Scattered Thoughts on Homeschooling

As a child, Churchill possessed boundless energy and curiosity. He attacked life with a bold but innocent disregard for convention, thinking in dimensions few others were able to perceive, including his teachers. Like all children, he yearned to understand and please, but his eager mind would not allow him to march in lock step through a rigid, and at times senseless, curriculum. Like other men of intelligence and imagination – Einstein and Edison, for example – he was labeled “naughty” and “backward” simply because he was unable to grow in an environment of insipid conformity.

---from Never Give In by Stephen Mansfield, concerning the young Winston Churchill

And, quite honestly, if I had a child that was perfectly able to grow in such an environment I'd consider it all the more reason to keep them home. I don't want my children to conform to the standards of the schools. I don't want them to conform to their peers. I want them to be like Churchill: I want them to be unique, curious, strong, and exceptional. I want to challenge them to be something beyond what the standard school asks.

But today at least I don't intend to go through various philosophical reasons why I go for homeschooling. I don't want to go through them until I've thought through them a little more. One of my resolutions for this blog was not to feel like I knew what I was talking about every time I posted, but to raise lots of questions for myself... good practice for TAC and all that. In this case, though, my thoughts are so scattered that I'd probably just confuse myself.

What I was going to do was reminisce about my own happy homeschooled childhood. I was homeschooled starting in first grade and going through my high school years. After eighth grade we shifted more in the direction of unschooling, so up to a certain point and in a certain sense I was self-taught in my high school years. That's just a note for me, because I want to write about the benefits of that at some later point.

For now, the years prior to high school, when we were young kids running wild through the woods and possessed of "boundless energy and curiosity."

Our 'study time' took up about three hours in the morning, and that was it. It only took us that long to actually finish the books. Anything more would have been superfluous. And then Mamma sent us out into our wide woods, where we played until the twilight came on and we caught the first scent of dinner.

"Yikes!" cry some opponents. "I mean to say, yikes! You spent such little time studying! How in all the world can such children be a success in the world? When I think of all those kids sitting in school for their several hours while you spent three at the most... well, kids aren't going to learn if you give them so little structure."

It's true to an extent, I guess. Kids won't learn how to conform. We certainly were... oddballs. But I've always found the suggestion that just because we weren't in a classroom studying at a desk we couldn't have been learning anything. School and whatnot were part of learning, because they were part of life. Life was learning.

We devoured books. When we were children our bodies were growing awfully fast, so we always had an appetite for food. Our minds were growing too, and our appetite for books was insatiable. We benefited from having books presented to us as fun things, as friends and teachers, rather than as 'textbooks' which belong in the school environment. Books weren't associated with long hours schooling. To us books meant adventure and excitement, new worlds and ideas to discover, and inspiration for our play.

Our play was pretty much exclusively imagining. For the most part we didn't go for toys after a certain age... we had one set of little toy animals that we sent on all sorts of adventures and wrote stories about. Aside from them, we managed to get by with sticks from the forest floor for swords, and the fascinating world around us.

(In passing, when I talk about 'we' and 'us' I'm referring to my slightly older brother Brendan and I. We were inseparable, and often mistaken for twins.)

Shakespeare's Henry V was one of the earliest attention-grabbers that I can remember. Dad used to recite the St. Crispin's Day speech for us, and it fascinated us. The whole story fascinated us. We would play it for hours on end, taking turns as King Harry. We'd have magnificent battles on the old ridge, reliving days of battle and glory.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien was the earliest. We started 'playing' that when I was five years old. We called it 'the Frodo game.' When we lived in town for a brief time when I was six years old we used play with the snails that lived in the backyard and pretend we were Sam's children having merry times in Hobbiton. We wrote lots of stories about that, too.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis never captured us quite the way the Tolkien books did, but it still became a big part of our lives, and one hot summer day after thinking fondly back to Easter we decided to have a Narnian Easter Egg Hunt. We took our 'eggs,' which were in fact the roundest, smoothest rocks we could find, and hid them about, and then in persona of the four children we had a hunt.

We had our favourites to play, so not everything we read we acted out. We read a lot though. Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, and Arthur Conan Doyle were some of the early ones; and a little later there was Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. Living in the mountains as we did, we felt a great kinship with nature, so we immersed ourselves in the writings of natural historians, particuarly Fabre and Muir.

All this was extra-curricular, mind you. We read, wrote, and imagined because it was fun, not because it was part of school. Life was learning.

And then there was the music, the radio shows, the plays we put on, and the newspapers we wrote, but I'll save those for another day.

Frankly, I don't regret that I never went to school. I don't regret the unconvential way in which I learned. I don't regret the long free hours in the woods. I don't regret all the time I had to read, write, imagine, and live. Hopefully I can give my kids the same kind of childhood, because it was beautiful and, as it happened, I did learn a lot.