I had the most radical version of homeschooling I’ve ever encountered – (60-70s commune driven) in which we kids actually wrote our own curriculum (for each of four 10 week terms per year, with three-week holidays in every season – felt very decadent to have time off, out-of-sync with the other schoolkids)!
Not only did we pick subjects as our personal interests/obsessions suggested, so that our natural intellectual enthusiasm was allowed to build, when we personally felt it (a huge boost for self-direction pride and dignity), we also selected our own texts and what form we would use, to show that we’d done some work. Sometimes it was a lecture for the other kids, other times a rigorous chart of calculations revealing an underlying patter, sometimes a (well-documented) garden, or a small clear book, etc.
We’d pick one main subject, and one secondary for each term, and because we were all self-directing our educations, we were all very competitive about selecting challenging ‘original source’ texts (why we all ended up preferring the classical version of Euclid’s “Elements” to later dumbed-down variants).
Naturally, this also meant that sometimes we bit off way more than we could chew (and faced a humiliation when it came time to ‘present’ – since we couldn’t deny we had “Asked for it”).
We spent several entire days per week at a library (everyone had their own favourite – I dug the history stacks at the main reference library, where I could read century old newspapers on microfiche for clues) and though we did no formal curriculum or exams at all, the majority of kids who learned this way went on to have great success with higher education also. I never had the money for uni myself, but when I went to community college as a mature student, I ended up getting honours in a hard science subject (electronics), because at every stage I looked at what they wanted me to learn, and then felt fully authorized (in fact, irresistably driven to) teach myself the subject, even while also paying respectful attention to the teachers (who were great sources, for tough and subtle questions).
I didn’t read a single one of their textbooks, just checked the subject headers, and found better (harder) books, that went into far more depth than required. Got almost a quarter century career out of ten months of ‘higher’ education that way – doing what I wanted to be doing (solving interesting detective puzzles, on behalf of audiophiles and musicians). Kept at least twenty thousand pieces of nice classic gear out of the damn landfills, too!
Of course that trade became obsolete (robots now manufacture disposably cheap) but I had never stopped being interested in many other things also. Found a crazy editor in California who loved my stuff, and even went to art school (in my late forties) by becoming a “costume model” for art students (same fascinating lectures as the kids get – only they paid me, to be there to hear them!)
I have also helped innumerable friends with university school-work (my wife went from failing statistics to being bell-curved at over 100% LOL). And never once have I failed to get them to a breakthrough understanding in a single afternoon, just by showing them my own self-teaching techniques – even in subjects that I knew absolutely nothing useful about, at the start of the day.
Funniest of all though, is that I still find myself able to routinely best university people (Bachelors and Masters, anyhow) in their own specialist subjects! Not by tricky use of “gotchas” (the stupid aim of stunningly many, these days, and a very poor substitute for argument), but simply because I remain enthusiastically interested in ALL knowledge, which means I’m not so specialist-invested that I miss the way specialties inevitably link out to the wider world – often with consequences they ignore.
Key takeaway – don’t ever let anyone trap you on any kind of “Incomplete curriculum” argument when it comes to home schooling. The aim is simple and singular – lifelong celebrators of knowledge who feel fully-authorized to find out anything and everything which interests them, and have no traumatic associations with ANY of the great domains of inheritance of the human intellect.
Some days I really just want to say, (much like your fine cartoon) “It’s not rocket science, it’s really just about reading a great book, and enjoying that enough that you keep doing that.”
But in our ever more frighteningly stupified context, you might also look at homeschooling as a matter of investing in giving your child comparative super-powers for adaptation (and also paying for that, with extra frustrated loneliness, as they try to find like-minds among the seething hordes of idiots). ;o)
Cheers man! Keep doing what you do! Righteous cause(es)!
Superb piece!
I had the most radical version of homeschooling I’ve ever encountered – (60-70s commune driven) in which we kids actually wrote our own curriculum (for each of four 10 week terms per year, with three-week holidays in every season – felt very decadent to have time off, out-of-sync with the other schoolkids)!
Not only did we pick subjects as our personal interests/obsessions suggested, so that our natural intellectual enthusiasm was allowed to build, when we personally felt it (a huge boost for self-direction pride and dignity), we also selected our own texts and what form we would use, to show that we’d done some work. Sometimes it was a lecture for the other kids, other times a rigorous chart of calculations revealing an underlying patter, sometimes a (well-documented) garden, or a small clear book, etc.
We’d pick one main subject, and one secondary for each term, and because we were all self-directing our educations, we were all very competitive about selecting challenging ‘original source’ texts (why we all ended up preferring the classical version of Euclid’s “Elements” to later dumbed-down variants).
Naturally, this also meant that sometimes we bit off way more than we could chew (and faced a humiliation when it came time to ‘present’ – since we couldn’t deny we had “Asked for it”).
We spent several entire days per week at a library (everyone had their own favourite – I dug the history stacks at the main reference library, where I could read century old newspapers on microfiche for clues) and though we did no formal curriculum or exams at all, the majority of kids who learned this way went on to have great success with higher education also. I never had the money for uni myself, but when I went to community college as a mature student, I ended up getting honours in a hard science subject (electronics), because at every stage I looked at what they wanted me to learn, and then felt fully authorized (in fact, irresistably driven to) teach myself the subject, even while also paying respectful attention to the teachers (who were great sources, for tough and subtle questions).
I didn’t read a single one of their textbooks, just checked the subject headers, and found better (harder) books, that went into far more depth than required. Got almost a quarter century career out of ten months of ‘higher’ education that way – doing what I wanted to be doing (solving interesting detective puzzles, on behalf of audiophiles and musicians). Kept at least twenty thousand pieces of nice classic gear out of the damn landfills, too!
Of course that trade became obsolete (robots now manufacture disposably cheap) but I had never stopped being interested in many other things also. Found a crazy editor in California who loved my stuff, and even went to art school (in my late forties) by becoming a “costume model” for art students (same fascinating lectures as the kids get – only they paid me, to be there to hear them!)
I have also helped innumerable friends with university school-work (my wife went from failing statistics to being bell-curved at over 100% LOL). And never once have I failed to get them to a breakthrough understanding in a single afternoon, just by showing them my own self-teaching techniques – even in subjects that I knew absolutely nothing useful about, at the start of the day.
Funniest of all though, is that I still find myself able to routinely best university people (Bachelors and Masters, anyhow) in their own specialist subjects! Not by tricky use of “gotchas” (the stupid aim of stunningly many, these days, and a very poor substitute for argument), but simply because I remain enthusiastically interested in ALL knowledge, which means I’m not so specialist-invested that I miss the way specialties inevitably link out to the wider world – often with consequences they ignore.
Key takeaway – don’t ever let anyone trap you on any kind of “Incomplete curriculum” argument when it comes to home schooling. The aim is simple and singular – lifelong celebrators of knowledge who feel fully-authorized to find out anything and everything which interests them, and have no traumatic associations with ANY of the great domains of inheritance of the human intellect.
Some days I really just want to say, (much like your fine cartoon) “It’s not rocket science, it’s really just about reading a great book, and enjoying that enough that you keep doing that.”
But in our ever more frighteningly stupified context, you might also look at homeschooling as a matter of investing in giving your child comparative super-powers for adaptation (and also paying for that, with extra frustrated loneliness, as they try to find like-minds among the seething hordes of idiots). ;o)
Cheers man! Keep doing what you do! Righteous cause(es)!