Author: Kate

Rediscovering the Importance of Family Life

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

Before the industrial revolution, family time was incredibly important. Families worked together, as a unit, to produce goods. As families were working together on the land, children were able to play, learn from, and spend plenty of time with their parents and siblings. Children learnt practical skills like how to cook, garden, sew, and build. Following this era, family members’ lives became separate. Women’s roles in the economy took a major hit, as they began to take on more of a “housewife” role while men had to work long hours to provide for their family. Before the industrial revolution, families would work at their own pace from home, living a comfortable and content lifestyle and choosing their own work hours and days.

Schools as we know them today – compulsory, standardised, mostly state controlled, and mass-educating – were established in around 1870, following the industrial revolution. It makes sense that the 9-to-3 school day loosely models itself upon the 9-to-5 work day that emerged around this time. The problem is that these workplace guidelines were put in place to cater for the needs of manufacturing and factory workers. While manufacturing and factory work still exists, today’s modern society has produced thousands of other industries and workplace domains that are not confined by the hours of 9-to-5. Technology has made it easier to do work anywhere and at any time, employers offer far more flexibility, people are travelling more. A factory model for workplaces and schools no longer works for many families.

My better half, my wonderful husband and involved father, does not work 9-to-5. Sometimes he is home during the day, and goes to work at night. Sometimes he works day shifts, or split-shifts. He almost always works on the weekend. This has been a significant factor in our decision to explore the idea of homeschooling. In the post-industrialisation ‘standard’ work/home model, a parent may work from Monday to Friday during the day while their children are at school. They will then come home and eat dinner together as a family, or spend some special time together, such as putting their children to bed. In addition to this, they have two whole days on the weekend together to spend as a family. On the other hand, in families where work hours do not follow this pattern, time together is sparse. A parent may work evenings or nights, missing out on their children when they come home from school, or they may work every weekend – the only two days the children are home. I know several shift working families where the children can go weeks without seeing their mother or father due to the fact that their parent is working evenings, nights or weekends and the children are at school during the only time that the parent is off work. Moving away from the 9-to-3 school day, and instead choosing to home educate, would be a wonderful option for families where work hours do not follow the traditional Monday to Friday, 9-to-5 model.

The beauty of homeschooling is that, as a family, you can dictate your own hours. Thanks to a magnificently low student-to-teacher ratio, many homeschooling families are able to get as much school work done in a couple of hours that would take a full six hour day to achieve at school. Families with parents who work on weekends could utilise days during the week to spend together, and dedicate weekend days to schooling. Holidays together don’t have to occur in the school holidays and the opportunity to travel or move without restriction becomes possible. In such a flexible, ever-changing and dynamic modern society, it seems to make sense to re-evaluate the rigid hours set by schools that were created to conform to the factory-like culture of the manufacturing and industrial age.

Obviously, the idyllic picture I painted at the beginning of the pre-industrialisation family is long gone. But we have also well and truly moved on from the industrial era – so why are we still structuring our homes, workplaces and schools like this? As society moves on faster still, leaving the information age behind and transitioning into a time where creativity is the new capital, let’s be creative with how we view our work and home lives. Let’s rediscover some of the benefits of family life that flourished prior to the industrial revolution, rethink how we educate our children (not to be mass-produced factory workers), and recognise that not all families are living in a 9-to-5 world.

You’re doing WHAT?!

~ Kate ~ 2 Comments

My daughter isn’t going to 4-year-old kindergarten. She didn’t go to 3-year-old preschool either, but it seems the longer we keep her at home, the more shocked people are and the judgement from the world seems to sting that little bit more. Apparently, the way we are parenting our children is quite radical by today’s standards, and our determination to avoid the broken and unnatural structure of our modern society is regarded as preposterous by many. I am not surprised when people think we are crazy for even considering homeschooling. After all, we have been discipled by the system to believe that school is absolutely necessary. It’s just something we do. Everybody goes to school, we need school. We need it for socialisation, we need it to get a job, we need it for healthy development – the list of ‘requirements’ goes on. But when you begin to discover that all of these things are actually complete misconceptions, it makes you question why you would just go along with what everybody else does just because.

I thought I’d pen a blog post to explain how this all began.

Not long ago, we attended an open day for the kindergarten my daughter was, at that point, enrolled in. Afterwards, I went home in tears. The outdoor play area was a dirty concrete jungle with a few broken old toys – I remember thinking of our beautiful big backyard at home which is full of nature, wildlife, a cubby, and more. The facility’s indoor space was just as underwhelming. The educators were unwelcoming and stand-offish, struggling to explain their educational program. They seemed to care little about the children’s needs and more about how how convenient things were for the adults – a common theme in today’s culture. I could go on about everything I witnessed that truly made my stomach sink (I won’t list them all here, but feel free to ask me about some of the very questionable things I saw) but basically, the whole experience felt off.

