When we set the intention to spare our child from a public school “education”, I knew our family faced some serious decision making regarding how we would conduct our lives post-school. We knew that we wanted to do things way differently than how it all had been going but we also knew we didn’t want to “drop the ball” per se, so I began researching homeschooling. My research took me on the same emotional rollercoaster I experienced when we embarked on cloth diapers: nothing obviously stood out and then I became overwhelmed with the clusterfuck of options. Online public school, Classical, Traditional, Waldorf, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, Relaxed, Electic, ksjngjkdfngkjndfkgj!! Okay, I made the last one up. My point is that there are many approaches to learning and for someone like me who was new to homeschooling in general, it was incredibly easy to feel lost in the abyss.
Right away, I began to reach out for guidance by telling some fellow homeschooling mamas about our decision to “pull the plug” on public school and how we weren’t yet decided on our homeschooling approach. One fellow mama told me “Girl, it’s hard. Sometimes we only ‘do’ an hour a day and it’s not always cute how you see it on Pinterest.” Another mama friend of mine said “It’s really hard to balance it all, so we do a couple hours of an online curriculum.” I gotta say, I LOVE that my fellow mamas are willing to share their “behind the scenes” feelings about homeschooling because their input was already relatable before even beginning and their input helped to steer our family into the direction we were going.
Not so fast though. Here’s the part where I have to paint you a clearer picture and admit that not very long ago, I use to have this magical ability to turn ANYTHING into a stressful event for our family. So naturally, I was scared that homeschooling would be another bunny from my hat. How do homeschooling mamas have the ability to morph from mom to teacher and then back into mom again for “lunch” break? Do kids enjoy that? How do you break the day up into “classes”? How will I meet everyone’s needs by embarking on this huge decision? What if I spend our entire savings on a curriculum and my daughter has no interest in it?
This is around the time where I had to stop and consider two things in order to keep it real. First, I had to consider that I probably wasn’t the first women in history to feel overwhelmed by all the homeschooling methods/options/styles and second, I would more than likely end this search successfully if we used the same methods we used during our cloth diaper search. After all, we did end up finding the PERFECT perfect brand of bamboo cloth diapers after all was said and done. I just had to keep the faith because I knew going back to public school wasn’t an option.
The first and most important step was to envision learning and harmony together. Here are few things I knew from the get-go: I pictured our daughter excited to learn. I pictured myself happily facilitating her interests. I pictured my daughter learning more than she would in public school. I pictured a natural, stress-free homeschooling experience. I pictured her having a better relationship with reading, writing, and math than I had formed in my public school experience. These “truths” prompted us to really dissect our issues with the public school system and to decide on what, if anything, we wanted to integrate from public school into our homeschooling.
After a couple family discussions, soul searching, and some good ol’ learning from the past we realized that we actually didn’t want to integrate ANYTHING from public school into our homeschool and here’s why: Forced education isn’t learning. Decontextualized curriculum isn’t learning. My sweetheart and I remember quite clearly how confusing school was and how much we disliked basically anything that we were forced to learn. We wanted our daughter to actually learn. So I did more research. What is the “ideal” homeschooling “method” for a family who wants a natural, stress-free, learning environment that a child would actually be eager about?
Welp, the answer was so simple that it was almost beyond our comprehension: Unschooling. Unschooling is when the philosophy of child-led learning is adopted and trusted to be the guiding light of the child’s learning experience. We have chosen to go a step further and adopt radical unschooling which is adopting the same principle in all other areas of our family life. Unschooling unlocked our child’s natural abilities, talents and she has developed a strong desire for learning about all the things that interest her. Though we do not measure her or grade her, it’s difficult NOT to notice that her reading, writing, and math skills have all dramatically improved as a natural side effect of adopting this philosophy.
Reading, writing, and math are really only superficial ways of “measuring” the benefits of unschooling though because there are so many more areas our daughter has begun to thrive in. For instance, her entire concept of time is more refined these days because she’s no longer spending 8 hours a day away in an environment where time is dictated by “bells.” Another example that is easy to notice is that her communication skills have flourished since unschooling because she practices those skills at home with me all day without being censored, controlled in any way, or subject to the injustices of age-segregation. Unfortunately, this has made her phone calls with her former classmates sometimes frustrating because their communication skills are still in their infancy in comparison to hers. Not that we like to compare but it IS something to note considering we embarked on this journey hoping she would learn more than she was in public school.
If it weren’t for radical unschooling I’m not sure that we would have had the joy of seeing and encouraging our children to develop their unique abilities, discover their talents, or refine the skills of their choosing. For instance, I had no idea that my daughter was so talented in creating clothing for her dolls and I’m not sure she would have ever had the opportunity to discover that about herself if she continued to be forced to read, do homework, or sit at a desk all day. In fact, I wonder what the world would be like if everyone were able to do exactly what they wanted to do every day. I will write another post illustrating the myriad of benefits of radical unschooling but today I just wanted to share how we found our bamboo cloth diaper of learning & harmony.
Learning & harmony can exist side by side when you remove the agenda behind it all.
Congratulations @freesister! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCongratulations @freesister! You received a personal award!
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!