A Vision for Our Children’s Education
Lest we get lost in the weeds of curriculum choices, scheduling, and school supplies, it’s always good to start our school year with a step back to remind ourselves of our long-term goals in education. My husband and I talked a lot about this before our kids were school age, but we revisit the topic with our closest friends and each other from time to time.
We want our children to love learning. My mom always used to say, “Only boring people are bored.” I find myself repeating her all the time! We want our kids to be interesting, fun people who never get tired of learning new things. We encourage them to be creative, to ask lots of questions, to be curious and observant about the world around them. While we limit the sit-down, formal schooling to set hours of the day, we never stop learning. We own thousands of good books, and we all read, all the time! While I get excited about picking out new curriculum and introducing a new subject, the curriculum is just a means to an end. When something is killing a child’s interest in a subject, we take a break and try something else. (That’s why you’ll see that I’ve recommended a few different math programs—we do not do these simultaneously, but take breaks from our core curriculum when I feel the need to change things up!) If the kids get really into a topic, I pull back our other expectations for a bit and let them follow the rabbit trails of their interests. In non-pandemic times, we take lots of field trips, attend concerts, and plan family vacations around museums and historic sites.
We want our children to good citizens, helpful neighbors, and faithful friends. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your kids can speak flawless French or diagram complex sentences from classic literature (though both of those are secondary goals!)—we want them to be good humans. So while academics are important to our family, character matters most. Sometimes doing your duty means practicing your math facts, and sometimes doing your duty means taking your little sister with special needs on a very slow walk around the block in her walker. Sometimes it means shoveling the neighbor’s driveway before starting school, suddenly stopping the school day early so mom can pick up groceries and bring a meal to a foster family having a crisis.
We want our children to be able to think logically, read critically, and communicate confidently and articulately. Math, grammar, Latin, and logic are some of the tools we use to develop those skills in our kids. We present things in an orderly way so that our kids can organize their thoughts and draw connections between topics of study. This is why I adore diagramming sentences, actually, and so far, my three oldest kids have found it immensely satisfying to learn how to identify the function of every word in the sentence. Foreign language study gives them a better understanding of how language operates as well as opening doors for future travel and reading and art appreciation. We read widely and emphasize well-written literature so that our kids are exposed to solid arguments and beautiful prose. With six voracious readers in the family (and the seventh eager to be read to), we talk about books all the time: What did we like or dislike in the story? What was effective? Why should your little sister read this? We have different tastes and preferences, so we’re always debating and trying to convince each other to check out our favorites. We memorize and recite poetry (and this year, we’re adding in speeches from Shakespeare) to practice public speaking skills.
We want our children to understand what we believe and why we believe it. For our family, our Christian faith is the foundation of every aspect of our lives, so theology is not just something we get at church on Sunday mornings, but spiritual formation is part of our everyday conversation and part of the basic routine and rhythm of our days. This means we study the Bible itself to see what it actually says, we don’t just give our kids trite answers, we encourage questions (and stop everything to answer them to the best of our ability, even the awkward, tough ones), and we ask them to consider the underlying worldview of the books they read, the movies they see, the articles they read, and the songs they listen to.
At the beginning of the school year this year, I actually sat down with my kids and read them this vision statement so that they knew exactly what our goals were. I’m a firm believer in giving the kids as well as myself a long-term goal to strive for as we accomplish little daily, weekly, and yearly school goals. I remind them that we’re all on the same team, working together to head in the same direction!
