Thoughts on Unschooling and Schedules

Recently a friend of mine made a facebook post that linked to a chart comparing "unschooling" and "schooling". Some of the hallmarks of schooling, according to the chart, were curriculum, schedule, the instructor choosing what will be studied, and requiring the student to work on an assignment until it is completed. The chart also said that schooling involves building one's life around the school district schedule, and trusting others to nurture and develop one's child. I objected that just because I have an organized home school with curriculum and a schedule and assignments doesn't mean that I have become a slave to someone else's interests or failed to create a nurturing environment in my home. The friend replied that the chart was meant to contrast unschooling with state school or private schools.

I still feel it is disingenuous of the chart's creator to link curriculum, schedule and assignments with bad aspects of state schools, since the two can and often are separated by home-schooling families. However, it did get me thinking. I often concentrate on how my home school is different from state schools. But in this area it is quite similar. I wanted to make sure that I had a good reason for the structure of my children's education. I can't just do something in school that way because that is the way I was taught. I need a good reason. So, here are my reasons.

1. Making sure all necessary material is covered: My goal in educating my children is to glorify God by raising up servants for his Kingdom. In order for my children to be fully equipped servants there are certain things they need to learn. In my understanding, unschooling involves allowing the student to choose to study only what he is interested in, for as long or as short a time as he is interested in it. Now, I try to make my lessons interesting for my children, but even if they aren't interested, they still need to learn doctrine. They need to learn how to read, and how to write clearly. They need to learn basic math skills. They will need to learn how to budget a household. They may never be particularly interested in some of these things, but they and many others are necessary for them to learn and so they are necessary for me to teach.

2. Creating interest: Another problem with letting the child only study what he is interested in is that often we don't know what we are interested in until we try it. I used to think that I hated history. But, 4 years ago I started to study it, because I knew I was going to have to teach it. And, to my surprise and joy, I found that I really love it. I am sure we have all had a similar experience at some time. Sometimes we may have to make our children study something, but hopefully we will do so in a way that sparks their interest.

3. Instilling discipline: More than imparting information, I want education to develop in my children a Christian character. An important aspect of such a character is self-discipline. One reason I start school so early with my children is that I want them to practice sitting still, listening, and controlling a pencil. Having a goal (assignment) and working until that goal is accomplished is a skill that everyone needs to be successful and useful in life. Being able to work with a schedule is an advantage to almost everyone. Whether you are a homemaker, self-employed or an employee, one must be able to accomplish tasks on time. Having a curriculum and scheduled assignments gives the child plenty of practice in this life skill. Further, who gets to work only on things that are interesting to him. No one. We all must do some things that are interesting and others that are not. Uninteresting duties like housework and paperwork are part of life. Children need to learn early to do such work with a cheerful attitude if they are to have a Christ-like character. Again, I don't want my lessons to be dull, but if the child thinks a lesson is dull, completing it is still character-building, while allowing him to shirk it for something more fun would only develop a self-centered attitude in the child.

4. Accountability for me: I want to give all my children the best education I am capable of giving them. I want to give them all an equivalent education. Notice, I didn't say identical. They each have their own God-given talents, abilities and callings, so each will pursue a different course, especially as they get older. However, each must learn a core of essential material, and each should be given my best effort. Seeing how the quality of my housekeeping varies with pregnancy, health, outside circumstances, and my own sinful laziness, I know that I need a curriculum and a schedule. It would be so easy for me to slack in my teaching at certain times without a way to keep myself accountable. And since the results of teaching are less visible than the results of housekeeping, I might not even notice that I am short-changing my children if I didn't compare our progress with some concrete goals.

5. Reflection of the character of God: I have said over and over that the only way to really understand any subject is to study it from the perspective of the Bible. All truth is God's truth, and as such all truth reflects His character. God has created a beautifully ordered world. My favorite example of this is math. I love math. I especially love the underlying patterns that connect different aspects of math, how everything fits together so elegantly. To best understand math, one can't just nibble on pieces here and there at a whim. To really understand math one must build it up in ones mind, brick by brick, in an orderly fashion. This requires a well-thought-out curriculum. Similarly, history doesn't really make sense unless it is seen as His story. If a child is allowed to study WWII one month and Ancient Egypt the next, as his fancy takes him, it will be very difficult for him to see the hand of God's almighty Providence in the flow of history. And so, he wont have learned history, just a bunch of trivia. All subjects are this way.

