Hi Sarah, thanks for your reply. That's really encouraging and I'm grateful for your perspective.
Every family is different and one rule isn't going to work for everyone, so its really important to constantly consider and re-evaluate your individual needs when making a decision as big as whether or not to home school. Being able to tweak and arrange your children's education to tailor to your whole family's needs is one of the great perks.
I don't want you to think that I am disagreeing with you though, as obviously you are entitled to make those decisions yourself, but I just wanted to respond to the concerns you raised to demonstrate how we, as a family have responded to them. (In theory!)
We have to keep reminding ourselves and remembering to look at DS's education from a more obtuse angle than what we are used to. Most of us government schooled now-adults have such a fear of the word 'failure' and we associate it with so many things. We feel like we've failed when we slept past our alarm, or slightly burnt the dinner, or lost our temper, or forgot to go to the post office.
To see it acutely, we would be spending our lives like a stalling engine, starting and failing, starting and failing. But from a distance you can see that in reality we are just making human, natural mistakes that are only platforms to take the next stop from, usually with a bit of knowledge or at the very least, incentive. We're going to do that until we die, there will never be a time when we are perfect, or "there yet".
To look at my son's education from an intensive, severe angle, I would probably be saying something along the lines of. This is his potential, this is what he is achieving. Who's fault is it that he's not achieving his best? Why is he failing?
From a softer view, and how I have to keep reminding myself to see it, as long as he is a well-rounded, inspired, productive adult, then we have not failed. Regardless of how much money he earns, what age he marries at or how many holidays he goes on a year.
One of the benefits, I hope, of not being part of the school system is not having an ultimate deadline for everything. While, of course, I want him to be able to set and achieve short-term goals, I don't think he
needs everything to have a cut off point. What you've said about last minute career decisions wont apply to him if there is no such thing as a 'last minute'. There is no age limit to start uni, or complete GCSEs or ALevels. And a doctor at 36 is surely the same achievement as a doctor at 26, he will be as able to cure disease and save lives. (My mum has started studying to become a psychological therapist, with no previous qualifications bar an "O level" in Domestics.. and she's 52. She'll be 58 when she graduates)
If my son decided only when he was 25, the age I am now, that he wanted to become a doctor and only had basic knowledge of all required subjects, then I would encourage him to set up a realistic plan of how to bring those levels to where they needed to be. Those are skills which he will already have instilled in him from homeschooling and self-led education; drive, incentive, goal setting, self-teaching.
There will, again
hopefully, be no limit to how he views his own education. I expect he wont see it as education, he'll see it simply as, What I'm Working On Now. He will always be welcomed to live with us for as long as he needs to, and we will provide for him as long as he is there. He is our son always, and I don't subscribe to the "18, you're an adult, you're on your own" ideal. Thankfully neither to my parents. I swear to God every Sunday my dad tries to give me £20 pocket money.
Another factor is this: You used an example of preferring creative subjects and disliking Maths and Science, but if you were able to learn those subjects outside of the school environment, you mightn't have been as apposed to them as you grew to be.
If you had learnt maths through helping with doing the shopping (think you could teach percentages, budgeting, calculations, ratios - anything with grocery shopping!), games, measuring ingredients for cooking, designing and constructing woodwork projects; if you were able to delve into a book of how the human body works without having to surface to change subjects and start another irrelevant topic, if you could read until you had filled your curiosity; or studied the stars and gravity yourself without being pressed to fill in workbooks, or stop and start at the class' rate; or if you had never been told that it wasn't your 'strong point' or that it was an area that you needed to work on, would you have been apposed to it quite as much? How much do you think you would have learned without really trying?
Its subjective, of course, but looking at my own education, I know I would be much better in many subjects if it wasn't for the school system.
For example, I abhorred maths growing up. All I knew was that I was awful at it, I would never understand it and I just hated it. But recently I have been helping my mum with her OU course and was self-teaching how to do percentages, long division and multiplication. And I got it in seconds and realised that, oh my god, Maths is really interesting! Its really fun. (Not exactly advanced but considering I failed my GCSE maths 4 times, its impressive for me!)
I hated English until I unexpectedly got the highest mark in my class in p7 and it suddenly became my passion. I thought I hated science until I got a Grade 7 in my KS3 and ended up getting top 5% in my biology GCSE exam, having only got one question wrong.
What is it that made me hate those subjects? It probably wasn't the subjects themselves, cause turns out they're seriously interesting!
I can't speak for everyone, and like I said it is hypothetical at this point because we haven't, technically, began homeschooling yet. My son might just be a natural genius, I'm not sure. But I gave him a piece of paper when he was two, that had CAR, CAT, DOG, COW, PIG, TOM (his name) and sat with him, gave him a pen, and played the "what noise does a ... make" and as he answered them right I drew a picture of the word. A few days later he found the paper, brought it to me and we did it again. Within a few months he was able to write and spell all the words.
The other day - a year later - I found him sitting with two books in his hand and writing something. I looked to see that he had drawn a tractor, and was using a book to reference the spelling and wrote TRACTOR underneath and asked me for more paper so he could try a digger.
