One word? When seven would do…

I’ve been pondering education, autonomy, our approach, where it might all end up and so on recently. I’ve been involved in several conversations with people who have asked questions which I have had to really think about to answer and then ended up thinking about lots more afterwards. I’ve read odd remarks here and there on other blogs, listened to others in their educational ponderings and reasonings and realised that in some areas we are very similar to others, in other ways we are worlds apart and far from either of us being right or wrong we are both totally right somehow, which is something I would not have accepted a year or so ago.

I think the last two years of ‘Being Home Educators’ has been the biggest journey of my life so far. I have learnt so, so much. About me, about Ady, about our children and our family. I’ve learnt so much about people both as people and as individuals, I’ve listened to others agonise and I’ve agonised myself. I don’t think I have it sussed forever but I do feel like I’ve got it sussed for now, for us. It feels right, we are happy, the children are learning, I don’t feel surrended or guilty and with the odd tweak here or there still to work on I think this is working for all of us as individuals and as a family unit. The best thing for all of us at the moment is that we feel free. We are not bound by anything we do not want to be bound by, we have no resentment and no feeling of having to do something depsite not actually wanting to do it (probably best described as the homework feeling!).

I think we are probably closest to the autonomous approach educationally. The children spent the vast majority of their time playing. They play with each other or alone, they spend lots of time playing with friends making up games and stories and role playing. They play endlessly with all of the many toys and resources in our house making cities and world, recreating history, playing out stories, books and films in their own way, pretending to be people off the TV. They do, what in my very small experience of being around children seems to be what children do naturally when left alone to get on with it.

I was talking to someone at a soft play centre recently – I try not to get into discussions with strangers about HE. You end up answering the same questions with the same answers which sounds tired to your own ears, you graze the surface of it rather than say anything profound and at best just hope that they will leave the conversation a) not about to take down your car registration number and ring Childline / the LEA / Social Services and b) maybe even think a little about what you’ve said. I don’t feel I have any responsibility whatsoever to convert anyone to HE either as an idea or as something they should do themselves, although if as a result of a conversation I may one day have someone who didn’t know about it as an option and it was something that knowing about helps them or their children then that would be good. 🙂 But the woman raised two very interesting questions while chatting to me about it and although I answered them at the time with practised, polished confidence I did come away and wonder a bit more about them myself.

The first was about curriculums and how you would cover everything without one. The second was what would I do if they reached teenagerdom and got the ‘can’t be arsed to do anything’ type attitude that characterising teens and spent all day in bed doing nothing at all.

The currciculums one first then. When we started this whole Home Ed thing I was fairly convinced I would be following some sort of curriculum. I looked at Sonlight but decided it was too religion based for us and came to the conclusion that I would work out my own sort of curriculum using workbooks and the NC. I downloaded all the NC stuff, looked at early years goals and stuff and bought shelves full of workbooks, got Studydog and plastered the walls of the playroom with alphabet posters and pictures of 1 button, 2 frogs, 3 balls, 4 flowers and so on. Oh I had big plans for timetables, coloured in charts, graphs, stickers and certificates of achievement! Several false starts later with occassions behind me I’d probably rather forget of me standing over a weeping child holding his pen in the wrong sort of grip desperately trying to remember the order of a, b, c and d and write them down again and threatening school each and every time we tried to tackle one of the 100 lessons all of which we found really rather hard work instead of the advertised ‘easy’ I decided that school at home was never going to work for us. I think I secretly harboured hothousing tendancies. I believed I had bright children who would stream far ahead of where their schooled peers were, effortlessly impressing everyone who met them with their ability to recite the 7 times table whilst playing the violin and colouring in maps of the world in pastel shades never going over the lines into the seas! But I’ve had to realise that I am not your classic hothousing mama. Aside from our day to day lives not fitting very well with routine and sitting at desks for an hour a day, we don’t have the desks and we’d all really rather be somewhere else instead!

