Home Schooling Strategy

There is a proper pace to all things. To push faster than this pace causes stress, and to go slower causes anxiety. This is as true for home schooling as it is for politics and economy. Furthermore, there's a margin of safety to all things. A life constantly lived at the edge is a life of constant fear and anxiety. To master fear, we need to build cushions of various kinds. We need surplus capital. This too applies to all aspects of life. It's only when we operate within our material and intellectual limit that we feel comfortable enough to perform optimally.

It follows from this that home schooling should be done at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow, and that it's better for the child to know too much than too little when going for a school exam. This is why learning should be as free as possible. The 5 minutes a day school is in this respect a guideline that parents should follow. The amount of structured learning should be kept to a minimum. For the rest, children should be left to explore their own interests.

Children are naturally curious, and pick up an amazing amount of knowledge through everyday social interaction and activities such as online game play and YouTube videos. Learning is therefore not a problem. All that is required from the part of parents is to guide their children through the more formal disciplines, such as maths and grammar. Children have to learn the curriculum, but the bar is set so low that this requires hardly any work at all.

When teaching my son maths, I let him work through exercises until he comes to a problem that somehow frustrates him. If I manage to explain it to him, he can continue. If not, I tell him to stop. We put the book aside, talk some more about the problem, and agree to look at it again the next day. This allows the natural pace of learning to set in. Given sufficient time and attention, the child will always figure it out, and further progress can be made.

By the look of it, we'll be able to get through this year's curriculum with ease, even at the low rate of 5 minutes a day. Our plan is then to continue into next year's curriculum. We'll let him build up an intellectual margin so that the year's exam will be easy. This is not to push him along faster than other kids, but to allow him to grow more confident and secure. We have no plan to skip a year. There's no rush to any of this. The lesson we want to give our child is that margins are important. It never hurts to have a bit of extra padding.

If we keep at it like this, we might well see our son engage in all sorts of sophisticated activities in his spare time. He's already showing an interest in computer programming and video animation. There's basically no limits to what he might pick up in his free time. School will then become an easy and non-intrusive activity that he can do a little of every now and again. If he ever goes to college, he'll be an expert in all sorts of things, making college relatively easy to get through. Or he may never go to college. He may in the end pick up all that he needs in life from his free time activities.

Fireside Education

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