So I ask you, Mr. O’Donnell, do you know why you are teaching your children what you are teaching them?
Read on to see my answer…
In the case of my children, I can say, "Yes. Yes, I do."
What I discovered before I had children was that knowing this fact or that fact, this formula or that formula (the things that schools spend so much time and effort on) was really not all that important in the average adult life. What makes a difference in most adult lives is whether or not they are able to find out things that they don’t know.
Like Chris, I don’t care how my children would do on standardized tests. Unlike him though, I don’t have a government breathing down my neck so my children don’t take them. Because I don’t have the external issues to deal with that he does I focus on what I believe is important. The main things I teach them is that they can find things out & how to find things out. I teach them problem solving, reasoning, decision making and logic. There are some basic skills that they need to be able to do this, but as Chris may have already pointed out, teaching those is not that hard.
Spunky has joined the fray and described a conversation she had with another mother who wanted to homeschool. Spunky asked the other mother,
Why do you want to educate your son?
If I had really been put to this question when we started homeschooling and I spent the time to think it over, my answer would have been, "To prevent him from getting the education that the typical high school graduate has." To understand this, though, you have to go back to what I said earlier about this fact and that fact because I am not referring to what is technically the curriculum of public school.
Even in my early 20′s, I felt that the average high school graduate is grossly immature, irresponsible, shortsighted and thrill-seeking. It follows then that, my goal was to prevent him from becoming any of those. While I didn’t realize it at the time, it became obvious over time that teaching the opposite was the real goal of our homeschool. And based on our first graduate and those getting there, I think that our methodology is a screaming success.
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