Celebrate Home School In Jakarta Indonesia

Nineteen years ago, when I began homeschooling, I was very uncertain about this commitment we had made to educate our children at home. My husband and I had never even heard of homeschooling, and, as far as we knew, neither had anyone else. We knew of no support groups; I had no one to turn to for advice. In fact, it was eight years before I met another homeschooler.

When I began working with Alexandra, she was one month away from her fifth birthday, and I was pregnant with my fifth child. The challenge of teaching my daughter, caring for three preschoolers, taking care of the house, and preparing for the new baby nearly overwhelmed me.

On the surface, it would seem that the young homeschooling mother in 1994 has a much easier time of it. Nearly everyone has at least heard of homeschooling. Most communities have support groups. A number of books and magazines provide information on various aspects of homeschooling. Annual conventions and curriculum fairs display a variety of curricula designed to meet various homeschooler's needs.

Yet, our readers tell us another story; you are concerned about those very areas which troubled me in September of 1975 when I launched my own program. We have, therefore, compiled a list of your most frequently asked questions which we will discuss in depth in the next several issues. In this issue, we have touched on those areas and offered some general advice which should help to get your homeschool on track.

What Have You Tried That Worked Or Didn't Work?

Since we used structured curricula at all levels, everything worked. I never got into the business of designing curricula and, therefore, never had to rethink what we were doing. It is certainly all right to design your own curricula, but if you do, you must be prepared to make some false starts. You must also realize that you will spend many hours of preparation that would be unnecessary if you were using a program in which the lesson plans are included.

How Do You Stay On Target?/What Techniques Do You Use To Organize Your Home And School?

There is a misconception that organization restricts freedom and creativity. As a result, many of us reject the notion of being on a tight schedule because we fear that both we and our children will become robotic creatures who move mechanically through the day performing one mundane task after another while both the love of learning and the love of life are extinguished like a candle in a vacuum.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Organization is simply a means of putting those routine tasks into a framework so that they can be dealt with expeditiously.

I started my homeschool with a written schedule which included everything that had to be done on a daily basis. The first few entries looked like this:

5:30 a.m.-get up
5:30 to 6:00 a.m.-do makeup and hair
6:00 to 6:30 a.m.- dust furniture and fix breakfast
6:30 to 7:00 a.m.-eat with family
7:00 to 7:30 a.m.-do dishes and make the beds

Has this schedule, which we have adjusted over the years to accommodate our growing family and changing needs but which remains as rigid as ever, squelched creativity and inhibited individual expression? Absolutely not! By dealing with all those things we do not want to do first, we clear our schedule for time to be spent doing the things we do want to do.

We have specific school hours (8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.) and everyone is in the school room seated with his materials in front of him at 8:30. We also have a highly disciplined school room: No talking about anything that does not pertain to school. No going to the bathroom without permission. No food or drinks in the school room. No wasting time.

These rules actually give my children a good deal of freedom that they might not enjoy in a less structured setting. After all, they know that they will be finished with both their routine housework and schoolwork by 11:30 a.m. The rest of the day is theirs to spend as creatively as they like.

What Is The Physical Layout?

Thoreau wrote, "Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify." This is probably the only thing he ever said with which I agree. We can spend so much time working out the logistics of our homeschools that we hardly have time to teach. The following arrangement has helped me keep it simple.

• All lessons are completed at our dining table, which is situated in our breakfast room. No one is allowed to study or complete lessons anywhere else. The one exception is the college-level students who are using the computer.

• No computers may be used for school work until a student is in college and then only for word processing. I insist that they use no mechanical aids, including calculators, to assist with lessons.

• Each student has a cardboard school box which contains his text books, syllabus, a pad of paper, pencils, erasers, a ruler, a compass, a protractor, and a pocket-sized spelling dictionary. This box is kept on the child's closet floor when school is not in session. When he comes to school, he brings his box with him. In this way everything is organized so that we do not waste time looking for materials, books, etc.

• As each student finishes his school day, he places his materials back in his box and returns it to his closet. Thus, when the school day ends, there is no mess to clean up.

How Do You Deal With or Prevent Interruptions?

When we made the decision to homeschool, I told my friends what we were planning to do and let them know what our school hours were going to be. If they called me while we were in school, I talked with them for a few seconds and then told them that we were in school. I then asked them if I could call them back and set up a specific time to return their call.

Now that I have older children, I try never to answer the phone during school hours. If someone calls, I have the children take the caller's name and number, and I return the call as soon as we finish school. If I do answer the phone, I keep the call as brief as possible by making arrangements to return the call later if necessary.

Preschoolers are another story. I will be devoting a later article solely to the subject of dealing with preschoolers. In the meantime, here are some things that worked for me.

• Set perimeters. Each day before you begin school talk to your preschoolers about what they are going to do while you are in school. Tell them that if they change activities they must tell you first.

• Put the oldest preschooler in charge of the others. Make it clear that he is not allowed to discipline but if anyone does anything he is not supposed to while you are in school, he is to come tell you immediately. Likewise, tell the younger children that if the oldest does something he is not allowed to do they are to tell you immediately.

• Allow preschoolers to join you in the school room only if they play quietly. No talking or noise-making in the school room.

• Plan to keep your infant in the school room unless he is asleep. Babies love to be held and will usually sit happily on Mother's lap. They can also nurse during school. However, you need to be prepared. Have diapers in the school room so that you can change the baby without leaving. If you know the baby will want juice or water during school, bring it with you. Also have some toys, a baby swing, etc. on hand to keep him entertained.

How Do You Motivate Your Children?

I have never tried to motivate my children. They know what is expected of them in school, and they do it. We have wonderful times together in school, but I have never taken the approach that they should perform well in school because they love learning. I have found that the love of learning is automatic when school is handled properly, but I also believe that no child should be made to feel that he must particularly enjoy something in order to do it well.

I have always told my children that life is filled with things that we do not want to do but must do anyway. At times we may have jobs we do not like. It is likely that God will require us to do some things that we would rather not. We are going to have to do lots of things that are difficult, or boring, or exasperating, but we never have any excuse for not doing our work to the best of our abilities.

What About Chores?

Again we will be covering these topics in depth in future articles, but I will share with you here one thing that does more than anything else to simplify chores. I give permanent work assignments. When someone receives a work assignment, he can expect to keep it for several years. In that way each individual has his own special chores for which he alone is responsible. Thus, each child has the benefit of habit which enables him to complete chores quickly and efficiently.

What about Enrichment And Extra-Curricular Activities?

Enrichment and extra-curricular activities need not take a child away from the home. I suggest limiting the children to one or two outside activities and stressing activities they can enjoy at home for additional enrichment. In later articles we will talk about things your children can do at home to widen their horizons (one of the things mine loved to do was put on plays which they found in books). In the meantime, encourage them to get creative without your input. When adults get involved, children will often back off and lose interest. My personal rule is that I never interfere with my children's leisure activities.

My final "tip" is to take charge of your school and not to be afraid to exert your authority. Pray daily for guidance and let the Lord lead you as you prepare your children to meet the challenges of the world in which we live.

From the day of their births, I read the Bible to our children. The day that our oldest child was born, I began with chapter one of Genesis and read two chapters to her. I then placed a bookmark at chapter three and turned to chapter one of Matthew. I then read her two chapters from Matthew and placed another bookmark. Thus I began a daily routine of continually reading both the Old and New Testaments straight through, which continues in our home to this day.

As other children were born, they were also present for this daily Bible reading. This was our first step in teaching our children a Christian worldview.

The second step was family prayer. As the children grew older, family prayer at the breakfast table became our second method for teaching a Christian worldview. Each morning after the Bible reading, we began at the head of the table and prayed aloud in turn. One day, however, when my son Benjamin noted that we were frequently repeating each other's prayers, he asked each of us to choose one particular area of prayer for these family prayer times. As a result, one of us now prays for our homeschool, another for healing for ourselves and others, another for finances, another for salvation for unsaved friends and extended family members, etc.

Our third step in creating a Christian worldview was weekly scripture memorization. Each week since 1990 we have chosen several scripture verses which everyone, including me, is required to memorize "word perfect." Although we may practice all week, no credit is given until the weekend when we recite the verses for credit. At that time, our names are entered into a log showing that we have completed those verses. Everyone must have recited his verses "word perfect" by Sunday evening.

When our children began studying in our homeschool, I did not move this devotional time into the classroom. I knew that one day they would complete their formal education, and school would end. I never wanted the day to come when they would feel that they should put aside their Bible study and prayer time as well. I wanted them to know that prayer and the study of God's word is forever, and that we never leave it behind.

Because we chose a prepackaged curriculum which does not contain a Christian bias, I encountered a special challenge in bringing a Christian worldview to our children's schoolwork. At first, it seemed that secular texts might present a stumbling block to the children's Christian growth, but as I began to teach, the Lord showed me how to use those texts to a great advantage.

Science was not a problem, since the curriculum we used allowed the children to be excused from any units in the science book dealing with evolution. We did, however, encounter a number of other areas in which a liberal humanistic view prevailed. At those times I discussed those humanistic views with the children and explained to them that although many people adhere to these views, they are in error. We then discussed those humanistic views in light of scripture to see how they erred and what God has to say on those subjects.

For instance, Calvert's fourth grade curriculum contains A Child's History of the World. This text, which is published by Calvert School, is one of the most charming and interesting histories that I have encountered. It reads almost like a novel, and most children are captivated by it from page one.

The only problem is that the first chapter or two deals with "prehistory," a.k.a. evolution. I never allowed my children to read those chapters alone. Before beginning the book, I would tell my fourth grader that this history text was wonderfully fun to read and very interesting, but that the first few assignments were totally untrue. I would then explain that the people who wrote the book were not Christians and were unwilling to accept the Bible. "When people refuse to believe the Bible," I would tell them, "they have to make up stories about how the world began that are just like fairy tales." As I read those pages aloud to my fourth grader, I would stop to comment often. We would discuss what the Bible has to say about creation in contrast to what the history book had to say.

After we got past those introductory pages, the rest of the book was wonderful. I would tell the children that as soon as they reached a place in history where there were written records other than the Bible, the authors stopped inventing history, and we could start taking the book seriously.

Of course, I gave my children much guidance in all of their assignments. I read every book they ever read in school - even on the undergraduate and graduate levels in college - and I discussed with them all the areas in which the texts were in conflict with the Bible and Christian values. This approach was difficult for me, but it worked well for the children.

I believe that instilling a Christian worldview in children involves more than just teaching them Christian values. It also means helping a child to understand what the secular world believes and then showing them why secular thinking is in error. When a child learns to defend his faith early on, he may have less difficulty defending it when he reaches adulthood. When a child actually understands that those parts of a secular education that are in conflict with God's word are not, as so many educators would have us believe, rooted in either "fact" or "science," he cannot be intimidated by those who would have him believe that his faith is "blind." When a teacher can educate her students so that they reach adulthood knowing that God's word is Truth that can withstand any test, she has succeeded in giving them a Christian Worldview.

Twenty-three years ago when I sat down at our kitchen table with my oldest child and began teaching her basic lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic, I was afraid that I was not equal to the task. I knew only that the Lord had instructed me in a dream not to send the children to school "lest they be corrupted," and I was acting out of obedience. My husband John and I had dedicated each of our children to God, and as Bible-believing Baptists we were willing to do whatever He required to raise them in accordance with His will.

Yet, it is fortunate that I did not know then all that lay ahead for our family. If I had, I might not have had the courage to go forward. In 1975, when I began teaching Alexandra, I was pregnant with our fifth child. However, I did not know that I would, ultimately, give birth to ten children in twelve years. I did not know that in 1985 my husband would lose his lucrative job as the president of a large financial institution, and we would go from a six-figure income to no income at all. I did not know that we would spend the thirteen years after that struggling and scraping so that we could continue to homeschool. I did not know that in 1995 I would be run over by our family van and spend the next few months battling crushing pain and illness as I continued to teach. I am glad that on my first day as a homeschool teacher I did not know just how much would be required of us.