He went into the bathroom the other day and wrote ROBBIE (my husband's name) on the steam on the shower door. DH asked him what it was and he said it was "daddy's letters". This isn't something we tried to teach him. We just gave him some tools, and he figured it out. We gave him a pen and paper and never sat and demanded he do this or that, or told him what way to hold his pen. He draws his letters from the bottom to the top, instead of how we were taught but at the end of the day he is a four year old who is able to spell, read and write words, with absolutely no direction.
AND the bonus is, he learnt it for his own enjoyment. For mere entertainment! And he taught me that a baby swan was called a signet. I didn't even know this!
Your concerns about what a 6/7 year old will want to be taught are very valid. We worried about that too until we discovered that Tom, aged only 3/4 is wanting to be taught words, reading, numbers, colours, he constantly wants to be quizzed on everything and despite us deciding not to start schooling him until 6/7 years, he has begun to lead the way already.
Realistically, most things that a 6/7 year old is interested in, especially with boys, has the potential to be very educational.
Using stereotypes as an example: dinosaurs opens the door to a whole host of historical and archeological lessons, using years and dates as maths teaching, dinosaur themes for creative writing, the science of it is all there on a plate.
Spacemen/aliens will lead to space interest, geography, planets, constellations, again using distances and time for maths, gravity, space travel, open door into physics. I'd say if you gave an interested 11 year old a book about E=MC2, you would be shocked at how quickly they understand it and potentially grow to be passionate about it.
Cars = engineering; tractors = agriculture; animals = zoology/biology/evolution; even a little boy who's obsessed with guns will find interest in World Wars, politics, European history.
Houses = design; sharks = marine zoology, sustainable fishing, biology, geography; planes = travel.
Everything your child will be interested in will be based on something natural, educational and interesting. You say that a person can't know what they want when they're a young age, and I disagree. I think a human's main interests will be apparent from a young age, its having freedom, access and tools to build that into a passion, to build that into a source of income, to build that into a career. (I've come back full circle to where I was as a child with my interests mainly in English monarchy, cooking, baking, cleaning, interiors and having a baby to love. In Careers they asked me what I wanted to be and I said a housewife and mother, and they said "no you can't do that, that's not a thing" and in the end I bloody did anyway! People think its not ambitious, but its my ambition. It uses my skills and interests to their greatest potential and I am genuinely, in my soul, very happy! *I'm mentally giving the middle finger to my career's teacher.*)
Someone, at the age of 16, who isn't interested in biology isn't going to become a doctor. That's not to say that they can't, but if the interest and passion isn't there, then why should they? For the sake of money?
Why should a 16 year old who's interest is cars, and can name every part of an engine and take a car apart and put it back together again, be led to think that they should put their passion aside and study to be a doctor? They shouldn't be encouraged to be anything but a mechanic, or engineer, or sales person!
Well, I'm not sure if you'll agree. I don't mean to be overly presumptuous with my theory! lol
The child will lead in a direction, and as a parent I believe I have to do my job of rounding it out. For example, my son is obsessed with tractors. This is brilliant for me because I am from the country and love being back here (sitting in my mum's living room right now). I would love for my son to have a job in agriculture when he is older because I think it is more humble and wholesome than an industry-based job. So we visit farms all the time and chat with farmers and they get Tom to help them with silly little things like holding the goats horns while they check their teeth, and he loves it. We sat in my mum's kitchen a few weeks ago and he watched a tractor turning the soil in the field and when it finished he just said. "The tractor went around the field to make the black soil come up to the top." And my mum in two seconds explained how you have to plant seeds in soft soil and he was like, yup! got it! Something that a year 10 teacher would probably take a day to explain to a class.
The reason I am saying all of this is just to reiterate the trust I have in Tom's ability to lead his own education. And I one hundred percent agree with you that as a parent we have to... looking for the right word here. Intercept? at times, but, for me, it will only be with encouragement and guidance. Rather than taking the lead.
As I mentioned, its the backseat driving that I feel my role mostly involves. Suggesting ways to incorporate maths, english, science, religion, politics, anthropology, literature into all of the things that Tom chooses to learn. Its going to be a challenge and I am so looking forward to it!
By the way, I know I said a lot of "you" and "yours" but what I meant was a grand, overall "we " and "ours" and that wasn't at all meant to be a defensive attack. I hope it wasn't mean seen as such, but you can never be sure how things come across when its just words on screen without focal context. Especially when its something you're passionate about and you go off in tangents as I tend to do!
Like I've said loads of times before, it takes all sorts to make a community and I have such a passion for the homeschooling community. With helping people and finding advice and perspective in what other people say, its so interesting.
Incidentally, I am aware that I still haven't posted up any links. I will do that very shortly! I'd do it now but I'm not on my own laptop atm. And also, Tom just came up to me with a little bath toy that's shaped like a water mill and said "the river goes through this bit and turns the wheel, and that turns the gear, and that grinds the grain and makes it into flour so that we can have bread."
I'm like, HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS? genius baby.
