Educational Philosophy

First up, if you are new to homeschooling, I’m sure those words sent you panicking. Stop, take a big breathe in and slowly let it out. Have you calmed down? Ok, let me explain. An education philosophy is a fancy way of answering questions like what is the purpose of education? What should your kids learn, and how should they learn? (Identifying Your Educational Philosophy, 2021) Answering these questions will help you feel grounded, give you the why to the question we know you’ll get asked “Why are you homeschooling?” That usually delivered in a nasty tone as well. Once you know your why, your passion and knowledge will usually silence the naysayers. If that doesn’t wow them, then tell them to shove it. Unless you feel like you need their acceptance, then let your child steal the show.

Let me explain. My kid, we will call Thing 2, was about 7 when he got to show off his knowledge set. We were at Disney with the fun Uncle waiting at the bus stop. I had the baby and tried to get everything set up while keeping baby happy and Uncle wanted to keep the kids entertained. So he suggested a word association game, mind you he had only interacted with public school educated kids previously. Thing 2 not only won each round, but taught the fun Uncle LOTS of biology and paleontology at the same time. Fun Uncle was flabbergasted. Now that he has two kids of his own, their plan is to homeschool them. 

That was a great story of how you dealt with the naysayers, but what about your why? What's my education philosophy? It may seem like a contradiction, so wait till the end before passing judgement please. About 8 years ago, I came across a friend that brought me into the Thomas Education (TJEd) or leadership education, fold. TJEd for me is two fold. The first fold is how we teach. We teach what the student wants to learn, within limits. We learn with them and model the behavior as a way to teach. It is about letting them picking what they want to learn, but me being the parent also being willing to set boundaries (DeMille, 2012).

Secondly are the projects that a company called LEMI, Leadership Education Mentoring Institute, designed and trained mentors to run. My encounter with them was vastly different from past co-ops experiences. The mentors, which were trained Moms, worked to develop a classroom that invited, allowed opinions, cultivated individual thinking, simulated real world experiences and was fun. Their goal was to help the students to unlock their potential through education and self evaluation. The course focused on helping them to "think like a lawyer, write like an author, compute like a mathematician, and so on"(Leadership Education, n.d.). Around the same time, I discovered a video from a leader in education at that time stating that the last thing we need to do is to teach our children to be computers and to compete with computers. They could never outcompete a computer in anything. But what we need to be teaching our children is compassion and what it means to be a human. (Sorry, I can’t find that video.)

Together it has merged into a mess I have today. Yes, we can’t out compute a computer, but we need to be able to compute. Yes, we have things like audible and text to talk, but we still need to know how to read. The important thing is to learn and expand our education, it doesn’t matter how that happens. The most important thing first is to get us (Mom is definitely include because we need to model what we preach) to love to learn.

If you are interested in learning more about Thomas Jefferson education, Oliver DeMille has some great books and resources.

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References

DeMille, O. V. (2012). A Thomas Jefferson education: Teaching a generation of leaders for the twenty-first century.

Identifying your educational philosophy. (2021, February 5). Coalition for Responsible Home Education. https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/guides/resources-for-homeschool-parents/educational-philosophies/

Leadership education. (n.d.). Scholar Projects Help Parents Mentor Their Homeschoolers Successfully! Retrieved October 8, 2024, from https://leadership.education/scholar-projects/