It is also true that I did not know how glorious Jesus Christ's presence would be in the midst of such trial. He was always there, and I have never experienced Him so intensely as I have in those darkest moments when He miraculously met every need. But He did more than meet our physical needs. He gave us a means of educating our children in a Christ-centered environment where their spiritual needs could be met. This was what John and I wanted most for our children; we wanted them to honor the name of the Lord all the days of their lives, and we trusted that homeschooling would play a major role in accomplishing this goal.

On August 14, 1998, at age 15, my two youngest sons received their bachelors degrees from Brigham Young University. Although they had not completed their formal educations - they would begin earning their masters degrees through the extension program at California State University the following week - their graduations from BYU marked a milestone in our homeschooling odyssey.

The five weeks we spend on the BYU campus while they each completed two seminars and presented their closure projects (bachelors theses) were a time of both enormous stress and considerable blessing for all three of us. However, something happened during their first two-week seminar that, for me, was the high point of the summer. Three of the boys' classmates walked to our on-campus apartment to talk with me. The three women, who ranged in age from late twenties to late fifties, came independently of each other, and I have no reason to believe that any of them knew that the others had come. They all said that they had come to meet me because they were so impressed with the boys. Yet, what impressed them most was not that the boys were following in their eight siblings' footsteps by graduating from the university at age 15 or that their graduations made our children the ten youngest graduates in the history of Brigham Young University. These women had come to meet me because the boys treated their classmates with so much respect and kindness, and they wanted to know what I had done to turn out such polite young men.

The women told me that the boys always opened the classroom doors for all women classmates and helped them get on and off the vans when the class went on field trips. They stayed behind long enough to turn out all the lights in the classrooms and close the doors when classes ended. In short, although the boys were 13 years younger than their next-youngest classmate, they seemed to consider it their duty to "take care of everybody else." It was these simple acts of kindness that opened the door for me to tell three strangers what Christ has done in our lives. I spent hours telling them about the daily Bible readings, the family prayer, and the simple act of putting one's life in Christ's hands and then trusting Him for the outcome. It was a wonderful opportunity, but it would never have come had my sons not been willing to extend what we think of as "common courtesy."

The boys were simply living out the Golden Rule - treating other people the way they would like to be treated - and their actions were solely a result of years of Bible reading. I was so caught up in making certain they were scholastically prepared that I never once thought to say, "Be polite," or, "Act like gentlemen," when they left the apartment for the seminars each morning. They were not obeying me; they were obeying Christ's command to treat others with courtesy, respect, and kindness. They were living out their Christian faith, and that was what John and I had wanted most to see in our children's lives. Our goal was not to have the world look at them and see scholars; it was to have the world look at them and see Christians.

My children are far from perfect, and I know that in many ways I have failed. But I have tried to teach them to serve Christ both by what I say and by the example of my own life. Thus this summer's experience with their classmates was the best graduation gift God could have given me.

Ten years ago my wife Laurelee and I decided to educate our children in a homeschool rather than a public school or a private school. Of special concern to us were the following facts:

The social and religious environment in most schools in America has deteriorated to such a level that it is a threat to the spiritual, moral, and mental health of each child who is forced to participate in it.

The level of political and secular humanist indoctrination in American public schools has risen so high that it is very difficult for any child attending public school to emerge with an understanding of historical and religious truth.

Irrationalism has become the norm throughout American schools. It is therefore very difficult for children who attend those schools to learn how to think -- rather than to simply believe whatever propaganda is being disseminated at the moment.

The academic quality of most schools has deteriorated to the point that American students are literally the world's largest group of dunces. In test after test of academic abilities, American students score last or near-last in comparison with students from the other twenty or so advanced countries.

It is, of course, possible for a child to emerge from an American public school with good academic training and a good spiritual and moral outlook. With increasingly rare exceptions, however, students who achieve this do so in spite of the school rather than because of the school. The overall performance of American children who attend public schools is very poor.

Even when American public schools of the past are used as a standard, current schools are an embarrassment. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores have deteriorated so much during recent decades that the tests themselves are now on the verge of being changed. The American educational establishment is determined to change these tests, so that continued comparisons with past performance will not be possible.

Even the SAT tests themselves are being used as tools for social engineering. "Politically correct" questions are being asked about "socially responsible" reading passages. In some cases the student must give an answer that he knows to be false or misguided in order to please the social engineers who designed the tests.

As a result of these facts, hundreds of thousands of American families have chosen to educate their children at home. Home schooling is rapidly becoming a major force in American society and has become a significant embarrassment to the public school establishment.

Moreover, families who have chosen this path are clearly achieving some of their objectives. In particular, they are succeeding in partially isolating their children from the social and religious decay that is pervasive in American public schools. They are also strengthening their families by keeping children and parents together rather than allowing them to be physically and mentally separated by the State.

There is a growing possibility that, if the homeschooling movement continues to expand, it may become the most important single force in American public life.

In order for this to occur, however, some current weaknesses in the homeschool movement need to be corrected. Aside from the obvious legal problems and other difficulties that have developed as the public school establishment attempts to protect its decaying monopoly, these include:

Homeschooling is very difficult for parents whose circumstances prevent at least one dedicated parent from giving a very large percentage of his or her time to the homeschool. While it is fine to argue that a family should always include one full-time parent in the home with time to teach the children, many families find themselves in circumstances which do not permit this.

Many parents themselves lack the education that they so earnestly want for their children. As a consequence, homeschooled children have a difficult time rising above the level of academic achievement of their parents. This is true of many homes in which both parents are college trained and may even have advanced degrees. A large fraction of college graduates, for example, are not trained to do simple calculus -- a level of academic achievement easily possible for most properly educated sixteen-year-old children. Even parents holding doctoral degrees in mathematics and science are often poorly educated in literature, history, and the foundations of our civilization.

The average level of academic achievement in homeschools at present looks good only when compared with the disastrously poor results currently the norm in public schools. While it is true that SAT scores are a little higher for homeschools than for public schools, the average public school child comes from a generally poorer home environment and a school environment that is not conducive to learning.

We Need Higher Hopes

Some parents react to these difficulties with various forms of resignation. They hope that more families will find a way to rearrange their lives for homeschooling. In their homeschools, they emphasize subjects such as spelling and grammar and spend less time with difficult subjects such as mathematics and science. They hope that by the age of 18 their children will be strong enough to resist the evils that they encounter at the universities, or else they deny the children a higher education and direct them into occupations where that education is not required.

They are comforted by the fact that they have achieved slightly higher educational performance than the public schools while, at the same time, sparing their children the depravities of the secular world for at least part of their formative years. These are dedicated people who are doing their best for their children. I believe, however, that they should be thinking beyond the current homeschool situation.

In order to take our country back from the evil that is destroying our society, we must do more in our homeschool movement than we are doing now. Our children must be not a little better educated when compared with those in the public schools -- they must be so much better educated that they are entirely beyond such comparisons.

Our children must be able to think -- and to think so much more effectively than their opponents that they are able, in one generation, to become such a superior force in science and engineering and in industry and government that they dominate American society.

Our children must be such shining examples for the homeschool movement that the majority of American families demand the same quality for their children.

Our children must be such superior performers in America's colleges and universities that they not only resist the corruption in those institutions -- that they destroy, by their example, the corruption itself.

Interesting rhetoric, you may say, but how can this be done?

I respond, it MUST be done, and, for the remainder of this article, I describe an experiment that indicates the beginnings of a way in which it may possibly be done.

How It All Began

Like most successful experiments, this one reveals only part of the truth and suggests further experiments that may be worthwhile. Also, like a great many experiments that point in a different direction, this one was done by accident. If it ultimately proves to have been worthwhile, then the credit belongs to the Lord -- not to the participants.

As our children reached school age, my wife Laurelee undertook their instruction. A highly educated scientist herself, she understood what they needed to learn, but she had no experience in teaching children. Moreover, she worked virtually full-time with me in our research work; she was still bearing new children and caring for infants; and she was carrying out a significant amount of farm work in addition to the usual household chores.

As an aid to her growing homeschool (all of our children have been entirely homeschooled), Laurelee purchased educational materials and curricula from a wide variety of sources. These she melded into a curriculum along with a large amount of Christian materials that she purchased. (She purchased so many Sunday school materials, that the people at the local Christian bookstore thought that we were operating a church.)

Not knowing whether or not these materials would be available to us in the future, she created an entire twelve-grade curriculum for each of the six children and obtained all of the necessary materials for that curriculum. These she organized meticulously in the order that they would be used. That curriculum occupies the equivalent of about five large filing cabinets and is in perfect order.

This effort, in degrees that vary according to the resources, education, abilities, and motivations of the parents, is one that is being undertaken today in tens of thousands of homeschools across America. It is being made increasingly effective by the growth of many excellent businesses that supply materials and curricula to homeschools.

Laurelee's effort was truly outstanding. It allowed for every academic eventuality and it utilized the very best materials available. It even included life insurance on me, so that she would be able to continue the homeschool in the event of my death. Her plan had only one flaw-a flaw that neither she nor I ever considered. The plan assumed that she would be alive to teach.

Six Children Who Teach Themselves

When Laurelee died suddenly four and a half years ago, after an illness that lasted less than 24 hours, her class contained Zachary, Noah, Arynne, Joshua, Bethany, and Matthew-ages 12, 10, 9, 7, 7, and 17 months-a class now without a teacher.

As I assumed her work, including cooking, laundry, and other household tasks, and continued the farm and professional work without her by my side, there was no possibility that I could even read the curriculum that she had so carefully created -- much less have the time to teach it to the children. Friends tried to help, but the problem seemed to be intractable.

What happened then, with the Lord's help, was remarkable. Gradually, over the next two years and building upon the environment that their mother and I had already created for them and some rules of study that I provided, the children solved the problem themselves. Not only did they solve it themselves, they created a homeschool that, in many ways, points toward answers to some of the difficulties enumerated above.

Gradually, with occasional coaching and help from me, they created a homeschool that actually needs no teacher and is extraordinary in its effectiveness.

In judging its effectiveness, I have some experience for comparison.

I, myself, was fortunate to attend one of the finest public schools in Texas -- Lamar in Houston -- during the late 1950s when public schools in America still retained reasonable standards. I performed well and was admitted to every college to which I applied -- including Harvard, M.I.T., Rice, and Caltech. After graduating from Caltech, I obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at San Diego and was immediately appointed to a faculty position at that University. There I taught introductory chemistry to 300 students each year and supervised a group of graduate students.

I can honestly say that the six Robinson children in our homeschool are, on average, at least two years ahead of my own abilities at their ages and have a far higher potential for the future than did I. Moreover, by the age of about 15, they are surpassing at least 98 percent of the college freshmen that I taught at the University of California at San Diego.

The oldest, Zachary, who is 16, is already completing a math and science curriculum that uses the actual freshman and sophomore texts from the best science universities in America. Last October he took the Scholastic Aptitude Tests for the first time (the PSAT). His scores of 750 in math and 730 in verbal for a sum of 1480 (and a NMSQT score of 221) were above the 99.9 percentile among the 1,600,000 students worldwide who took the test. The other children are, for their ages, performing at least as well.

During the past four years, I have spent less than 15 minutes per day (on average) engaged in working as the children's teacher. They are teaching themselves.

Moreover, each one of them has spontaneously, without suggestion or demand from me, taken over an essential aspect of our farm and personal lives. They do all the work with the cattle and sheep; they do all the laundry, cooking, and housework; and they are working beside me as Laurelee used to do in the scientific research and civil defense work that is our ministry and our professional life. One by one, my tasks just disappeared as the children assumed them.

In general, they prefer to work independently. They tend not to share tasks and have not divided them as one might expect. For example, 11-year-old Joshua is the cook-and already a better cook than I. Zachary does all the work with the cattle (about 30) and the chickens; Arynne cares for the sheep (about 100); Noah is in charge of all farm and laboratory repairs; and Bethany does the washing and teaches Matthew. Some tasks are shared, such as house cleaning, sheep shearing, and watching over Matthew.

This sort of extracurricular work is especially valuable as reinforcement for the homeschool. While self-confidence can be built somewhat in sports or other "activities," the confidence that comes to a child from the knowledge that he is independently carrying on an activity that is essential to the survival of the family is valuable indeed.