So we stopped. We moved away from everything even remotely educational in the usual sense of the word. I listened to the words I was to say to that woman in the soft play centre about a year before I even said them and I realised that my children didn’t learn to walk and talk as a result of me drawing up a timetable and us working on the M sounds before they said Mummy. We didn’t have a movement a week to put together at the end to create ‘the crawl’. They got where they are on these basic skills in their own time, in their own way, in their own style. Sure I helped and facilitated but it was just in a low level way of talking to them lots, naming stuff all the time and using all available resources to help them learn to talk. We read books together, we chatted to everyone we met, we got out and about so they learnt words in their own contexts (shopping centre, cashpoint, trolley! 😉 ) to make the link that much easier. They watched me and everyone other grown up around them walking, having watched the older babies around them crawling. Their natural curiosity spurred them on to learn how to ask questions and learn how to do stuff for themselves rather than squawk and wait for someone else to do it for them. And do you know what? Turns out they were both natural walkers, just like they were born to do it! And as for talking? Well I reckon I have two of the most articulate children I know, they both have a huge vocabulary, know all about changing pitch and volume to great effect and just which words will create the outcome they are after!

I’m not saying they would learn everything they need to know simply by existing, or actually maybe I am, I’m not sure. But that isn’t quite what I’m planning to do anyway, however it is the basis of it. If they need to know they will learn it and by fostering that love of learning, that inate curiosity and that passion for knowing stuff and quest for knowledge I imagine they will never ever stop learning. So my role is to not push them into it, or dictate what it is they need to know and learn, but to help them learn it once they know themselves. I can provide the tools and the resources, answer the questions they ask or help them find out the one’s I can’t, cheer them on and celebrate their successes, gently nudge or push them that bit futher when they are tired and help with the skills and foundations to smooth the road ahead. What I can’t do – and this is the radical bit I don’t believe anyone else can either – is prescribe what it is they need to learn and when they should be learning it. I see my role as the person in the gown and face mask who hands the surgeon the tools he asks for – a lesser role than the surgeon perhaps but one which the surgeon couldn’t be so brilliant without. In the same way as I might be the one who buys them their toys but I cannot dictate what games they play with them or how their imagination brings them to life I don’t think I can presume to tell them what they need to learn. There are of course bare minimums – a level of literacy and numeracy are mine – but I think that to impose any greater enforcement would quite possibly stunt rather than give wings.

I should say at this point that I am not against curriculums for others, I do not think that everyone else is stunting their children by sending them to school or doing school at home. I have no idea what is best for other families, but this is what I think is working for ours – I can see the results already in my children and I hope to continue seeing them grow and grow.

The second question was about motivation really – the example being the ‘don’t care’ teen who sees no purpose in trying and if they can get away with not bothering then they will. For my children who have been given responsibility for their own education I very much hope the motivation they currently possess will remain and grow. I hope that by taking their own future in their own hands they will realise that the winner of pushing themselves to be the best they can is themselves and similarly if they take the piss by spending all their time lying in bed sleeping their lives away then it is their life and no one elses. That is not of course to say I wouldn’t care but one of my biggest life philosophies is that we are each responsible for our own happiness – if I can pass that on with the idea following on that by deciding what they want out of life and then going out there to get it there is nothing to be gained by wasting a single day.

Whilst I have been typing this I have been sitting on the floor of Davies’ bedroom while he is supposed to be falling asleep. He laid there telling me (with no prompting, actually he was distracting me from this – lol) the starting letter and sounds for box, Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Mummy, crocodile, aligator, apple, leap pad, cat, cupboard, drawer, snake, bed and so on – basically everything he could spot in his bedroom. He was right on each and every one 🙂 He also ‘drew’ each letter in the air as he said it, again with a 100% success rate. So he’s five and he can’t read or write yet but he probably has more of the mechanics in place than a child who can!

Home Education is experimental. There is no denying that we are pioneers of something different and something which there is no guarantee or proven evidence of success for. I am very aware that by making this decision for my children it will be something which stays with them for life. It will be one of the first pieces of personal information they impart about themselves in any new relationship or acquaintance. I will spend many more years justifying and explaining it and then pass the baton on to them to do the same. It is a gamble and the way I am choosing to do it is perhaps even more of one. But I believe it’s an ‘everything to play for’ type of gamble, one which could just net massive rewards. For now my reward is happy children who spend lots of time being children, who have a fantastic relationship with me and each other, who have no stresses or unrealistic expectations on them and who are allowed to be whoever they want to be (even when sometimes that is Buzz Lightyear or a Fairy Princess for the best part of a week), who are learning all the time in everything they do and who are loving pretty much every minute of their lives. Who never have to put their hands up to ask a question and who get the answer from riding a magic carpet holding the hand of someone who loves them, they are surrounded by friends and for once would probably prove the saying that these are the best days of their lives.