6. Obedience to God's Method of Teaching: All truth is God's truth. We don't know or understand anything unless God reveals it to us. And how does God reveal himself to us? In a Book. Unschooling de-emphasizes facts (calling them trivia) and emphasizes experiences. Now, we all should want to experience God and His work in our lives. But these experiences are sweet extras, not the core of our Christian faith. Our senses are not infalliable. Our heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Our emotions are fickle and easily swayed. We may learn from our experiences, but the surest way to learn is by the preaching, reading and studying of the Scripture. When we learn the Scripture, we are better able to make sense of our experiences. In the same way, experience can be a good teacher, but it is a much better teacher when we have knowledge, gained through systematic study, to help us interpret our experience. The way we learn about God's Creation and Providence should be the same way we learn about God himself, by listening, reading, and systematic study.

Bible Class Project on the Armor of God

Last fall we did a project to learn about the armor of God (Eph. 6:10 - 18). I made a Timothy paper doll and the armor, and he colored it in. We made a different piece of armor each day, talking about it together.


We also illustrated some proverbs. This is Proverbs 12:18a "There is one who speaks rashly like piercings of a sword"

A Call to Dunkirk

Milepost

Today I started the school year. This will be Timothy's 3rd year of school and Emma's 1st. I write the following not to brag, but to give you an idea of what you can expect from your children. People today, influenced by state schools, which are designed to produce a dumbed-down and malleable populace, expect far too little of their children. Of course, learning should be fun, and each child is an individual and will learn at a different pace, but I hope this post will give you some idea of what one can expect one's young children to learn.

Timothy is 4 years old. This year we will be continuing the age-appropriate Bible projects in "Plants Grown Up". Our current project is to go through the child's catechism and talk about each question and answer. We are taking several months to do this thoroughly.

By the end of the last school year he had completed the 1st grade math book from Rod & Staff publishers. This means he learned his addition and subtraction facts through 10, how to judge which numbers are greatest or smallest, counting by 2's, 5's, 10's and 25's, pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, cups, pints, quarts, feet, and telling time at the hour and half-hour. If I gave him grades at this age (which I don't) he would get C's. But this is exactly where I want him to be. Math is so repetitive in the early grades that he will get several more years to perfect his knowledge of this skills. And in the meantime he is learning something I never learned in school because it moved too slowly for me at that age. He is learning to stick with something even when it is difficult and even when you make mistakes. This is something I still struggle with; I give up far too easily. Hopefully this training will help him stand his ground in all areas of life. He is moving on the the 2nd grade math book this year.

By the end of last year Timothy had read all the Little Bear books we could get a hold of. He was learning 5 three-letter spelling words each week, as well as learning the phonemes and some spelling rules, and going through "The Writing Road to Reading" by Romalda Bishop Spalding. Again, his work would probably be graded with C's. We will continue in a similar fashion this year, but he will move on to reading Frog and Toad books as well as others of similar difficulty. I have been reading some stories to him, as well.

This year he will continue in "Baby Lambs Book of Art", which he started last year.

This year he is starting "Hey Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek!" This series teaches Koine (biblical) Greek to elementary school children. The first year covers the Greek alphabet and how to say one sentence (The Lord is my helper).

I am also hoping to get him started with cello lessons as soon as the cello teacher can fit us in.

Emanuela is 2. This year she will continue to memorize the child's catechism. She has only memorized 4 so far.

We will also be starting my homemade beginners math. Concepts to be learned are larger, largest, smaller, smallest, shapes, sorting, days of the week, months of the year, identifying today's weather, and tracing with a pencil.

I try to strike a balance between encouraging diligence and not overwhelming my kids. But I am encouraged to think I may be doing it right because every day that we are on "vacation" and don't do school, Timothy is disappointed. And Emma, when her own lessons are done, hangs around the table while I teach Tim. And they both exhibit nearly the same enthusiasm about starting school each day as they do about watching their favorite cartoon. I can't expect much more; they are kids, after all. ;-)

An Excellent Op-Ed

Big Brother at school

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | October 17, 2007

"FREEDOM of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever," the party's national platform declared. "We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government."

That ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education was adopted by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1892, which just goes to show what was possible before the Democratic Party was taken hostage by the teachers unions. (Wondrous to relate, the platform also warned that "the tendency to centralize all power at the federal capital has become a menace," blasted barriers to free trade as "robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few," and pledged "relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure.")

Today, on education as on so much else, the Democrats sing from a different hymnal. When the party's presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates "comfortable" with that?

"Yes, absolutely," former senator John Edwards promptly replied. "I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don't get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don't get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right." None of the other candidates disagreed, even though most of them say they oppose same-sex marriage.

Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party - and much of the Republican Party - has been transformed from a champion of "parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" to a party whose leaders believe that parents "don't get to impose" their views and values on what their kids are taught in school. Do American parents see anything wrong with that? Apparently not: The majority of them dutifully enroll their children in government-operated schools, where the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state.

But controversies like the one in Lexington are reminders that Big Brother's ideas about what and how children should be taught are not always those of mom and dad.

Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages. Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the significance of music and art. With parents so often in loud disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation's entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Yet the government's control of 90 percent of the nation's schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned.

But we should be concerned. Not just because the quality of government schooling is so often poor or its costs so high. Not just because public schools are constantly roiled by political storms. Not just because schools backed by the power of the state are not accountable to parents and can ride roughshod over their concerns. And not just because the public-school monopoly, like most monopolies, resists change, innovation, and excellence.

All of that is true, but a more fundamental truth is this: In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character. As we wouldn't trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them.

What 19th-century Democrats understood, 21st-century Americans need to relearn: Education is too important to be left to the government.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

How Much of Your Money is Being Used to Fund Musharraf's Abuse of Power?

Entangling Alliances
Ron Paul
November 13, 2007

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst111107.htm

"In the name of clamping down on "terrorist uprisings" in Pakistan,
General Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and imposed
martial law. The true motivations behind this action however, are
astonishingly transparent, as the reports come in that mainly lawyers
and opposition party members are being arrested and harassed. Supreme
Court justices are held in house arrest after indicating some
reluctance to certify the legitimacy of Musharraf's recent
re-election.

Meanwhile, terrorist threats on US interests may be more likely to
originate from Pakistan, a country to which we have sent $10 billion.

Now we are placed in the difficult position of either continuing to
support a military dictator who has taken some blatantly un-Democratic
courses of action, or withdrawing support and angering this
nuclear-capable country. The administration is carefully negotiating
this tight-rope by "reviewing Pakistan's foreign aid package" and
asking Musharraf to relinquish his military title and schedule
elections.

By the time he complies with the requests of the White House
sufficiently to continue to receive his "allowance," courtesy of the
American taxpayer, his mission will be accomplished. A more friendly
Supreme Court will be installed and enough of the opposition party
will be jailed or detained to assure an outcome of the elections that
will meet with his approval. All the while, our administration lauds
Musharraf as a trusted friend and ally.

So much for a War on Terror. So much for making the world safe for democracy.

Free trade means no sanctions against Iran, or Cuba or anyone else for
that matter. Entangling alliances with no one means no foreign aid to
Pakistan, or Egypt, or Israel, or anyone else for that matter. If an
American citizen determines a foreign country or cause is worthy of
their money, let them send it, and encourage their neighbors to send
money too, but our government has no authority to use hard-earned
American taxpayer dollars to mire us in these nightmarishly
complicated, no-win entangling alliances.

When we look at global situations today, the words of our founding
fathers are becoming more relevant daily. We need to understand that
a simple, humble foreign policy makes us less vulnerable and less
targeted on the world stage. Pakistan should not be getting an
"allowance" from us and we should not be propping up military
dictators that oppress people. We should mind our own business and
stop the oppressive taxation of Americans that makes this meddling
possible."



If you don't want your hard-earned wages to be supporting dictators
like Musharraf and others around the world...

Vote Ron Paul!