It is important, however, not to take advantage of this situation. The development of a young mind takes place in a few short years. A parent must always make certain that the children have more than enough time for their academic studies and for essential recreation. When children show an aptitude for productive work helpful to the parent, there can be a tendency for the parent to let them do too much. This can deprive the children of mental development necessary to their own futures.

I generally consider each child's time to be more valuable than my own. If I provide them the time for optimum development and direct them to the necessary tools, then each of them should be able to surpass my own abilities and accomplishments. If they do, then my goals for their academic work will have been fulfilled. Remarkably, they have spontaneously responded with efforts that provide me also with more time for productive work.

Our home is not as neat and clean as some, our spelling (including mine) is not all that could be desired, and our traditions have become somewhat unusual (they leave the Christmas tree and nativity scene up for six months each year-from December through June), but these children know how to work and they know how to think.

Their homeschool is a success. This school is entirely self-taught by each student working alone. It depends upon a set of rules that can be adopted within any home in America. As their parent, my sole essential contribution has been to set the rules under which they live and study.

How the Robinsons Do It

For those who consider adopting these procedures, I offer the opinion that they will work in any home and with any children, regardless of ability. Obviously children differ in innate ability. I believe, however, that these rules will achieve remarkable results with any child when compared with other alternatives.

These are not, however, "suggestions." They are rigorous requirements. I know what has happened here. I do not know what would happen in different experiments under different conditions. If, therefore, these suggestions are all followed in the same way, I expect the same result.

No TV. There is no television in our home. We do have a VCR. As a family we watch a video tape approximately once every six months. Television wastes time, promotes passive, vicarious brain development rather than active thought, and is a source of pernicious social contamination.

Most American children are addicted to TV. Their brains spend four hours or more each day learning bad, passive habits from the TV and another few hours (if they are fortunate to have good activities, too) unlearning the bad habits. Then, if there are any hours left, they can make positive progress.

Moreover, when TV is used as a tranquilizer, it can mask other problems that should be solved early in life. Children need to work out the ways in which they interact with other people. Even though their behavior while doing so may be more distracting than their behavior when pacified by a television set, the TV may be retarding this aspect of development which is then undesirably transferred to the classroom instead.

No Sweets. The children do not eat sugar or honey or foods made with these materials and have never done so at any time in their lives. Sugar alters the metabolism in such a way as to increase the probability of diabetes, hypoglycemia, and hyperglycemia, and immune deficiencies that can lead to cancer and other fatal illnesses at a later age. Most importantly to a homeschool, sugar diminishes mental function and increases irritability and mental instability. Most children are able to learn regardless of these effects, but why burden them with this disadvantage?

These points about sugar have been expanded upon in several texts that may be available in your library. I recommend these books: Sweet and Dangerous by John Yudkin, Peter D. Wyden, Inc., 750 Third Ave, New York, NY 10017 (1972); Sugar Blues by William Dufty, Chilton Book Company, Radnor, PA (1975); and Food, Teens & Behavior by Barbara Reed, Natural Press, PO Box 2107, Manitowoc, WI (1983). These books contain a substantial number of appropriate references to the scientific literature.

Though Laurelee and I (both sugar addicts) established this rule, it is now out of my control. Two years ago, when some visitors whom we greatly wished to please came for dinner, they brought sweet rolls and donuts. I suggested to the children that they should eat just one so as not to offend. They all refused.

Five Hours, Six Days, Ten Months. Formal school work occupies about five hours each day-six days per week-twelve months per year. Sometimes one of them skips his studies for the day as a result of some special activity, and we take an occasional automobile trip. With these diversions, their actual annual school time occupies about ten full months of six-day weeks.

School First. These five hours each day are the most productive hours-the morning and early afternoon. As soon as they wake -- and with time out only for breakfast and milking the cows -- they study. Each has a large desk in the school room. My desk is also in that room. I try to do my own desk work during the same time, since my presence keeps the school room quiet and avoids arguments about noise.

Phonics. The five older children were taught to read with the phonetic system -- learning the individual sounds of our language. Laurelee taught them all. Matthew (five years old) is currently learning to read by phonics. The children are teaching him.

Lots of Good Books. The teacher-presented materials that Laurelee obtained are not used, but the history, science, and literature books that we accumulated, which include a good selection of classics, are essential to the curriculum.

Saxon Math. Each day, before beginning any other work, each child (except Matthew) works an entire lesson in the Saxon series of mathematics books. This usually involves working about 30 problems. If the 30 problems seem to be taking much less than two hours each day, we sometimes increase the assignment to two lessons or about 60 problems per day. If the lessons seem to be taking much more than two hours, then we reduce to one-half lesson or about 15 problems per day. This is an excellent series of texts. The children work their way through the entire series at a rate that finishes calculus, the last text in the series, when they are 15 years of age.

They grade their own problems and rework any missed problems. They must tell me if they miss a problem and show the correctly-worked solution to me. The younger children tend to make one or two errors each day. As they get older, the error rate drops. The older children make about one error each week. On very rare occasions, perhaps once each month, an older child will actually need help with a problem he or she feels unable to solve.

This emphasis on math with the help of the excellent Saxon series teaches them to think, builds confidence and ability to the point of almost error-free performance, and establishes a basis of knowledge that is essential to later progress in science and engineering.

It is also absolutely essential preparation for the non-quantitative subjects that do not require mathematics. The ability to distinguish the quantitative from the non-quantitative -- the truth from error -- fact from fiction -- is an absolutely essential requirement for effective thinking. Otherwise one will tend to confuse independent, truthful thought with opinions based upon falsehoods and propaganda.

Our society is filled to the brim with public school graduates who imagine that they are independent thinkers when they actually are programmed to believe anything they perceive as fashionable. This cult-like behavior is not limited to graduates in "soft subjects." Many people supposedly educated in the sciences and engineering also practice this ritual of non-thought.

I believe that much of this difficulty stems from poor early education in mathematics and logical thought. It is essential to understand that physical truths are absolute and can be rigorously determined. This must be learned by actually determining absolutes. Mathematical problem solving is an excellent mechanism for doing this.

Grim examples of failures in this area are everywhere. Earlier today, for example, a local bureaucrat telephoned in an effort to get my help in fashioning a community compromise on environmental issues between the solid citizens of this Valley and some pseudoenvironmentalist political agitators who have been disrupting the community recently.

During the discussion I mentioned that the agitators had filed a document with the federal government that contained a graph condemning the local lumber industry for destroying local game fish. Actually there was no correlation between fish population and timber harvest. The agitators had created a correlation by leaving out about half of the data for the last forty years -- the half which proves that their premise is false.

"Oh well," the bureaucrat replied, "we all do that sort of thing."

An Essay a Day. After completing the mathematics work, each child writes a one page essay about any subject that interests him and gives it to me. Some of the children enjoy writing these essays more than others. The remainder of the five hours is spent in reading history and science texts.

I read these pages and mark misspelled words and grammatical errors that the child must then correct. Sometimes I fall many weeks behind with these corrections, but the children just keep writing.

There is an unusual bonus in these short essays. Sometimes the student will write things that he or she would not (and sometimes should not) say to the parent otherwise. These essays have educational value, and they also open a new line of communication with the children.

College Level Science. Zachary (16 years old) has a more rigorous curriculum, since he finished calculus about a year ago. He is working his way through freshman and sophomore college physics and chemistry texts in the same way that he previously worked his way through Saxon math. After those years of self-taught math, he has simply gone on to self-taught science -- and in the toughest college level texts that I was able to obtain. His mind has become used to the fact that there is nothing in the well-known sciences that he cannot understand and learn and no problem that, with a proper book, he cannot work correctly. His error rate is negligible.

No Computers. No child is allowed to use a computer until after he or she has completed mathematics all the way through calculus. (At one point Saxon calls for a little use of the hand-held calculator. I permit this, but only on a very few occasions.)

Constant Recreational Reading. Since they have no television, the children are prone to spend a substantial part of their non-school hours reading. They read whatever interests them from our library -- which Laurelee purged of all books that she thought it best for them to avoid. By recreational reading, the children pick up most of their vocabulary and grammar and most of their knowledge about the world. Regarding current events, they do not listen to the radio, but it has become increasingly difficult to maintain control of my copy of the Wall Street Journal.

No Formal Bible Teaching. The Bible is not a required part of our formal curriculum. We have a family Bible reading before bed each evening, and we discuss elements of Christianity as they happen to arise in our everyday lives.

Like Isaac Newton, no one in our family ever questions the truth of the Lord's Word as provided to us in the Old and New Testaments of the King James Bible. We only seek to understand these truths by repeated reading. That reading is rarely accompanied by interpretive comment. Each of us must understand these things for himself and build his own relationship with God.

What We Leave Out. This curriculum is important for what it contains and also for what it does not contain. It contains about two hours of math or science problem-solving followed by about two hours of directed reading and a short essay each day -- all self-taught by the student.

What it does not contain is also very important.

Although the children take piano lessons and engage in a rich variety of extracurricular activities oriented around our farm and laboratory, their formal curriculum consists of "reading, writing, and arithmetic" and nothing more. It also essentially has no teacher -- a fact that I have come to realize can be an advantage.

Learning to Think

The brain is never asleep. It continues to work and think 24 hours per day. If a brain gets used to the fact that it will actively work math problems for two hours at the same time each day and that it can understand and work those problems without error, it will also allot a significant part of its time during the other 22 hours to thinking subconsciously about mathematics. In this way understanding and performance are reinforced.

Each additional subject that is added to the curriculum creates a demand upon the brain's 24 hours of time. If an unnecessary subject is added, it wastes not only the curricular school time, but also a fraction of the extracurricular time. It is therefore important to be very careful not to add unnecessary subjects.

Our public schools and also many of our homeschools have so many subjects in their curricula that the children's brains do not have time to give adequate attention to the fundamentally important subjects.

In the formative years, it is absolutely essential that children learn how to think and how to learn independently. They have a lifetime to accumulate facts and will do so more effectively if they acquire a correct foundation -- not of facts, but of ability to read, think, and evaluate for themselves.

The ability to think is the most important. A very large percentage of our public school graduates lack the ability to think. Most of them can, however, articulate acceptably. When we give the brain a small number of the most important tools to learn and use, we give it an opportunity to learn to think.

Always remember that when you add a subject or activity to a child's schedule, you are subtracting from the time for something else. Is it really more important, for example, for the child to learn a foreign language than it is to learn error-free applied mathematics?

The Experiment Works

In this experiment, I have watched a group of children educate themselves in a far superior manner than I could have done for them if I had spent every waking hour teaching them in the usual manner. I am convinced that, had I done so, their progress would have been far less.

Although I have occasionally helped them with specific questions, that help has been so infrequent that they would have advanced almost as far if I had not helped. Moreover, the level of academic accomplishment that they have achieved is truly extraordinary.

Children learn by example and by doing. They do not learn effectively by being lectured to or by vicarious involvement as in television viewing. Our educational method works, and it involves almost no parental time once the school room and curriculum have been provided and the rules have been established.

Dr. Arthur Robinson and his six children are presently working on developing a directed, self-teaching literature curriculum that they hope "will do for the teaching of literature what Saxon did for the teaching of math."

What do you need to be a successful unschooler? The obvious answer is not necessarily the right answer. Many unschooling advocates would say that all you need is a child's natural curiosity about the world around him. Yes, that is one of the main ingredients in a positive unschooling experience, but of equal importance is the environment in which the child carries out his daily learning.

If you envision a well-rounded, well-educated adult emerging from a cocoon of flexible relaxed home education, then you have to be sure to include the necessary tools in that cocoon during the metamorphosis. It is necessary that your child have the love of knowledge modeled for him every day by his mentors. He has to see you eagerly take on new learning experiences. It is very important that he know you are available to help him answer questions about the world around him, even if you don't readily know the answers. He has to be confident in his (and your) ability to search for knowledge.

Show Enthusiasm

The most important gift you can give your eager learner is enthusiasm. If he doesn't see you get excited in the quest for education, his excitement will soon die. Give him space to explore the world around him, but be handy in case he wants to include you in his explorations. Be open to the learning opportunities in your everyday life. Should he suggest a walk in the woods, take time to walk with him. Listen to his questions, because when he asks, he is opening the door for you to be an active part in the learning process.

