Organization is not education (though it can help)

Here we are, starting a new school year, and all the homeschool instagrammers are sharing their amazing homeschool rooms. As of last year, I have a designated homeschool room, too, after eight years of using the kitchen table, the couch, or the back yard. And yes, we use it, I love it, and my husband is glad to eat without a map of Ancient Egypt, the cursive alphabet, a hundred numbers chart, and posters of common insects hanging over his head at the dinner table. Near the beginning of the summer, I even hired a babysitter and spent a long, productive day sorting 17 years worth of classroom teaching and homeschool materials (some of which had been boxed up six moves ago and never pulled out since) into big plastic tubs by subject. I took note of everything I had and labelled it all neatly so that I could easily pull things out this fall and in coming years. I texted a picture to my mom, who cheered me on but also reminded me that those neatly organized bins in my storage room are not the education. When she was homeschooling my brothers and me in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t have a designated school room, and we didn’t even have a dining room. We homeschooled in our kitchen, kept our books in plastic milk crates along the floor, and never thought twice about it. A beautifully organized homeschool room is great, but it’s not essential to a lifestyle of learning and flourishing.

When I started homeschooling, instagram wasn’t a thing, and most of us didn’t have smart phones, so social media was not full of daily pictures of homeschool life. I didn’t feel the need to compete with (airbrushed) photos of beautiful homeschool rooms. My inspiration came from friends at homeschool park day who would suggest a field trip they’d just enjoyed or shared a book or occasionally a piece of curriculum that just had their kids so excited about learning. One thing that we all agreed on was that when your children are home, actively learning all day, your home is never going to look picture perfect. I’m generally a pretty organized person, and I try to read a home organization book every year or two to get fresh inspiration to keep my home tidy. I do believe that when there is a place for everything, everything can get put away in its place. When extraneous things are removed from their zone, my kids (and I!) are less distracted and can concentrate on the tasks ahead of us. One of the things I decided right away when I did join instagram was that I would be real about the state of our homeschool—things are usually pretty neat and tidy at the beginning of the year, shelves full of potential, ready to inspire and delight and educate my children. But on a given day in October at 10 am, our room is a wreck! Books are everywhere, projects are piled up, and there are a million little scraps of paper under the table.

For the mom who feels like she’ll never be able to be as organized as those moms she’s seeing online, take heart. It took me fourteen years of parenthood and nine years of homeschooling before I got all my stuff organized. And my kids have been learning and thriving in the meantime. By all means, please try to be organized, but don’t conflate those lovely school rooms with the education taking place in your home.