Home education…never once regretted

September melancholy!

It’s a while since our home education days, even longer since my youngsters were at school in the early days, but that doesn’t stop that sense of melancholy come September. It has a sense of ending; ending summer; ending holidays; ending of freedom from school, it seems entwined with our culture.

When home education came into our family life it brought with it a whole new sense of joy about September, about our continued educational freedom, albeit tinged with a sense of sadness for those who were going back to school.

I know not everyone feels this. But when we started home educating after a brief spell doing school it was nothing but joy that ours weren’t among them.

So if you’re standing on the cusp of making that decision yourself, or having a bit of a wobble about it, I wanted to share the fact that we never once regretted it.

Of course, that’s not to say it was without wobbles and doubts at times. But then, don’t we always have those throughout our parenting over all the things we do?

Some of our wobbles are described in our story ‘A Funny Kind of Education’ and in ‘A Home Education Notebook’. But I also describe the antidote to some of these. And that was to remember how you got here and why you want to make the decision in the first place.

There are so many reasons parents choose to home school – almost too many to mention. They range from the philosophical distaste of the systematic and prescriptive style of learning in a school, the one-size-fits-all approach to make the child ‘fit’, lack of attention to individual learning needs, to the more personal like disrespectful relationships (and I include the adults in that), bullying, too much noise and hubbub (and there’s nothing wrong with children who don’t like that!) and the destruction of personality and the desire to learn, sometimes the destruction of good health and well being too.

Education and learning should be a liberating and life-enhancing experience. Schooling has made it into the opposite for many learners. That’s not because of a ‘fault’ with the child as the powers that be would like us to believe, it is because of a fault with the system and its blindness to a broader, variable approach to learning.

So if you’re having wobbles and doubts just remember that.

Also remember that were your children in school you would also be facing dilemmas and challenges and worries, they’re not just exclusive to home educating. You have no more chance of ‘ruining’ your children than schools do. In fact there is less chance because you’re keeping your eye on your individual who can become lost in mass schooling. You can review and adapt your style of learning to suit your child’s and family’s (ever changing) needs (schools don’t do that). And you can make education a broad and life enhancing opportunity for your youngster to grow, life long. Which is what education should be.

With all the online facilities and opportunities to network and connect with others now, and with Covid concerns, home education is growing and growing. Real home schooling is not the same as school-at-home (post here). It is a successful and liberating approach to learning and educating in it’s own right which thousands have been practising for years – long before Covid.

And as well as ourselves, I didn’t come across anyone else who regretted doing it either. The only thing I did regret perhaps, was not doing it sooner!