You can't teach a child that isn't receptive to learning, but if the door is open the education pours right in. Sitting him down at a desk with a bunch of books doesn't work, because all he has to do is either tune it out or memorize and remember a bunch of facts for a short time and he's done. In either case, true education didn't take place. Education has to start in the heart. If you leave the door open, the opportunity will arrive.

A Step in the Write Direction

My younger children had never shown interest in spelling correctly, and to be quite honest I was starting to worry a little, because like all good moms I thought my 10-year-old would eventually need to be able to spell something, other than cat. After a year of their journal writing (a project they began, because they wanted to do what Mom does), my 10-year-old came to me with a request that totally erased all worries. He said, "Mom . . . I think I need to work on my spelling. It takes me too long to write in my journal when I have to figure out how to spell every word." I started looking through the mountain of spelling programs I had purchased, just in case this moment ever arrived. Guess what? None of them seemed right. So much for impulse spending! Time for Plan B, I picked up the homeschool catalogs and every spelling review I could find. I finally decided on a program that took only a short time each day, and seemed easy to use.

It is working beautifully. Not only is he enthusiastic about his spelling endeavor, it has carried over to his younger siblings. Now they greet me at the breakfast table with their spelling list. This is unschooling at its best. All I had to do was give them the right ingredients. Not only did knowledge grow, so did wisdom. He became wise enough to realize he needed to learn to spell.

Space to Grow

Unschooling doesn't necessarily mean never using textbooks or never teaching your child anything. Unschooling is a phrase that originally meant "doing it differently than the schools do it." In a Christian unschooling home, the unschooling approach fits right into the Christian structure and framework you have already set up. You simply give your child space to grow and mature into the person God made him to be. Surround your children with learning opportunities and learning tools, share in the joy of learning and model a lifetime learning attitude for your children to mirror . . . then education just happens!

Our ninth official school year is drawing to a close. So I sit here and think back on our journey . . .

We started out like most other confused, dazed, rookie homeschool parents. We read all the right books, and bought all the right curriculum. We purchased textbooks, manipulatives, art supplies, music supplies, a piano, a recorder (just in case our musical child couldn't conquer the piano), playground equipment, a new computer, an aquarium, a pair of gerbils (after all, she had to learn about science first-hand), educational videos, educational audio cassettes, and computer programs. Then we signed her up for dance class, gymnastics, piano, soccer, Daisy Scouts, and all our church activities. If you are a veteran homeschooler you are probably smiling right about now. Our five-year-old was going to be the best educated and most well-rounded child on this earth!

Within a few months, we could drop every important name in the homeschool movement. We could quote Mary Pride by heart. We read everything by the Moores. We read all the Holt books. All the homeschool self-help books were on our shelves. Ruth Beechick and Charlotte Mason became our mentors; but then so did the Moores, Holt, the BJU and A Beka representatives . . . and let's not leave out Konos, Weaver, and Ann Ward. Now add a toddler, baby, and pregnant mom to the equation and what do you get?

We had all the right stuff, but no idea how to fit it all together! Though obvious to us now, we were trying to combine umpteen different homeschool methods, and we were totally missing the boat! One day we would sit in our new classroom with our workbooks; the next we would be outside drawing letters in the sand and catching bugs. It just depended on which expert's book I had last read. Of course, the days during which we did what appeared to be "nothing" were many, because of the babies and Mom's morning sickness and lack of energy.

No wonder I had no energy. I was trying to be everything, and more, to everyone! I was Super Homeschooling Mom, and everyone was so impressed with how fast I had caught on to this new adventure. After all, within a year I had become overactive in our homeschool support group. We had field trips and co-ops and all kinds of neat things planned every week. How could we fail? We were doing all the right things!

Life was swirling around us. We seemed to never finish what we started. In spite of the thousand dollars that I had spent that first year, the whole experience wasn't rewarding. Our delightful little girl was doing quite nicely. She was adaptable, although somewhat confused about what we would be doing from day to day. Well, we trudged along at this haphazard pace, until.... it all spun out of control.

A Change of Pace

It was shortly after Christmas of our second homeschooling year, and baby number four was due any day. We were still recovering from holiday festivities, homeschool support group gatherings, and countless other holiday activities we had become involved in so that our little student would have all that we could offer her.

She got it all right! She came down with a serious stomach virus, and soon everyone in our home was sick. We all recovered fairly quickly, but she couldn't shake it off. Within a couple of weeks, she was hospitalized. I was waddling around nine months pregnant, not sure what exactly was wrong with my child and exhausted from the long months of chaos. She was in the hospital for a week, and finally diagnosed with inflamed intestines from the virus. The doctor's prescription was "to keep her away from other children for the next 3-6 months. No exposure to any new germs." Two days after she was released from the hospital, our baby daughter was born.

There ended our merry-go-round of perfect homeschooling, and there begin our "perfect" life of taking it all one day at a time. I learned to really listen to my child. I learned to read a story or just cuddle in front of the fireplace, while my children told me stories. I learned to really go outside and catch ants and beetles . . . or just pretend we were a rock or blade of grass for a few minutes in the afternoon. We actually got the art supplies out, and painted the sky. We built towering structures with the huge Cuisenaire rod set I had purchased for math. We played hopscotch and jackrocks. We read poetry books together! All these things were much easier to do with toddlers in tow, and a newborn riding joyfully in a baby sling. We didn't have to watch the clock to finish math problems, or fill in the blanks in a phonics book. Why bother? She was reading poetry to me, and counting ants! We didn't even miss all our activities! We finally had time to have fun!

A New Philosophy

We had made a discovery! Even though it had already been discovered by John Holt and many others before us, it was a breath of fresh air for this tired, exhausted mom. We had discovered education at its finest. We were unschooling.

What is unschooling? Among the many different definitions that have been tossed about, the one that best describes unschooling is "allowing your child's natural curiosity about the world, and natural desire to learn become the motivating factor in education." As parents, our job is to guide and help our children as they pursue their interests at their own pace according to their unique abilities. Children are natural learners, and they want to learn about the world they live in. So if their lives are rich in learning possibilities, great books, and parents that care, children will absorb all the information around them like a sponge.

Unschooling was the turning point in our homeschool journey, but there have been many twists in the road along the way. We managed to survive toddlerhood with the next three children. They even all learned to read! We've homeschooled through Grandma's serious illness that has lasted for the past five years. We've homeschooled through two years that I worked outside the home, because of bad financial decisions. We've homeschooled through learning disabilities and many other curve balls that were thrown our way. Each year ends much the same. I sit and ponder how far we've come since the year before, and I realize that no matter how side-tracked I become during the year . . . the children keep on learning.

As I watch how far we've come on our journey, I know without a doubt that learning to relax and enjoy our time together not only saved our homeschooling adventure but added a whole new dimension to our lives. Our children have learned all the basics, and so much more. They enjoy many hobbies and activities that they wouldn't be able to enjoy if we were tied down to a curriculum time table. It also allowed me to overcome the guilt of not being perfect, so that I could enjoy the many years of homeschooling that we have had and the many years I hope we can share in the future. This is a season in my life that I really wish could last forever!

If you are just embarking on this wonderful winding road of homeschooling, you probably have a multitude of feelings and attitudes you are sorting out in your head and heart. There are a vast number of "how-to" books, philosophies, "experts from the trenches," and well-meaning friends giving you advice. All of this just adds to the apprehension, because everyone is telling you something different. So, are you ready for some more advice?

Somewhere down the road, all of the input that you and others have fed into your brain will gel and you will be able to weed out the information you don't need. Then you can claim the information that is useful as your own, and incorporate it into your teaching philosophy. In the meantime, relax and don't let the bombardment of opinions, ideas, and "perfect" examples discourage you. By all means read, listen and gather ideas from all the experts. All of this information will help you make better decisions about your available choices, but don't let the pressure to be perfect destroy the joy of educating your children.

Enthusiasm is the key to every successful homeschool. With that excitement the road never becomes so long, rocky, or winding that you lose sight of the reasons you are homeschooling your children. You will need to begin your journey with some sort of road map, but don't ever write it out in ink! Be willing to change your plans in midstream if you see enthusiasm start to wane - your child's enthusiasm or, even more importantly, yours! If you are enthusiastic and joyful, your child will be enthusiastic and joyful. If it becomes a chore for you, expect that attitude to be reflected in your child.

Keeping the joy in your homeschool is not always an easy feat. No matter what method you use to educate your child, education comes from the heart and the heart should be educated. Homeschooling is a privilege that we need to be prayerfully thankful for every day, and we need to pray for God's blessings and grace for our homeschooling endeavor. Believe me, God's grace goes a long way when we start to feel guilty because we don't live up to the standards depicted by our "perfect homeschooling mentors." Perfect is an illusion that we muster up in order to set goals for ourselves, but this illusion has a way of growing way beyond anyone's ability to attain. (In reality, the poor "perfect homeschoolers" out there shudder to think that their homeschools are used to set standards for others!)

Whether we use unschooling or traditional methods, we are obligated to our children to make their education worthwhile, meaningful, and fun. Contrary to popular belief, unschooling is not the easy way out! As Christian parents, we need to carefully discern where to gently guide our children in their educational explorations. We have been ordained by God to educate our children, and we do need to take it very seriously. If we see areas in which our children have definite weaknesses, we need to find ways to spark their interest and help them over the rocky parts. Sometimes that means finding a way to incorporate the not-so-fun stuff into our daily living . . . and doing it in a way that will not put out the spark of excitement that you've worked so hard to keep alive.

So unschooling isn't for the faint of heart or for parents looking for an easy way to homeschool. Every method has areas that require time and commitment from parents. Unschooling or relaxed homeschooling is no different. The key to being relaxed is to look at every day as a new adventure, and greet it with anticipation.

So relax, there are no perfect homeschoolers. And the perfect homeschool philosophy or method doesn't even exist either. Look at your children, listen to your children and pray for God's guidance. Be willing to change your route if life takes an unexpected turn, or even if you just feel yourself becoming burdened with the mundane daily tasks. Homeschooling should never be looked at as a just another job Mom has to do each day. If it's not a total everyday lifestyle, then it easily becomes "something we just have to endure each day." That's definitely not the attitude we want our children to have about learning.

Learning is for a lifetime, and learning is fun! Show your children just how important it is to you by your joy and your commitment . . . and your smile!

Mary Ann Turner and her husband, David, homeschool their four children in Southern Virginia. She believes that everyday life's educational possibilities are limitless, and it's up to us to take advantage of the curriculum God provided.

Ever wish you could open your child's brain with a screw driver and insert a hard concept into the right slot? I guess that's a rather grisly, medieval view of education. But, anyone who has struggled with a child who "doesn't get it" will appreciate the sentiment.

There are less grisly steps to follow when communicating a difficult concept to your child. Two settings seem practical for tutoring. First is when your child is working independently, say in his math book, and needs help. You can only "drop tutor" those subjects that you understand well or have covered earlier in your homeschooling experience. When I was learning to teach math, I did the worksheets aloud with my children to learn how to use manipulatives. Now, I can assign math as independent work because I don't have to scramble for ways to demonstrate concepts.

The second setting is when I am trying to teach my children a subject I don't know myself. I've been studying French with them recently. I find it is more efficient for me to learn the subject along with my children rather than trying to stay one lesson ahead of them or assigning it to them in the hopes that they will be able to do it on their own. As I study with them I can see when a new concept comes up that needs "teaching time" and when we can just work on our worksheets together. I think it is more fun to study with them and then I can help when I've planned to be available to help, instead of being pulled away from some other task. Okay, my kids help me, too. My pronunciation is lousy, but one of my children has a great ear for language and coaches me.

We were going over a little French chart recently to try to sort out the verb changes that go with pronoun changes. We wanted to know why aller, which means "go," was written as seemingly totally different words:

Thinking we would get through this quickly, I said to my children, "Tell me all the French subject pronouns." I knew they knew je, nous, il, and elle, but they weren't comfortable with the category "subject pronouns."

1. Bridge New Information with Information the Child Already Knows

I tried to see if there was a bridge I could make between French pronouns (which they didn't know) to English pronouns (which they, hopefully, knew). I said, "Tell me all the English pronouns you know."

