Belonging
I spent the morning mucking out stables and filling hay nets. And this afternoon I found myself keeping house – these days I’m becoming quite ruthless at throwing out things that are just lying around (by my slight hoarding standards anyway). For about 5 minutes the kitchen surfaces were sparkling, and the slate floor was hoovered of golden labradoodle hair. I finally put up a picture that has been sitting in my room for nearly 2 years since we moved into our farmhouse.
But what am I doing? Haven’t I got 3 children to home educate? If I spend the day keeping house, where does this monster of a task fit in?
It is usually with disbelief that people ask about our home education.
“It’s remarkable if you can give three boys of such different ages proper schooling”, is a comment I get a lot… laden with incredulity, often blatantly disapproving, and sometimes with kindly tolerance.
Belonging outdoors
What were my children doing the whole time that I was shovelling horse manure? Were they inside completing assignments and worksheets, one after another until the allocated school time is complete?
Well, when they weren’t having their riding lesson, they were helping me lug soaked hay nets to our parched fields, and filling water troughs. They were cuddling chickens and inspecting the veg patch. They were caring for their animals. Ingenious and creative, they were busy with inventions of pully systems and skateboarding routes. Fit and strong, they were motivated.
They were choosing to contribute and belong to our family enterprise.
Belonging indoors
Their belonging is also established at home, whether with the organisation of their own space, their bedrooms, or our snug/playroom. They took the afternoon to arrange their models, and assemble their books by author or theme.
In the downtime that followed they chose to set themselves a STEM challenge – a zip wire for their teddies.
Perfect imperfection
I’m not saying that it was a perfect day with perfect children. All of our days tend to be very neurodiverse, laden with sensitivity, distraction and the typical mix of ADHD and testosterone that would make anyone run for the hills.
To nurture belonging
Belonging is not something that children pick up by osmosis. Like love and acceptance, belonging cannot be fostered in isolation. Belonging is an unwritten (like many of them), but key aspect in our home education. It is active and intentional, and involves daily forgiveness, ownership, interdependence, consideration, contribution and autonomy.
School curriculum
Above is a description of my confidence that holding the curriculum loosely is still providing my “children of such various ages” with a full and proper education.
Next to me as I type, is a shelf full of curriculum materials, aimed at fulfilling the typical left brain centred, analytical fragments of logic and exposition that might result in some grades by the time my children are 15 or 16 years old. And yes, this is actually part of our children’s daily education. It is my honest opinion that there is a lot of benefit in regularly including much of this material. However, 7 hours a day is not necessary, nor even attainable. They would lose any sense of motivation within a few days.
It is only after we stepped away from this regime that our children gradually rebuilt their natural, and unquenchable, sense of motivation, contribution, belonging and autonomy.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/what-should-i-teach-my-homeschool-children/
Belonging in our family enterprise
On our little ‘homestead’, we choose to keep horses, chickens, dogs and a beautiful (imperfect) veg patch and orchard. Our children are invited to embrace this, our family enterprise. It doesn’t generate any money. In fact, since moving here and re-fencing much of the land, it generally drains us dry. But it is the work of our choice.
Our children each have their individual interests and talents. Not all work is rewarded with money. We choose to live the way we do, with the burdens that we have. It’s hard work. As we learn to relax into the daily ebbing and flowing tide of tending the house and the ‘homestead’, we can find a much deeper reward.
Confidence in skills
What most people consider extra curricular activities is what I consider a main part of our educational curriculum. Sunday school, scouting groups, debate, judo, musical instruments and groups, art, woodwork, animal care and crafts are what I believe contribute to a full education. Children feel confident and capable when they are learning skills.
History of education
I hadn’t realised how closely linked the rise in feminism and the discussion of children’s education are. The removal of women from the work place was part and parcel of the same movement that moved children out of their family homes and into schools for their formative upbringing 150 years ago.
And yet, since the millennium, it seems to be coming round full circle. While women have contested prejudice against their rights for over a century, home education is steeply on the rise only recently.
- Before it all started (mass compulsory schooling), large families shared an income from their cottage industry, within a patriarchal system. Their family business thrived on large families of adults working skilled trades, and passing their skills to their children, everyone contributing towards a common goal. (I don’t think this togetherness can be found in schools, with children and staff all very much in competition with one another, fact piling and filling out worksheets (or now completing exercises on iPad apps), but rarely becoming very proficient in any kind of skill.)
- This cottage industry rapidly began to dissolve by industrialisation. The work place moved away from home, causing resent that women with their child care and household work had lost their earning capacity.
- Competition between women and child factory workers, and men striving to uphold their craft and skill set, intensified to the point of social destruction.
- Resent and emasculation resulted in women often bringing home a larger pay package from working in factories, than men who tried to “defend their traditional privileges and work organisation” (p89 History of Education).
- Large families broke down with young adults, having lost any hope of inheritance, and relying on their employer, could be more independent with their earning capacity on behalf of their young families, thus losing any incentive of caring for their aging parents.
Eventually women were excluded from public life and paid work, and mass, compulsory education became mandatory through schools that were intentionally designed to deskill.
Childcare and deskilling
It was not the intention of schools to teach children skills and to think. Nor did children receive the same personal care and love, belonging and sense of contribution.
It was a largely the state claiming childcare. The working class were simply, and by prejudice, believed morally suspect and unfit to raise their own children. Rhythms of housework, childcare, sleeping, eating and leisure were set by the dictates of capitalist work discipline, and ruled by the factory whistle (and later the school bell). Schools were purposed for the policing of families, where the main objective was that children be ‘pliant and obedient to discipline’.
It only goes back 150 years that mass compulsory schools were implemented, and purposefully aimed to deskill the middle and working class.
Full circle
But of course it is coming round full circle – we are in an age where children often have at least one if not more extra curricular activity after school. Parents desire their children to grow in the skill set of their choice.
Especially since covid, workplace has become more fluid with many making the move to work from home.
Morality
However there are many differences now that children did not have to contend with a century ago. The moral imperative that the state had previously taken such a stance on, and that the state taken out of the hands of the church, is no longer of any significance at all. With unlimited tolerance, schools have nothing to say about any moral compass at all. Indeed, skirting around so many controversies it’s hard for anyone in schools to say anything at all. Furthermore, they often teach ‘woke’ ideologies according to the latest internet propelled movement.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/religious-and-moral-studies-in-education/
Out of control
Schools also have lost the capacity to monitor the many realms of internet access. Children are only ever as safe as their peer with the most lax internet protocol at home.
Daily, personal
Is it really remarkable that I’m able to provide my 13, 10 and 6 year olds with a full and wholesome education? Not really no… They partake in our family enterprise, learning life giving skills on our homestead, foreign languages as an every day part of life, being involved in church life, and benefitting from my husband and my own working skill set. They learn their ‘schooling’ of course, but education is so much more than that. There is a search for Truth, and it is only out of school that children are allowed to proclaim certain truths.
Belonging
More and more it seems of highest importance that children experience the sense of belonging that comes with so many acts of love, forgiveness, time, service, and contribution that comes with family life.
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