When it comes to home schooling, there's only one common goal that every child has to fulfil. That is the successful completion of whatever bureaucratic requirements are set up by the state. Apart from that, parents are free to craft the child's school day in any which way they please.
There is very little time required for the child to achieve the required goals. One look at the requirements give us the impression that much is already known and understood by our boy, and the rest is easy to teach. Furthermore, much can be taught without much direction from us. Our boy is passionate about YouTube and online games, and is therefore fluent in both his first and second language. Very little additional counselling is required. Five minutes of structured work per day, on average will probably suffice.
By making the structured work as trivial as possible, we teach our boy what may be the most important lesson of all, namely to take control of his own learning. There is no lack of curiosity with him, so it's not like he will learn nothing if left to his own. The other day, he was playing around with an HTML editor. For an 8 year old kid, that's pretty advanced. He is also reading and writing well due to his eagerness to figure things out. The only things we have to keep an eye on are the parts in the curriculum that he does not pick up on his own through his everyday activities. That's trivial in comparison to what he learns on his own.
Another thing that we help him with is his out of school interests and activities. We invite friends over every now and again to keep him from getting isolated, and we have registered him with an artist and a dance teacher so that he can get professional guidance with his two non-academic passions.
From this, our boy gets a taste of a lifestyle that we value very much ourselves. It is low in consumption and high on liberty. My intention is to teach my boy how to maintain this lifestyle for himself so that he will be as sovereign in his life as I am. That way, he'll be able to pursue any interest he might have, safe in the knowledge that he will never run out of money. If he makes money doing what he loves, he'll know how to save and invest his profits. If he pursues interests with no income, he'll nevertheless have enough money to keep him afloat through careful management of his inheritance.
From this it's clear that the ultimate lesson to be gleaned from home schooling is liberty, and with evermore people pursuing this type of education for their children, liberty will become evermore accepted and valued. Adding to this that no more than a few minutes of structured education every now and again is sufficient to achieve this end goal, liberty for all who want it is virtually guaranteed.
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| Fireside Education |
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