At this point they were kind of saying, "Yeah, yeah, I know that." But they still couldn't define a pronoun or easily say what one was. This tests a child's understanding. He may be familiar with a concept because he has been exposed to it, but he doesn't really know it until he can explain it in his own words.

2. Have the Child State the Definition in His Own Words

I asked, "What is a pronoun?" The children remembered, "It takes the place of a noun."

3. Have the Child Give an Example of the Definition

That was pretty good, but I knew that to be a rote definition. To extend their understanding of that definition, I asked them to make an application. Grammar is an applied system; knowing the definitions doesn't mean you know grammar. "Can you give me some examples?" The children couldn't give me any examples quickly. I was feeling a bit frustrated myself at this point. "We've been over this," I thought. As I tried to come up with some way to make this clear to them, I revealed my own shaky understanding. I couldn't think of anything quickly myself!

This is what I call the "frustration factor." Every time a child learns a new concept he experiences frustration, or aggravation as he tries to "get it." When Mom experiences this at the same time as the children, schooling can undergo meltdown. It isn't bad for your children to see you struggling to grasp a concept well enough to explain it. If they can join you in that struggle, they will learn to master new concepts for themselves, as they see how you handle the process.

In this case, I found myself running for my English handbook, and asked my children to grab their handbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias to see which would help us. After refreshing myself with handbook examples, I felt better prepared to come up with an example for my children. I later found the book, Simply Grammar, by Karen Andreola, which is used out loud and gives ready examples on a young child's level.

4. Go to an Every Day Comparison

Since I couldn't connect French pronouns with English pronouns, I needed to connect pronouns with something the children would know. I tried to connect "pronoun" with its use in an everyday setting. I said, "James, if you were hungry for a cookie would you say, 'James wants a cookie?'"

"No," he laughed, "I'd say, "I want a cookie.'"

"That means you are talking in the first person. And if you were going to ask Christie if she wanted a cookie you wouldn't say, 'Christie want a cookie?' would you?"

"No, I'd say, 'Do you want a cookie?'" he said.

"So that's second person," I said, "because you are talking to her. Then if you were going to tell me about Christie wanting a cookie, you could say 'Christie,' but you could also say, 'She wants a cookie.' That is third person because you are talking about someone else. Now, James tell me first, second, or third person."

"First is when I am talking, second is the person I am talking to, third is the person I am talking about."

Now that James has come up with a definition, I ask him to give me some examples by asking, "Use a second person subject pronoun, use a first person subject pronoun, and give me a sentence with the third person subject pronoun." By repeating these technical names aloud, I am building a connection between the term and his explanation and making him more comfortable with the terms by repetition.

5. Limit and Define a Concept by Contrasting it with a Related Concept

When he gave me examples, he mentioned some object pronouns instead. "I gave the cookie to him." We had to ferret these out by comparing the concepts of subject and object. "Can we use him as the subject of a sentence?" "Him hit the ball" sounded wrong, so we knew it couldn't be a subject pronoun. We looked up object pronouns in the English handbook and played with them a little.

We contrast ideas in order to define them all the time. We teach subtraction in contrast to addition, the sun in contrast to the moon, or the Greeks in comparison to the Egyptians.

"Wait a minute!" You're saying, "Isn't this a lot of English going on in a French lesson?" Yes it is, but who said we had to fracture our homeschools into subject bits? If we are in "French" but find a missing "English" concept, we build that foundation first. Teach to the need.

6. Don't Assume That the Children Who Listen In, Have It

Each of my children needed the opportunity to define pronouns and state examples aloud. It seems they need to get the concept out of their brains verbally to internalize new information. This gives the concept a concrete "handle" that they can grasp better than just a wavering thought in their head. Those who answered latest could answer fastest, though, so the whole process wasn't agonizingly slow.

7. If Understanding is Still Muddy, Go to the Concrete

If a verbal "handle" isn't sufficient, try to think of a way your child could touch this concept. Hands-on activities seem to really "seal" a concept for my children. These are especially useful when introducing new concepts to any age, or when teaching young children. Trying to come up with a concrete activity will quickly test your own knowledge and creativity! Teaching books can help you understand how to do this, but there are some very good and bad examples. Some hands-on ideas just waste time, while others are really valuable.

In this lesson I had the children label a bunch of cookies with subject and object pronouns (try using Post-it notes or laying cookies on scrap paper). Only cookies labeled with subject pronouns could be given out at first. The children had to take turns picking up a cookie and figuring out a sentence to go with the pronoun so it winds up in someone's pile. We decided we would end the game when everyone had the same amount of cookies in their pile, but they couldn't resist trying to hoard cookies at first. For instance, brother picks a cookie labeled "she" and says, "She gets a cookie" and hands it to sister. Sister might pick a cookie labeled "he," but getting smart might say, "He gave the cookie to Christie."

A cookie labeled "they" would have to be divided. Object pronoun cookies were then divided in the same fashion. Think of all the impromptu drill that takes place with this activity! Besides, it's lots of fun to watch the children figure out how they can keep their cookies through creative sentence-making.

8. Make the Connection to the New Concept

Finally, we were ready to get back to French. Actually, we stopped with English and got back to the French lesson after a couple of days. I asked the children to name the English form and then the French form of all the subject pronouns. Next, we added the French verb that kept changing, aller, with its proper pronoun.

9. Drill to Memorize the Fundamentals by Rote

Then I did a quick drill calling out, "Second person subject pronoun, French. First person plural, English" and so forth. The children called out answers, and the little ones came over to join the fun. Pretty soon the children were answering faster and faster.

10. Have the Children Play Teacher

Next, I let the children be the ones to call out the drill. When children answer your questions they look for hints in your face and try to determine if they answered what you wanted. When they ask you questions, they try to figure out if you've gotten it down to the last shade of meaning and look for holes in your answer. It is also valuable to let the children explain concepts to each other. When a child has to do the explaining, it stretches their understanding just like it does mine.

11. Overlearn by Repeating the Drill Over the Next Several Days

Overlearning is essential to mastering the fundamentals of any topic. A child may know the multiplication table, but he won't be proficient in math until he has it memorized. We went over the pronoun chart every day that week, and once during the following week. When the subject of pronouns comes up in future work, I can refer them to the "pronoun cookie exchange." This is a big advantage with a hands-on experience - it is usually unforgettable. This experience makes an easy bridge to build on later. Hands-on learning seems slow and painstaking at the start, but after a few years, the bridges formed start to multiply understanding.

12. Use Teacher's Aids

Now that I am sure of my children's understanding and application of this concept, I can rely on tireless aids like cassette tapes to continue the overlearning. A good tape is Audio Memory's Grammar Songs. I can still hear "Pronouns take the place of nouns" as I write this. Chore times or meal times seem to work well for using these resources, saving school time for new concepts and application.

13. Practice the Application

I've always disliked grammar and reading worksheets, because I feel that both of these skills require a tutorial setting. I thought my children knew pronouns because they had used language-arts worksheets. The French provided a new setting which challenged their level of understanding. This proved to me again the inefficiency of using worksheets to teach new concepts. Now that my children understand the concept "pronoun," I might rely on a worksheet, perhaps from Grammar Songs, or a computer program to give another chance at application in the next month. I'd also point out any misuses of pronouns in their writing.

Oral drill, especially when you can teach several children at once, can be a real time saver for both you and your children. If the child doesn't learn a concept well from a worksheet, he's wasted his time. Students are adept at getting around textbook work with incomplete or vague answers, or by using guessing strategies. You can't be really sure a child has grasped a concept until you've heard him tell you in his own words. You'll save yourself time by ensuring this in the first place. Once a child has understanding of a concept, he won't need to do as many worksheets as are normally offered in a book to reinforce learning. The hardest part for you will be learning to not use all those unnecessary pages!

The #1 thing I would recommend to other home educators is that you become so well versed in any subject that you are not intimidated by it, nor enslaved by textbooks. This is not a goal I have completed or achieved overnight; I am still working at it. My motivation is that I want to know phonics, or math, or the elements of teaching writing so well that I can teach my child in an enjoyable, and sensitive fashion. I want to catch that gleam of understanding in my 4-year-old's eyes as he suddenly understands that a ten bar can be counted as a whole, to teach directly that letter combination that my reading child is stumbling over, and to know exactly how to help my middle grade child get past his "writer's block."

Using Curriculum

Have you ever noticed that when planning dinner, you tend to serve most often those recipes that you have memorized? They just don't seem to require as much effort as those you have to look up. Besides, you also tend to be a far more creative cook when you "own" a recipe. I taught my daughter how to make a white sauce along with many ways to vary it, then took her down the grocery aisle where she noticed all the packaged foods that were nothing more than freeze-dried variations of white-sauce foods. She caught the vision.

Now head to the nearest homeschool store and notice all the prepackaged learning materials. What is the basic skill or set of skills the program is based on? I'm not saying you should never use a well laid-out program, only that you should use it, not let it use you. Signs of program "slavery" include feeling guilty if your child doesn't cover every sheet, reteaching concepts year after year because the information was never taught well the first time, and wasting time teaching your child subjects he isn't developmentally ready to study.

Freelance Teach

I marvel at the way phonics programs often present themselves as a scientifically designed, perfectly sequential study so your child will have no opportunity to stumble over words or memorize wrong spellings. But the minute your child leaves the program, he is confronted with the real world of print - from trying to sound out the additives on his cereal box, to writing a letter to Grandma carefully sounding the few letters he knows into "Dr Grnmah."

If you have a mental chart of phonetic sounds and an idea of their hierarchy of difficulty, you can capture the moment of your child's interest to further his understanding. Peter (6) recently asked me what the word light was in his library book. I pointed to the igh and told him these three sounds say I. We sounded through the word together. He went on to read the next page, having no problem with the word fight. When my daughter tells me about a book she has been reading, I can ask her questions using literary words so that she uses them in her description. What was the main conflict? Who was the protagonist? Admittedly, I can sound stilted and teachery if I overdo it, but my daughter appreciates the review of terms coupled with my honest questions.

Drop Tutor

Children ask questions about their schoolwork at the most inconvenient times. In the world of guerrilla homeschooling, this means answering algebra problems from the changing table; stating the order of the planets while cooking, or counseling a frustrated child through a writing assignment; and still retaining a cool enough demeanor to deal with the squabble over toys that suddenly arose in your midst.

You can not "drop tutor" a subject you don't know well yourself. By "drop tutor," I mean dropping into a lesson without having to run for the teacher's manual or other resources.

Pick one subject a year in which to become an "expert." First read the easiest books you can find on the subject to get a handle on the content. For unit subjects such as in history or science, I find the easiest little kids' picture book I can on the subject to reteach myself what I've forgotten from my own schooling. I think I've learned more reading little kids' books than I ever did from textbooks! Get a guide that cuts out the lessons, and leaves a skeleton of the basic vocabulary and skills within the subject. Design-A-Study Guides are great for this, as are expanded skill-by-grade-level check lists that describe the information to be mastered.

Understand the Incremental Steps

I work with my child on a day-by-day basis to develop an understanding and a practice of the subject. This is as much for my reinforcement as my child's! Not only does this complete my understanding of the subject matter, it helps me to develop a method for teaching that subject.

Every subject has some sort of "Organizing Framework." Like a "closet organizer for the brain," an organizing framework organizes information for easy retrieval, but also organizes you or your child as a thinker. I believe it is most helpful if a child can construct the framework himself. He will see the framework as his own. Typical frameworks include charts of phonetic rules, timelines, classification charts of plants and animals, an addition table, etc.

In general, I pick the shortest route to teaching the organizing framework of the subject, then fill in the details with the liveliest whole books I can find. For subjects like teaching phonics and writing, I found myself developing all sorts of teaching strategies to hold their interest and expand understanding. With my younger children, I can now assign much of their school work and tutor to any problem that arises without so much direct teaching time. This gives them more control over their day allowing them to finish work without waiting for me to get to a subject, and frees me to spend my time only where it is really needed. This is another advantage of becoming a professional mommy; teaching takes less work with subsequent children!

Develop a Teaching Philosophy

Now that you have mastered the content of the subject, read up on some of the teaching philosophies that effect the way a course is taught. Biology from an evolutionary perspective teaches the student in a sequence starting with the cell and moving to more complicated life forms. A book from a creation perspective starts with what the student sees - whole plants and animals - then uncovers the underlying design.

