Slow Schooling Chapter Two

The Real World

Side note: After doing some pondering and praying, I’ve decided to open this book up to everyone to read. I think it’s that important. I’m also opening up the comments to everyone and encourage you to share as you feel led. If you decide to support my writing (and publishing) with your subscription, I would be very grateful. You can also help me by sharing my work. Thank you!

Feb. 25, 2007

3:35 PM

Thoughts on a Happy Home

... I think at times there is a fear that they are going to end up uninformed about and unready for the “real world”, and that they are going to miss out on “experiences” that somehow have become the holy grails of growing up....

The “real world” I gained my schooling through was from 12 years of almost perfect attendance in the government schools. I went on to five years at the University of California not only for a BA degree, but credentials to teach dozens of children at a time in a classroom setting. I was a “good student” with good grades, good behavior, and a love of doing homework and learning. However, once I became a “real” adult, I realized that I didn’t really learn much other than how to follow the rules, do assignments given to me, and to do my best to not disappoint my elders. Three times in my recollection did I attempt pardon from ridiculous assignments that made no practical sense, and failed from getting freed from them. So even though I graduated university with an excellent GPA, I certainly could not attain much of the “formidable lists” of goals that were presumably gained by children under the age of 12 a hundred years previous (1).

The idea of a “real world” is simply a rip off of reality to bring you under condemnation and censure to even thinking of living or learning in any other way. It’s one of the reasons why good parents are typically viewed with suspicion and assumed to be inadequate to the task of teaching their own children in matters of faith, family, morality and politics. The Real World says the emperor is dressed, morality is born of imagination, and that real community revolves around peer groups who won’t ever read or listen to an alternative viewpoint lest offensive triggers send them to their safe places.

If a child learns how to read, measure, discern worldviews, cook a meal, grow a garden, fix a tire, and treat a wound, is he ready for the real world? If she learns how to research, how to write, change a diaper, recognize flora and fauna and actually care, is she ready for the real world? I think before we throw around this notion that children who are educated in alternative ways aren’t ready for the “real world”, we ought to not only ask for a definition of terms, but take them in hand and have a real look around at how we really live our lives.

Homeschoolers are not immune to the idea. In fact, there is (now) a whole industry built around providing workbooks and busywork to help mark the time (and please grandparents and legislators) during school time at home. Except we at home are not running a school. We are constantly in a flow of preparation-consumation. We prepare the food, we eat the food. We teach our kids to read, and then you can’t keep them from reading even if you tried. We also add in explanation and teach as we go throughout the day: why this food and not that one, how we as a family relate to one another, even what makes the world go round. This kind of education is a threat to grooming a culture of conformity.

It’s unfair to pigeonhole individual, unique children into the same methods and speeds of learning. Homeschoolers are notorious at wanting to cover as much ground as possible in as wide a swath as possible, so that their children will not only be well equipped for whatever comes, but that they will be exonerated if questioned about things left untaught. The problem there, of course, is that it is impossible even for (especially for?) government schools to reach such fantastical goals. Those goals instead narrowly focus on getting students ready for the “real world”, the world in which I successfully worked a job in my younger years that would not even call me by my name, but by “Employee 99”.

The truth is children don’t have to learn it ALL! It is a pleasure and profit to spend a whole week, or a month, or a year, on whatever you or they are gung-ho about, whether it is learning bird names or studying Leif Erikson. It is sad I gave up on learning higher math and chemistry lab, even though I loved those subjects, because teachers never let me approach things in my own visual way of learning. Instead, it was “do page 54...then 55.....then 56....” I don’t remember much from textbook learning other than answering the questions at the end of chapters (in complete sentences of course). Do you happen to remember the English monarchy? In order? And if so, how has that been made useful to you?

Here is a list from my then 6 year old about what she really wanted to learn:

grow flowers

sew

make paper flowers

make dolls

make bows

plant a sea of flowers

make a dress

make a basket

make a book

make a tin car

do corking

cooking

Now, if we did nothing else but those things, would she not learn math, reading, writing, botany and handskills? And yet we’ve been brought up to think, “Oh yes, those sound great. We’ll do them. Someday. After we do a couple of pages of phonics and math. And handwriting. If we have time...”

Habits and appetites are also cultivated during those young years. If we spend too much time away from our homes, children learn that home is simply a place to collect our material goods and lay down our heads, that it is not a place of production and enterprise. If we involve our children in too many classes, cultural events, vacations and sports teams, they will learn to persistently seek to be entertained or overwork to seek that elusive gold and fickle public and cultural approval. If we do not involve them in the real honest-to-goodness “real world” of laundry, cooking, and daily mundane chores, they will learn to be passive and expect to be served. If we put too much emphasis on academics, they will find it normal to amass tremendous student loans for the sake of having multiple letters after their names but have no practical outworking of what it means to use their knowledge to love and serve others, much less how to survive with basic skills.

I’d encourage you to consider what your “real world” really involves, and if the journey your children are on reflect that. Too many of us are just floating (or riding the rapids!) down the years of the rest of our lives without giving any consideration to our own talents, interests, gifts and desires. Instead, we are trapped within a system in which sameness is encouraged and sometimes demanded. We are, at this time, expected to fall in line to mass schooling, to cultural thought and behaviors (which of course changes like the wind), to join and celebrate the “real world” of taking on debts of all kinds, living a consumer lifestyle, and always, always pushing forward to get the next new thing or upgrade. We don’t know our neighbors, we’re seeking our affirmations on online media platforms, and we’re living in a world of virtual-everything. That, to me, doesn’t sound very “real” at all.

Goodbye, Self-Confidence; Hello, Trust

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

There is more to learning than just acquiring a checkmark in someone else’s idea of a scope and sequence for a child’s age (or “grade”). I need to remember: Isaiah 54:13 And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children.

When the Lord leads me to teaching materials, textbooks or otherwise, I need to just trust Him in that leading and not allow doubts to germinate into the fear that I am not doing “enough”. Jesus Himself (and His leading) is more than enough, even in our schooling. And if I hold fast to that, great shall be my peace, too.

1. Aug 30, 2016 https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMAttainments.shtml