set a challenge in this post
So here is my response....
My eldest is 5. He would have started his second year at school at the beginning of September, however we home educate, or rather, unschool. Since it’s not been that long, and when we’re out and about it’s not obvious that he should be at school, we haven’t had a lot of negative comments about our home education choices from strangers but we have had A LOT of conversations with family about it so I’m going to focus on that.
I made the decision to home educate very early in Tayler’s life, so we have had quite a bit of time to research before he was of school age. We’ve also been parenting in a gentle child-led way too, which is why home education seemed like such a great fit for us (and unschooling in particular). We’ve always co-slept, fed on demand, and had no strict routine. All of this means that we’ve had to justify and stand up for our way of parenting for the whole journey so far!
We both come from relatively ‘normal’ families. They have been supportive about our decisions, which is fantastic,but they have also been sceptical and have had a lot of questions and, sometimes, negative comments.
At first they had the usual questions that you get when someone find out you don’t just send your kids to school; how will they socialise? What about exams? Will they learn what’s on the curriculum? What if they want to be a doctor? How will they learn...? Can YOU teach your child what they need to know?
You feel like you’ve been through an interrogation. Luckily I was prepared. I’d been reading unschooling blogs from people like Sandra Dodd and Pam Sorooshian. I’d been listening to Pam Laricchia’s podcast ‘Exploring Unschooling’ and reading John Holt’s books. It was still difficult.
How do you tell the people who raised you, that you want to do it differently?!
There was a lot of; ‘It’s working for us.’ ‘We’re doing what’s best for our children.’
It helps that we are confident in our decision. We can see that Tayler IS learning. He is spending time with other kids. But, ultimately, he is learning what he wants, so he actually and truly IS learning it. He’s not learning a random bunch of facts for a test, he’s learning interesting things so he can tell his friends or apply it to his life!
These are the things I tell the people who don’t know how you learn without school.
Learning happens in life, it’s impossible not to. If we give our children an interesting life, they will learn much more than if they were in a classroom, and more importantly, they remember it.
While you’re living life with your children, they meet people, they talk and play and make friends. That’s better socialisation than to be in a room with 30 other kids their age.
If you have any questions, comment away.
Thanks for reading x
Photos are of Tayler, since he’s technically the only home educated one. Top left is him with a corn snake called noodle, reptiles are a big interest for him at the moment. Top right is him on a small climbing wall. Bottom left is him learning how to strip and fix up a bike. Bottom right is him at a talk and tour of a local fire department, he’s having a go with the hose (cropped for privacy of another child).