Most textbook introductions will lay their philosophy out for you. I've learned a lot about educational philosophy from reading anything by Ruth Beechick, but I think her Language Wars (which is about curriculum in general) to be highly valuable. I've also enjoyed Mary Pride's subject introductions in her Big Books of Home Learning, and still find them right on.

Evaluate Curriculum

Once you know a subject well, you will be able to step back and view a curriculum as a whole, evaluating how the subject is developed from year to year, the basic philosophy behind the way content is presented, and the teaching strategies employed.

Math starts with counting, then addition, and progresses through calculus. Some math programs focus on content, while others focus on rote skills. I have found both areas need attention.

Geography is often taught beginning with what is close to home and progressing outward. I prefer to teach geography by starting with the continents, then adding to the child's knowledge by reading stories of people who live in the various countries of each continent.

History might be taught chronologically, beginning in Ancient Babylon, or according to what would be most familiar to a child, such as beginning with his relatives and going through U.S. history. The KONOS curriculum teaches history by getting to know the stories of historical people. My young children can understand stories of people's lives, and they can add those people to the organizing framework of our timeline. Little by little they build on the knowledge of people that they know throughout history. As they get older, they begin to see history in "periods."

Science is usually taught according to what is familiar to the child, or as simplified pieces of the later high-school curriculum (i.e. the major plant kingdom). I like to teach science in a fashion similar to our history. We begin by building a simple chart of a topic, then getting to know one part of the chart well. For instance, we made an overall classification chart of plants, but then got to know one plant from our backyard that fit in each category. This allowed my younger children to both grasp the idea that there is a way to organize information as a whole, and to personally know and enjoy the plants that are familiar to them.

Develop a Teaching Strategy

There is a time to teach different topics in various stages of a child's development, and we must understand and respect this as teachers. One reason why some rigid phonics programs are so exciting to us moms is that we finally "get it" ourselves, having been reintroduced to an old topic at a new thinking level. It is, however, inappropriate to require that level of phonetic analysis of a 5-year-old beginning reader.

I like the way the Classical Approach describes the various thinking levels (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric), and have found this to be a reliable grid. My only addition has been to remember that learning must also associate with a child's heart and understanding. Just because a child can memorize rote facts doesn't mean a child should be taught rote facts with no understanding of their content.

In a nutshell, my method is to seek the light of understanding in my child's face. If the bulb doesn't go on, I cut back the lesson to a simpler and more concrete level. If after many lessons, my child doesn't seem to grasp the subject, I consider dropping it for several months - or even years. I have at times dropped spelling, phonics, grammar, Latin, and writing assignments. On the other hand, I've been able to keep many of my children several grades ahead in math and reading, and all have maintained a keen interest in schooling.

If you are just beginning to homeschool and the thoughts in this article seem overwhelming to you, I'd like to comfort you with the confession that I often call my oldest child my "homeschool guinea pig." I switched math programs on him an embarrassing number of times as I worked out my own teaching ideas. Yet at sixteen he got a 4 out of 5 on the Calculus AP exam, so perhaps I created a very flexible thinker!

In truth, I think all of my children have only benefited from seeing me struggle over their subject matter. They know that we are working at this homeschooling together, and that's the best part.

Katherine von Duyke is the mother of nine children, has homeschooled for eleven years, is married to Timothy von Duyke, a P.C.A. pastor, and has a degree in nutrition, which she says serves to make her feel guilty when indulging in chocolates! Kathy spends the wee hours of the night free-lance writing and editing her newsletter, KONOS Helps.

It's all a bad dream. I'm surrounded by a mob of skeptics. The future of homeschooling hangs in the balance. "Why are you doing this irrational thing to your children?" they demand. (Remember, it's a dream.) A sneering questioner calls out, "Can you really pursue excellence as a homeschool teacher?" I breathe a sigh of relief. This is an easy one. "Why, yes. We are strongly committed to pursuing excellence in our home school." The crowd begins to murmur and grumble. A voice angrily shouts out, "Yes, but what do you do to pursue excellence?" It's going to be a l-o-n-g dream.

The question of excellence hangs over homeschooling like the proverbial sword of Damocles. If you took all the "honest" questions laid at the feet of homeschooling by critics and skeptics, it wouldn't be far off the mark to summarize their underlying charge something like this: "Homeschooling falls short of the excellence that is the right and privilege of every child in public school."

Homeschooled children consistently outperform schooled children - both public and private - on nationally normed standardized tests. This now extends to the ACT (the "other" test that some colleges require instead of the SAT), as we recently heard that, once again, homeschoolers taking the ACT had higher averages than schooled test-takers.

So why are we even talking about excellence? Because it's all about defining terms. If the public education system gets to define the term "excellence," then it's going to be a kangaroo court. The fix is in, the jury is rigged, forget the facts and let's get to the verdict - guilty!

In the world of public education, excellence used to be defined as performance on standardized tests. Today, it is increasingly defined as a system of "outcomes" that include beliefs and values many of us do not wish our children to have. Either way, excellence is defined by standards, and standards are defined by professional public educators. To protect their standards franchise, homeschooling, which is by definition not public schooling, is simply labeled as a substandard education (i.e., not "excellent"). To suggest that children raised at home are pursuing academic excellence would be to admit that "untrained, unqualified, uncertified parents" are as effective as "real" teachers.

The reality, of course, is that we are. Homeschoolers simply have different sets of standards to determine excellence than the public school system. Our standards, based on academic achievement plus much more, are also shaped by our personal experience and convictions, our family commitments, our insights into our children as individuals, our priorities in life, our own knowledge and skills, and much more. Our standards are not fixed, but dynamic, because every child is different and unique, deserving a personalized, "Designer" education. Public school standards, in contrast, are based on a theoretical, one-size-fits-all, age-graded model of knowledge attainment and personal behavior and belief. The goal is conformity to their shifting standards; excellence, by their definition, is reaching or exceeding the current goal.

So is there a legitimate standard of excellence toward which we as Christian homeschooling parents should encourage our children to strive? We wrestled with that question early on as a family, even before our first child was born, as we sought to come to grips with just what a homeschool should be and do. We came to a philosophical divide. On one side were child-centered educational models that based homeschooling success more on what the child was doing; on the other were parent-centered models that based homeschooling success more on what the parents were doing. What was needed, it seemed, was a model that integrated both into a single approach. We found it in a discipleship-based model.

We came to homeschooling with a basic conviction, born in our years before marriage in discipleship ministries, that we are not just raising children; we are discipling them. Our greatest goal as Christian parents has always been to help our children become mature disciples of Christ. Academics, as important as they are, have always been second to that first priority to disciple our children.

In Paul's words to the Ephesians, parents are commanded to "bring up" their children in the "training and instruction of the Lord." The word "bring up" does not describe a technical duty, but a very personal relationship of nurturing and cultivating a living thing. It's the same word Paul uses to describe how husbands are to "nurture" their wives as they do their own bodies. And "training and instruction" are the vocabulary of discipleship and spiritual training.

The only "excellence," to my knowledge, to which we are called in Scripture is the excellence found in God, and in Jesus Christ. Though there are certainly many examples of God's people who become "excellent" by the world's standards, God's standard of excellence for our lives is moral and spiritual. If we aim only for worldly or academic excellence and miss God's, our children will be of little use to Him; if we aim for God's excellence, our children will certainly learn the academic skills they need to be useful to the God of the universe in their future callings.

How is that usefulness attained? It is a process of growing in godliness that never stops, and is never fully realized in this life. Peter says that if your moral and spiritual excellence are "increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful" for Christ, and "as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble." That is a promise Christian homeschooling parents should claim!

We have worked out a method of how to lead our children towards excellence with God. It's an educational model that we have come to call the Whole Hearted Learning Model. It emphasizes the relational nature of education in the home, and integrates all the necessary academic goals that will enable us to raise children who excel both as students and as people. We begin with the goal of striving for moral and spiritual excellence, which we believe will enable our children to strive for academic excellence, and do so in a way that brings the most glory to God.

Although the model is more fully developed in our book, Educating the Whole Hearted Child, the five areas of focused study that define the model will give you an idea of how we have combined both living and learning goals in our approach to homeschooling. The first two areas are more parent-directed, the last two more student-directed, and the central area more interactive and relational.

Discipleship Studies   We start with the study of God's word to gain wisdom. Our goal is to shape our children's hearts to love God and to study and know his word. This is the foundational area of study.

Disciplined Studies   Next we study the "basics," such as math and language arts, that require a more disciplined approach. Our goal is to develop our children's foundational learning skills and competencies. These academics are part of our overall goal to raise balanced, competent, wholehearted children. These correspond roughly to the "inactive literacies" John Taylor Gatto talked about in his interview, although of course at a higher level than the schools encourage!

Discussion Studies   We spend the bulk of our studies in the humanities, reading literature and history to ourselves, reading them aloud to each other, and studying the fine arts. Our goal is to feed our children's minds on the best in living books and the fine arts. There is a great deal of interaction, discussion, and inquiry in this section, all of which is shaped by biblical perspectives. Here are the "active literacies," again using John Taylor Gatto's term.

Discovery Studies   Next, we direct our children into the "study of learning" in areas such as nature, science, the creative arts, and all other interests. Our goal is to stimulate in our children a love for learning by creating opportunities for curiosity, creativity and discovery. We are transferring to our children their own sense of desire and ability to learn.

Discretionary Studies   Finally, we turn to the "study of living," focusing on natural gifts and interests, community involvement, and life skills. Our goal is to direct our children in developing a range of skills and abilities according to their drives and gifts. Here is where we move them toward excellence in areas of personal giftedness and ability.

Having established our own methodology and standards of excellence based on Scripture and our own convictions, we do not concern ourselves with the standards of excellence defined by public educators. We have, in fact, a much higher standard to which to attain - the excellence of the One who made us and sustains us. If we truly pursue His excellence, the rest will follow naturally for our children, not just because Mom and Dad require it, but because they will desire it in order to glorify God in all that they do.

As it turns out, the dream is not so long. I answer the crowd, "What do I do? Why, I pursue in my homeschool the excellence of the One who created the very brains we use to learn. Why would I pursue anything less for the precious children God has put in my care? Your puny standards of excellence are far too low and pedestrian for me. The God of the universe is personally committed to helping me raise children who will excel in eternity. Anything less is unacceptable for my homeschool. That's what I do!"

And with that the crowd breathes a resigned, "Oh!" and quietly disperses.

. . . I can dream, can't I?

Take courage and take the "real book plunge." The act of replacing a history, science or literature textbook with the many fabulous real books available in homeschool catalogs may be an experience similar to that of jumping into cool water on a hot day. Once you are in however, you are glad you had the courage because the water is wonderful.

Let your young children chatter. Charlotte Mason said that this was an amazing gift that every normal child is born with and that it should be taken advantage of in their education. Children of any age can start to narrate using an Aesop fable, for example. Over time a child's habit of narrating what he knows will carry over beautifully to his writing ability.

Pitch the worksheets. Develop the habit of narrating. Use it in place of so many worksheets.

Those who read twaddle may just as well twiddle their thumbs. Most children are bored by easy vocabulary found in "graded readers." Try reading aloud from a page or two of any well-written children's book. I recently finished reading aloud from the story, Ginger Pye by Newbery medalist Eleanor Estes. In it we read that the dog named "Ginger was a purposeful dog. When he found something he "thoughtfully and earnestly breathed in the essence of Jerry until it permeated his entire being . . ." Are the words I put in italics third grade vocabulary? fourth grade? fifth grade? sixth grade? I don't know. What I do know is that my eight-year-old son delighted in hearing it read aloud. He always looked forward to hearing the next chapter at bed time. Listening to vocabulary in context like this is the best way to become familiar with new or strange words.

Make a nature notebook. It's a pity when children can name all the Star Wars characters but do not know the names of the birds, trees, flowers and insects in their own neighborhood. My children's Nature Notebooks, filled the crayon drawings of the nature they have observed, are more precious than a pile of workbook pages could ever be.

Display at least six pictures of one artist's works over a period of a semester. This is all it takes for a student to become acquainted with some of the world's greatest works of art. Display six or more of Leonardo DaVinci, six of Jean Francois Millet, six of Michelangelo, or whomever you choose. Let the children look and look and look and then describe what they see.

