Classes at the Kitchen Table and Everywhere

            When we schooled our daughters at home, at first we tried to match the length of our school days and our curriculum to the public schools. The length of our school days and our determination to match the public school curriculum soon dwindled, because we had two effective teachers, Amanda and Juniper, who told us what worked for their education and what didn’t.

            Laura was the main teacher throughout our daughters’ home schooling experience. I helped teach, particularly math and writing. I also served as advisor and moral supporter for the entire project. I advised, don’t push the students too hard. Let their own interests direct them through their studies. Let them provide most of their own motivation. Allow them generous time to play and to be children, because happy children will be willing learners, and because play is also a learning process.

            That approach worked well for us. Our daughters were avid learners. We read to them starting when they were babies. They saw a huge treasure of adventures and learning in books that filled libraries and book stores, and they wanted to learn to read early. They learned to read at the same time, when Juniper was six and Amanda was four, and they learned to read well enough to read anything they wanted to read, including complex “chapter books” in less than a year.

            It was important to their home schooling that we had no television. Without t.v., their entertainment and education lay in their reading and in their active use of imagination.

            I advised, “Trust our children to guide their own education. Children are intelligent, sensitive beings, capable of startlingly mature judgements. They can guide much of what they learn.”

            Had it been up to me alone, I would have taught our daughters to read and then stayed almost entirely out of their way as they learned. Laura wanted more structure in their education, primarily because she didn’t want the state to have authority in their education by testing them and finding them deficient. She insisted on and taught them classes in traditional subject areas, geography, history, and science, for example.

            Juniper and Amanda acted as intermediaries between my opinion about the best way to educate them and Laura’s. They guided their education by what they were willing to do. After two or three hours at the kitchen table, they were unwilling to devote more time that day to structured classes. They were unwilling to use much curriculum from the public schools because it was too often repetitive and boring.

            I’m glad I didn’t entirely have my way and Laura didn’t entirely have her way, because the compromise we worked out, more structured classes than I would have chosen but fewer than Laura would have chosen, with considerable weight given to our students’ interests, proved to be very effective.

            When classes finished for the day, learning continued. Amanda and Juniper read voraciously. Their interests guided them to books about mythology, classic literature, the structure of the English language, and many other subjects. Their experience helped guide their education. As they observed and interacted with wildlife, adults, and gardens, they became interested in the environment, complex communication about ideas, and the processes of life. They found books at the library, read, and sought more knowledge from the world around them.

            We four realized learning was not held captive in the schoolroom. It went on everywhere, all the time. We saw that we must not kill interest with too much structure.

            Of most importance, Juniper and Amanda learned how to learn. They learned they were not limited by age nor by anything around them. They could find the sources of knowledge they needed, and they could learn what they wanted to learn.

            Laura and I, their parents and their teachers, nurtured their interest and their desire to learn by supporting them, by respecting them, by loving them, by believing more in them than in the power of structured, prescribed education. We believed and let our daughters know we believed they were complete humans, invested with wisdom and abilities that needed respect and culturing to blossom into full flower.

             Amanda and Juniper went from education at home into successful college careers and showed that our careful listening for divine guidance, our careful listening to our daughters, our research, seeking effective approaches and curriculum, and our determination to base our family’s education in respect and love enabled the four of us to get it close enough to right to really matter.