Keeping the Home in Homeschooling

Laura has an awesome article posted on her blog today about home-centered learning. Here's just a few short excerpts...

"Too many parents see their homes only through the lenses of institutional education. Rather than finding joy and freedom in their homeschooling experience, they find themselves in bondage to cultural models of education defined by textbooks, workbooks, classrooms, age-grade norms, testing and grading.

Fortunately, we discovered early in our homeschool experience that textbooks and formal curricula are artificial means of education. Rather than unleashing learning potential, they hold it back. For us as parents, they created a false security that we were doing enough, and a false confidence that our children were really learning. For our children, they created a false dependency on formal methods of learning, and a false distinction between learning and living. Conventional classroom methods diluted the wonder and joy of real learning, turning it into a tedious and burdensome task unrelated to real life at home.

On the other hand, our children naturally loved reading and being read to, talking about their own insights and ideas, learning through real life, and having lots of time to explore and learn on their own. The more we studied Scripture and observed our children, the more confident we became that this was how God designed children to live and learn. It was the liberation of learning in our home!

Your home can and should be a warm, vibrant place where your children love to learn as freely and as naturally as they love to play."

And my favorite quote from this article describes exactly how we feel about our homeschooling in our home...

"we can honestly say that there is no distinction in our home school between home and school - we are living to learn and learning to live all at the same time."

To read the rest of this article, go here.