amazing and enthralling epic which tells how it was all done, how the one word water was the key which opened the doors of the child’s mind, while the word love opened those of the closed heart. Thenceforth, many new words came every day with crowds of ideas; and it is not too much to say that this imprisoned and desolate child entered upon such a large inheritance of thought and knowledge, of gladness and vision, as few of us of the seeing and hearing world attain to. The instrument in this great liberation was nothing more than the familiar manual alphabet, followed in course of time by raised books and ‘Braille.’

Miss Sullivan on Systems of Education.––Like all great discoveries, this, of a soul, was, in all its steps, marked by simplicity. Miss Sullivan had little love for psychologists and all their ways; would have no experiments; would not have her pupil treated as a phenomenon, but as a person. “No,” she says, “I don’t want any more Kindergarten materials . . . I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built

vol 1 pg 196

up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think, whereas if the child is left to himself he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things, and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.” It is a great thing to have a study of education as it were de novo, in which we see the triumph of mind, not only over apparently insuperable natural obstacles, but over the dead wall of systematised education––a more complete hindrance to any poor child than her grievous defects proved to Helen Keller.