Learning for the sake of learning...  Recently I had lunch with a friend whose daughter has severe dyslexia. We often share and commiserate about our children and their learning challenges. The thing we have most in common is our hopes for our children.
We want them to find their joy, to be happy and fulfilled as adults. Of course, we have different ways of approaching these goals. For her it was very important that her daughter attend a private college preparatory high school. Whereas, we took the path of homeschooling. When we first began homeschooling, I was panicked about keeping in step with traditional school subjects. I wanted to make sure my daughter could jump back into school, if she chose to, for high school or college. But I soon realized this was hampering the actual act of learning. Checking off boxes of completion for subjects from textbook quizzes was grueling and making my daughter hate schoolwork. When I loosened the reigns and let her drive the subject matter, things began to really shift. We had moments of pure joy while learning! She began to light up. She started asking questions, making observations, begging to read just a bit more of that great book we were reading. Learning about one thing would spark a new interest into learning something else. It became organic and the topics we were studying started to connect in almost magical ways. So, this is real learning, I thought! “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin Then I had lunch with this friend who was talking about her daughter struggling through Geometry, Physics, English; pretty much every class subject. She has special tutors for each class and my friend spends every night helping her with hours of homework. They have basically built a scaffold around her that props her up and enables her to get through school. I had to ask… to what end? If the goal is to find joy and happiness how is pursuit of an out-of-reach education supporting that? The high school is focused on preparing kids for college acceptance, but my friend knows that her daughter won’t be able to keep up this pace of academics on her own in college. So, they are spending four years pushing this kid to a phantom goal. I must admit that during the conversation I started getting that old feeling of panic back from our early days of homeschooling. The worries that: my daughter is behind, my daughter will never be able to get into college, my daughter will never be able to get a job, she will never be independent. Wow. It’s so easy to get to that dark place. But then I remembered we are not on a typical path. We chose a different life. What is education if a child is not learning? I don’t know where my daughter will end up. No one knows how their children’s lives will unfold. What I do know is that my daughter is learning to be herself. She is learning to think her own thoughts, she’s learning to express her intellect, she is learning that learning for the sake of learning is the truest form of education. And that is the goal. P.S. for more homeschooling ideas, go to Blossom Learning.
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