Do the same for music. Just pop in a cassette of greatest hits of Mozart, Beethoven, Scot Joplin, or Gershwin. One composer at a time is suggested. Play that composer's music over and over again while you wash dishes, sweep the floor, ride in the car, draw, or give the little ones a bath. Music is the universal language and classical music is another part of a cultural heritage we can pass on to our children.

Hooray for the strong-willed child! My prayer is that all my children will be strong-willed children, that they develop the will-power to do what is right, to choose to follow God's will and to do it with all their might. My job as a parent is to guide and inspire. I place in the curriculum stories that invite "hero admiration." The Bible, biography and historical fiction can supply heroes with virtuous characters that children may choose to emulate.

Good habits need constant attention until they are formed. Faithfulness at a task involves consistency. To be consistent takes great effort until a habit is formed. Once a good habit is formed another can be added to the list of acquired attainments. And good habits can take the place of bad ones this way, too.

Keep lessons short in the early years of school so that a student can focus all his attention without being tempted to dawdle. Over time a habit of attention is formed that enables the students to do harder work without fretting.

Some twenty "habits of the good life" can be instilled in the lives of our children during their school years. A mother only needs to develop one habit in her children at a time, keeping watch over those already formed. Her homeschool days will go by more smoothly with some routine and good manners. Saying "thank you" and "please," sharing, taking turns, sitting up straight at the table, waiting patiently, and remembering daily prayer, can become habit. Speaking the truth in love, using determination, counting our blessings (to avoid self pity and depression) are virtuous actions that do not need strenuous moral effort once they have become habit.

You don't have to be perfect. I'll admit to you that I was not brought up by way of Charlotte Mason's guiding principles of education. I was an "all right kid" so I got through the system of public school okay with slightly above average grades. But I graduated without reading more than one or two real books. I acquired little knowledge of literature, poetry, great art, classical music, history or science.

When my own children were small I was desperately in need of the wisdom and confidence to homeschool my children. So I asked God's help and searched for his answer to my prayers. This was the answer. I would learn along with my children. I cannot say I've never had a down, insecure or confused moment during my homeschool adventure. However, I can say that I am so glad I decided to homeschool fourteen years ago. We've been learning a lot together. And I am grateful Charlotte Mason's guidance was made available to me.

After being on the brink for more than a year, my 5 year old is learning to read. Not that she's old enough to worry about it, she just loves books so much I thought it would happen earlier. I did do a TINY bit of sitting down and teaching, but it probably only nudged her a little sooner than she would have learned herself.

Probably not. It's so tempting to think we can teach kids, but the fact is, we present, and they learn. If she wasn't ready, she wouldn't have been interested and she wouldn't have learned. Reading aloud is the start; demonstrating that reading is normal and interesting by reading yourself is part of the process, too. My own son, Alex "broke the code" for himself at about age 5, by typing a caption from National Geographic on the computer; he opened a word processing program, got a new document, chose a typeface and size, and started copying this rather lengthy photo caption about sea stars. He was so intent on what he was doing! He looked from the magazine, written in italics and upper and lower case, to the keyboard to find the matching letter, to the screen, where he saw the connection between the printed magazine's words and the ones he was typing. You couldn't make a curriculum or a lesson or a method out of that; it was *his* way, in *his* time. Not too much later, he was reading aloud from Calvin and Hobbes into a tape recorder; his idea, not mine!

Anyway, any suggestions for what to get for C. that would teach her to do math...

OK, let's start with you. "Teach her to do math" is not what you want to do. Schools do that. If you want that, pack her off. Let her explore the world we all inhabit, and discover the mathematical patterns that underlie it all. Let her have her own money to spend. Let her put fruit on the scale at the store, and see the numbers on each side of the dot, and the same kind of numbers on the cash register (ta-da, decimals, fractions, division!) Let her help figure out which is the best value, the five-pound bag of oranges for one dollar, or the fifty cents a pound ones? LIFE is education. REAL LIFE is the best education. Children sit in schools playing with plastic coins, setting up play stores to spend them. Come on. This is not necessary. Paper and pencil math can be approached later, with the foundation of real life experience to build on. (She's *probably* too young for strictly abstract math, by the way, although every child is unique.)

...or reading, or science?
One of Alex's great loves, dinosaurs, helped him in his reading quest. People have this idea of "the basics" that is backwards. You do not have to teach a child to read in order for them to pursue an interest; help them pursue the interest, and the basics, because they ARE basic, fall into place. Kids are forced to read boring little stories, when they'd rather hear about spaceships, with spaceships dangled like a carrot to get them through the little stories. READ the spaceship book aloud, show the kid the pictures of the moon and Tranquility Base and before you know it, she's reading them to you. No boring primers necessary. (And don't neglect Dr. Suess :-)

It's good to know someone who has been doing "unstructured" HSing for a few years. By the way, what do you think of the concept of unschooling? Is what you do unschooling? Someone told me they thought that unschooling is too "new age." That element definitely exists in unschooling, but I'm not sure that's a basic tenet.

I unschool. I don't do unstructured homeschooling or relaxed homeschooling. In fact, if there was a different word people would recognize, I wouldn't say I "Homeschool" at all. I *did* do that with Laura, and she will tell you about it with tears. Alex, on the other hand, has never had a lesson from me that he didn't request and initiate. Laura will approach a subject with interest, but still looks for "the right answer." Alex just gobbles everything up like a Pac-man :-)

It bothers me a bit that unschooling is perceived as "new age." Labels exist to stop discussion. Give it a name, put it in a category, and you've captured it and made yourself safe from it. Label a person, and you have a pretty good idea of what they are; you can feel safe either embracing them, or excluding them, depending on what you label yourself. Call unschooling "new age," and you might dismiss it from the possibilities before you, just as another person might label structured homeschooling "conservative Christian," and thus overlook what could be the ideal learning environment for *their* child.

Unschooling scares people, because there are no guarantees. What they fail to realize is, public school, private school, or school-at-home offer no guarantees, either. What unschooling is about is *freedom.* How it appears in different homes is as individual as the child himself. It does not mean "unparenting," though a wide range of parenting philosophies are practiced (most unschoolers are pretty relaxed, though, since you aren't trying to force the kids to do things all day long). The basic tenet is not new age; it's "what is best for this individual person, my child?" In some cases, unschooling parents will find their child desires a structured curriculum, and they provide it. The difference is in WHO is asking for the curriculum, and who is responsible for doing it.

It is possible to have a structured, orderly life, and still unschool. Your child's day can include lessons outside the home, or lessons within it *if* it is the child who initiates. If you're dragging her to the table because 9am is Math Time, and she really wants to play with her Legos, you're not unschooling. What a school-at-home person would see as "just playing," an unschooler sees as learning. Sandra Dodd uses the saying "Everything is Educational." And she means everything. Even if C. wanted to play dolls, or with stuffed animals, instead of "doing math," that is OK; math is no more or less important than whatever is in her mind with the dolls and animals. Math will still be there when she's done with serving tea to Princess Wilhemina Bear and Mr. Pterodactyl. (And you never know; she may have discovered division as she set out the 3 cups and 3 saucers and served the 10 cookies, 3 each with one left over!)

One thing school does that you don't ever, ever have to do is this: By making certain things "subjects," other things are not subjects, and in school, only subjects matter. What you learn "on your own time" is unimportant, and in fact detracts from the time you should be spending on subjects. Homeschools can end up making this same mistake: You buy a curriculum and you "do school," and THEN you can play (i.e., then you have "free time"). IF you do your lesson, you can play. Unschoolers turn the whole thing upside down: If you follow your interest (play), you will learn in the process.

Think about how an adult learns something new, how you yourself do it; there is no reason why a child can't learn in the same way. You have an interest, let's say, in tying flies for fishing, or in the Civil War, or in chinchillas. What do you do? Research, for one. What kind? The library, perhaps. You find books on the subject. You find movies about the Civil War. You go to the zoo or a pet shop or a state fair to see chinchillas and talk to people who raise them. You find a TV program about tying flies and how to cast, and you go to the lake and see people fishing, and talk to them. You realize you can't quite understand how to do it by reading, so you find someone who can show you. You want to have some fun interaction with others, so you join a Civil War reanactment society. Now, imagine you are in school, and you have to "study" tying flies, or raising chinchillas. You have no interest in these things at all; you are totally absorbed by the Civil War right now. It would take coercion (rewards/grades and punishments/grades) to make you "learn" about flies and chinchillas, and as soon as that last final is done, you forget it all and go back to that fascinating book on Antietam.

People learn because they are interested in learning something, for some reason. A man learns Greek to fulfill a goal important to him; a girl learns to keep her heels down and her reins even, because she wants to advance to using a bit. If these things, being a priest or horseback riding, were not important to the individuals in question, would either of them learn them? Would they be happy doing so if someone were making them do it? Children will learn long division, and algebra, and calculus in the same way. If they truly are not interested in mathematics, then they don't need it. They will most likely not pursue careers that require it. Basic arithmetic, sure. People need that, and without the interference of school, kids find it fun.

It's very common for us parents to panic about our kids' educations, *particularly* in the area we had the most trouble with ourselves. And taking on all the responsibility by homeschooling is very scary -- we can't pass the buck to anyone!! Educating yourself about *school* is important, too. John Holt and John Taylor Gatto will help there. The origins of public school in America are not noble or honorable. That schools continue to operate in the same way as at the turn of the century is part of their failure today. We don't have a need for obedient factory workers, yet we keep educating as though we did. What industry needs are innovative thinkers, people who are flexible and agile learners.

I've often thought how great it would have been if I'd known *then* what I know *now,* so I guess I get pretty enthusiastic when someone asks about homeschooling. Make good use of the resources readily available in books and on the Web; they will be really helpful. Trust yourself. Don't be in a big hurry about anything, especially spending money on curricula. Watch how your children discover the world around them, and trust their innate curiosity to spur them along. Realize that what you think is the most fascinating thing on earth may be met with a yawn on Tuesday, then eagerly sopped up three months later. Present whatever you think is cool, but *always* allow your children the freedom to say, "No thank you." Then, keep on enjoying the cool thing *for yourself.* Unschooling is for moms and dads as much as for kids!

And always remember the wisdom of Hobbes (the tiger, that is):
"If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun."
ALL KINDS OF HOMESCHOOLING
from "Off the Grid" by Sandra Dodd

When the deadline was upon me and I was pacing around, my son Kirby said, "Why don't you write about 'What I Did on My Vacation in Timbuktu' and then make it up from there" Well, I could write about what we did on vacation, but since we homeschool the same way all year and the kids learn more out of town than in, there is no vacation. We went to Ontario, anyway, not Timbuktu.
I kept pacing and whimpering.

"Write it like Lone Wolf," he said. "If you want to learn about math, go to page 132. If you want to learn about science, turn to page 53."

Now THERE is an idea--education as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. Now he's onto something. I mean now I'm writing.
There are many ways to homeschool. Surprisingly (NOT) homeschoolers sometimes look askance at styles which are not their own. Extremists at both ends have complained that they hate to be tarred with the same brush as [fill in the blank with "Other"].
Some homeschoolers are very structured. They do school-style work, with subjects, units, tests, grades, on a schedule with vacations (in Timbuktu, perhaps, but without schoolwork when they get there). They fear to hear, "Oh, so you're homeschooling; you just let your kids do whatever they want?"

Some homeschoolers structure their lives on the open classroom models used in the early 1970's. They were big in many New Mexico school districts, so some of you reeading this might have taught in one, or attended one. This is a structure based on removal of the traditional structure, on interest-based learning, on discovery learning. People enamored of this approach fear to hear, "Oh, you're a homeschooler. So you don't let your children play outside the house with other children?" or "So, call me when your lessons are over."

I'm an unschooler. Lessons are never over. On the other hand, lessons never really begin. Children's question are answered and an atmosphere of learning is created so that questions are constant and answers are never far away.

When people ask a structured family how much time it takes to homeschool the response usually ranges from three hours a day to six hours a day (much more than kids actually spend in classrooms in school). When you ask an unschooling family how much time it takes to homeschool, first there's a pause. I've heard, in rapid succession in groups of unschoolers, "None" and "All of it." Their range is it takes from zero hours a day to 24 hours a day.

