I saw this invigorating, inspiring post today from The Libertarian Homeschooler:Some Things I Wish I Had Understood When I Started Homeschooling
1. Lessons do not equal learning.
2. Curriculum does not trump real work.
3. My expectations about "who our children will be and what our children will do" need to sit down and shut up.
4. Most veteran homeschoolers don't do sit-down lessons until the child is six or older.
5. Some veteran homeschoolers don't do parent-initiated lessons.
6. Some children don't read until they're 10. Others, 13. And then they pick up and are reading at the same level as their been-reading-since-kindergarten peers. Without intervention.
7. The years we did book learning like mad, our son tested really well. The years we did no book learning at all, our son tested better. Don't put much stock in book learning or testing.
8. No lesson, no video, no book, no class can substitute for a curious parent who is with her child and asking questions, exploring, reading aloud, making messes, making mistakes, facilitating, doing intellectual match-making, and explaining stuff. There's no substitute.
9. You must spend a lot of time with your child every day, intentionally, and open-heartedly.
10. If you focus on understanding the child's needs and capacities everything else will fall into place. Until you understand the child you have in front of you, nothing will fall into place and you'll keep going from thing to thing to thing.
"A child who is miserable with a curriculum is not 'learning' a whole lot. As for what they're 'supposed to' learn and when they're 'supposed to' learn it, I think they pull this stuff out of a hat and call it good. It has nothing to do with how children learn and what will serve each individual the best. It's about pushing the meat through the grinder. A numbers game. We find that we do better without adhering to a standard scope and sequence because we're tailoring the education to the individual."
~The Libertarian Homeschooler
Standards, by definition, are NOT individualized. Teachers are encouraged to differentiate instruction to meet all children's needs, but in a classroom of 30 or more, that is utterly impossible.
A standard suggests that there is a specific concept that a child should have mastered at a specific point in time. But why? Why is it so important that a child master any given concept at a particular age? If you have children, think about this. At what age did each child learn to walk and talk? Probably it was different for each kid. So then, why can't each kid master concepts and skills at his own pace throughout his school days? Why must we have deadlines for mastery?
I've heard a story of an unschooled kid who was slow to begin reading. Suddenly, at age nine, he blossomed and couldn't stop reading. By public school standards, he would have been labeled with any variety of (often negative) terms used for kids who have not achieved mastery by an arbitrary set date. He likely would have been placed in remedial reading classes under the Special Education umbrella, where kids who enter rarely leave.
Strict and arbitrary standards are not healthy for kids. I say let kids learn what they want when they want, because, why not?