When learning is recognized in the fabric of life and encouraged, when families make their decisions based on what leads to more interesting and educational ends, children learn without effort, often without even knowing it, and parents learn along with them.
Many homeschoolers fall somewhere between structured and seamless-life learners. There are families whose children attend school whose houses are learning labs, museums and libraries all rolled into one. Enriching our lives for the benefit of our children isn't just for homeschoolers. Small changes in parental attitude are sometimes all it takes.

Learning isn't in fancy books or computer games, it all happens in the ideas children have, in the trivial facts they fit together to come up with their view of the world--past present and future. You don't need a lesson or a unit to show a child what's wonderful about woodgrain, ice crystals on the windshield, or birdsongs. Five seconds worth of pointing and saying "Look, these trees were not native to North America" might possibly lead to an hour long discussion, or a lifelong fascination. Bringing something interesting home, browsing in an antique shop, listening to new music on instruments you've never heard--all those build neural pathways and give you a chance to be together in a special place.

Each autumn I find that I am forced by the events of the preceding year to clarify home education for myself. It is too easy to fall into the habit of thinking within the boundaries of a given philosophy of education and to march ever onward along a single narrow track. Persistence isn't always a virtue. When we make discoveries we grow, and when we grow we change. I can tell that I need to reevaluate when I find myself committed to things that don't work or when I start feeling overly satisfied with myself.

Often we become homeschoolers in opposition to the schools, and then we develop into a particular kind of homeschooler in opposition to other kinds of homeschoolers. Sometimes being in opposition takes on a life of its own, and doing battle on the side of the correct educational philosophy can become an end in itself. Having once been a teacher in the schools, I had built up a plentiful supply of opposition to them. I knew first-hand how incompetent and destructive most schools are. Opposition to the schools was a great source of energy for me and the foundation for much that I have learned about learning. But opposing something bad doesn't of itself furnish us with something good.

I had planned to do a lot for Jamie in our homeschooling. I would make all kinds of information and skills available to him. I wasn't going to push and prod; it would be an academic democracy with both of us vitally interested in the outcome. We would learn a couple of languages, master a few musical instruments, become computer literate, maybe build a nuclear reactor in the basement as a science project. Next to the Earl Stevens Homeschooling Program, the schools would seem to be concentration camps of ignorance and defeat.

The first official homeschooling notification that I produced for Maine education authorities sounded as though I intended to open a branch of the University of Heidelberg. As a supplement to the main body of the text, coming right after the list of several hundred books that we planned to read that year, I wrote a long, long explanation of my philosophy of education. It was righteously child oriented and scornful of the subject orientation of the public schools. Ha! Just let them stand in the way of my vision! I was pretty well prepared to speak to a joint session of Congress should it became necessary. Maybe the people at the Portland Public Schools would read all this material and call out into the hallways, "Everybody come in here and listen to this! Earl Stevens says some pretty definitive things about education that could benefit all of us."

I have since come to realize that school officials mainly want to establish whether or not you are in compliance with the law so that they can act on your paperwork and then forget about you. Generally speaking, they are not all that interested in whether or not you have discovered eternal secrets of learning. However, my labors may at least have given me a reputation at the School Department as a true fanatic, a person to be avoided if you don't want to risk getting a headache. Very likely what they said, after weighing my notification on a vegetable scale, was, "Let's just throw this guy's paperwork in the approved pile, and then we won't risk having to talk with him."

Of course most of my early plans for Jamie's education came to nothing because they had more to do with my new position as home university president than they had to do with him. Often Jamie wasn't at all interested in learning a particular skill or collection of facts, but he was usually polite about it. "Great, Dad, really great.

Interesting!" he would say in answer to my question of what he thought about what I was telling him. But I could see that he was peering out the window at the cat across the street, or dreaming about the day he would lead Starfleet Command against the alien invaders.

Often, neither of us was interested, and it was easy to let things slide. Sometimes inertia protects us from folly. It was more fun to play with the dog, and the dog was always ready. We spent most of our first year letting things slide and fooling around. The dog loved it.

When we see that our home education plans are not working out especially well, there are a number of ways we can react. We can feel guilty for failing; we can blame our children for not living up to our expectations; we can work ourselves and our children even harder and hope that something good comes of it. Or we can just step back for a while and see what happens. Homeschooling isn't a contest.

It doesn't matter a speck whether a seven year old child learns some "basic skill" this year or next or the one after that. I eventually discovered that it is possible to spend the first several years of "official" homeschooling doing little more than nurturing and playing and suffer no ill effects.

My biggest personal discovery is about my relationship with my child.

I found that the basic skills which deserve most of my attention have to do with Jamie's attitudes about life, assumptions about himself, courage, willingness to risk failure, curiosity, self confidence, and a host of other qualities that enable us to live life fully and well. Like any parent or teacher, I have a hundred opportunities each day to make a child think less of himself, to weaken his spirit, and to needlessly obstruct his freedom of movement and thought. The challenge for me is to avoid these opportunities whenever possible by doing more listening than talking and by sharing ideas instead of dispensing knowledge. With that thought in mind I retired from my position as university president, probably for good.

Jamie and I are still fooling around. Some of our fooling around evolves into interesting adventures, profitable to both of us. If we don't master foreign languages or build nuclear reactors, we do learn a lot about the world and about ourselves. I have come to realize that there is a great deal more substance and vision in my child than in anyone's educational philosophies, mine included. Observing him now, and trying to understand him better, helps me to avoid pretending that I know what should be done with him. The less I think about his future, and about molding him to fit it, the more clearly I can see him and the more honestly I can be available to him. While Jamie will be trying many new things this year both with and without me, this autumn I have learned that my relationship with my child is the essence of my home education program.

This essay was originally published in Earl Steven's column Talk About Learning, Nov/Dec 89.

Basically that the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we need to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

That’s a big question. The great advantage is intimacy, control of your time, flexibility of schedule, and the ability to respond to the needs of the child, and to the inclinations. If the child is feeling kind of tired or out of sorts, or a little bit sick, or kind of droopy in spirits, okay, we take it easy, and things go along very calmly and easily. When the child is full of energy and rambunctious, then we tackle big projects, we try tough stuff, we look at hard books. And I think schools could do much more than they do in this kind of flexibility, but in fact they don’t. I want to make it clear that I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a supplementary resource.

But the school is a kind of artificial institution, and the home is a very natural one. There are lots of societies without schools, but never any without homes. Home is the center of the circle from which you move out in all directions, so there is no conceivable improvement in schools that would change my mind about that.

That’s what Growing Without Schooling is about, of course. What one can do depends a lot on what one’s own life is. A lot of families have small businesses or subsistence farms or crafts, or various kinds of activities that the parents are involved in, which the children are also very involved in. The children just partake in the life of the adults wherever they are, and then questions are answered as they come up. Other people may live at home and work somewhere else; they may have a more conventional kind of existence.

I don’t believe in formal fixed curriculums, but it may very well be that when parents and children start off, they’re both a little nervous. They’re both wondering what they should be doing. If it makes people feel happier to have a little schedule, and to work with a correspondence school for a year or so, kind of as a security blanket, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a starting place.

My advice is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine what happens and to give children access to as much of the parents’ lives and the world around them as possible, given your own circumstances, so that children have the widest possible range of things to look at and think about. See which things interest them most, and help them to go down that particular road.

How that’s done depends very much on the family’s circumstances and their interests, and the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to build things, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever. The mix is never going to be exactly the same.

Homeschooling doesn’t require that parents spend a great deal of structured time. I think as parents get into this they tend to spend less time. How much time they spend with their kids depends a little on the circumstances in their own lives. Sometimes they spend a lot of time in company together just because it’s fun. Other times that’s harder for them to do. The children, though they may enjoy a lot of their parents’ company during the day, don’t need it once they get past 7 or 8.

I’d say they have a very great advantage. I wouldn’t say that a person was disqualified from doing it because they had had training in education, but I would have to say that practically everything they taught you at that school of education is just plain wrong. You have to unlearn it all. I never had any of that educational training. The most exclusive, selective, demanding private schools in this country do not hire people who have education degrees. If you look through their faculties - degrees in history, mathematics, English, French, whatever - you will not see degrees in education. I think for the most prestigious private schools you could almost set it down as a fact that to have a teacher’s certificate, to have had that kind of training, would disqualify you.

Oh, well, the children don’t have to learn physics or math from you. There are plenty of people to learn from; there are plenty of books; there are plenty of extension courses. GWS will have information on that. There are plenty of other people to answer your questions. And the children don’t have to get it all from Mom and Pop. There are people who have only high schooling, or may not even have finished that, who are now teaching their children at home and doing a very good job of it.

As for friends – you’re not going to lock your kids in the house. I think the socializing aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues - kindness, patience, generosity, etc. are learned by children in intimate relationships, maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different - popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours, during vacations, at the library, in church.

Most of the schools that I know anything about are tracked - there would be a college track, and a business track, and a vocational track. Studies have shown over the years that these tracks correlate perfectly with economic class. I think I know enough about most high schools in this country to say there is very little mingling of people from different backgrounds, different religious groups. The rich kids hang out with the rich kids, the jocks hang out with the jocks, the pointy heads hang out with the pointy heads, the greasers hang out with the greasers. Maybe there are some exceptions to that . . . but the idea of school as a social melting pot where people of all kinds of backgrounds get together - pure mythology, folks.

I think the teaching of reading is mostly what prevents reading. Different children learn different ways. I think reading aloud is fun, but I would never read aloud to a kid so that the kid would learn to read. You read aloud because it’s fun and companionable. You hold a child, sitting next to you or on your lap, reading this story that you’re having fun with, and if it isn’t a cozy, happy, warm, friendly, loving experience, then you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t going to do any good.

I think children are attracted toward the adult world. It’s nice to have children’s books, but far too many of them have too much in the way of pictures. When children see books, as they do in the family where the adults read, with pages and pages and pages of print, it becomes pretty clear that if you’re going to find out what’s in those books, you’re going to have to read from that print. I don’t think there’s any way to make reading interesting to children in a family in which it isn’t interesting to adults.

My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things with them, or make certain judgements about them. And so I say let children do with numbers what we do with numbers. I’m a great believer in many kinds of measuring instruments - tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales, thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.

Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: "We’ll have to teach them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money." I think dealing with money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you’re talking about basics, those are basics.

The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the human mind. It’s fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and liabilities and depreciation.

Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really "big adult stuff." Let the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why? This is inherently interesting, so let’s at least make this part of our life - like every other part - accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything else. It’s embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing floating around in space, and it’s a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business; there are numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions in cooking. So wherever numbers are in real life, then let’s go and meet them and work with them.

None.¹

One question which often comes up is "How am I going to teach my kids six hours a day?" And I respond to that by saying, "Who’s teaching your kids six hours a day now?" I was a good student in supposedly the best schools and it was a rare day that I got five minutes of teaching... that’s five minutes of somebody’s serious attention to my personal needs, interests, concerns, difficulties, problems. Like most other kids in school, I learned that if you don’t understand what’s going on, for heaven’s sake, keep your mouth shut. What happens when children become ill, or have an injury, etc.? Home teachers come in for three to five hours a week. It has been found that this is perfectly sufficient. These children don’t fall behind. No child needs, or should stand, six hours of teaching a day, even if a parent were of a mind to give it. It would drive them up the wall!

Just like anyone else. You know, there are these tests you can take... the College Boards, the SAT, and so forth. Actually, homeschoolers do exceptionally well on these things. They’re more motivated to learn what areas will be covered, and prepare for them.

Various ways. Sometimes parents have to decide (we’re the grownups) that we don’t want them to go back to that school, and then stick with it. But other times, if the children want to go, then that means they’re immune to the manipulation the schools can do with the children who don’t have a choice about whether they have to be there or not. The school loses some of its power when the children know they can quit if they want.

¹ Once when John Holt was speaking to a school audience, describing his views on the their structured curriculum, a student asked him, "But surely there must be something important enough that everyone should learn it?" He thought for a moment and replied, "To learn to say ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘I was wrong’." [unpublished anecdote]