Obviously, I know this is an anomaly. I know there are lovely kindergartens. I’ve seen them – the beautiful green outdoor areas, nature play, crafts, books, and welcoming and caring teachers. I have fond memories of kindergarten as a child! But sadly, this was not one of them. Nevertheless, even though this experience may have been out of the ordinary, it was something that prompted us to think more deeply about education and it brought us to where we are now.

In the days following, I made some phone calls to try and enroll in different kinders, but we were too late. We were added to some waiting lists but we wouldn’t get a place – the only spots left were at kindergartens that offered 7.5 hour days. There was no way I was going to send my little one, who has only been on this planet for four years, to endure such structured and institutionalised days away from her family as long as an adult’s work day. And so it was decided that she would not be going to kindergarten.

It was then that I started looking into getting our kids involved in some local activities and groups as an alternative to kinder. In our community, there are plenty of homeschool co-ops and groups. After joining them I was amazed at what these unschooled children were doing – book clubs, nature walks, science experiments, incursions, art shows, market days, collaborative online lessons, and more. These kids were absolutely thriving without school! I decided to do some research. In Australia, homeschooled children perform better than school students in every single standardised assessment. They also have more university degrees than their peers (and yes, I’m hyperlinking to real research here). In fact, in some parts of the world, they have staff members dedicated purely to recruiting homeschooled students for scholarships because they are often the best performing and most engaged students in tertiary education courses. Growing up, my piano teacher was one of my biggest inspirations. She had been homeschooled, and she was one of the smartest, most brilliant people I knew – she had a smattering of qualifications on her wall, she performed in concerts and orchestras, she was kind and funny and a great teacher. She impacted lives. I recently managed to get in touch with her again, and she’s now homeschooling her own children who are also flourishing. The statistics (and anecdotes!) may be surprising but incredibly clear about the benefits of homeschooling.

“But what about socialisation?” The question that everybody asks and I can guarantee you are thinking. Well, according to various studies, homeschooled children are happier, more socially engaged, and experience less behavioural problems than public school students. My daughter loves her weekly Sunday School class where she works with teachers and primary aged students to read stories, complete activities and plan for a special presentation performed at the end of the year. She attends a fortnightly multi-age playgroup (including homeschool families) where she learns from the older children and feels proud when she is able to teach and help the younger toddlers. We have recently enrolled her in a local creative arts school that has its own special uniform and runs weekly classes in different age groups. She plays with her little brother endlessly, she learns modelled behaviour from the adults around her, she’s always the one to make friends at the park. She engages in so much natural socialisation – not artificial and engineered in a classroom – but the organic kind of socialisation that happened for thousands of years before school as we know it existed. In addition to this, these regular structured activities mean that, contrary to popular stereotypes about children who don’t go to kindergarten or daycare or school, she does indeed know how to sit and listen to someone when required, follow rules and expectations, and be in a group environment. The children I’ve observed in our local homeschool co-ops and groups are participating in far more socialisation than any children I’ve seen in my ten years of teaching in public schools.

After researching and discovering all of this I began asking myself: Why wouldn’t I want this for my child? What if we didn’t just keep her at home for her preschool years, but for some of her school years as well? The public schools around us are underwhelming, and the whole system in general is unfortunately suffering an ongoing decline. To afford private education, I would have to go back to work full-time to teach other people’s children, in order to pay to have mine be taught by someone else – ridiculous, right? If, as a family, we could make this work, why wouldn’t we choose what could be such a wonderful and beneficial educational path for our children? Yes, with any big decision, sacrifices have to be made. But I can tell you I’m more than comfortable with letting go of meaningless things that fade with this world (money, social status, possessions) in order to forge a life full of things that actually matter.

It’s the path that goes against every grain of our society that tells us we have to do life in a certain way. It’s a decision that is perceived as outlandish and foolish, and before reaching this season of my life I probably would have thought the same. It’s a decision that we wouldn’t make unless it was something we care deeply about, because we know we will be fighting off constant worldly attacks for our choice.

Does this mean I’m opposed to school and families that send their children to school? Not at all! There are some wonderful schools, and we have found many which are a little bit too far from us or just not affordable. What I do believe is that most parents know, care for and love their children more than anyone else in the world and they are capable of making decisions to shepherd them in a way that they believe is right for their family. There is no uniform way to go about life and it is okay to do things unconventionally or to veer from the path that most people just feel they have to stay on because that’s what everybody just does.

We still don’t know what our future holds. Our little one won’t be spending her kindergarten year at kindergarten. As for the year after, her first official school year, we may decide to homeschool – or something else might present itself. If we do decide to homeschool, how long for? Will it be a few years, or a significant part of our children’s education? We don’t know yet – circumstances change! But we do know that this is a serious consideration and conviction of ours that we feel called to live out.

I will leave this first blog post with the following David Gutterson quote, and if you are interested, I urge you to look into the history of institutionalised education, where it all began, and what its initial purpose was. Human beings were sustained by what was essentially home education for thousands of years – school as we know it is a rather recent concept in history. We are designed to live in families and be with our children, and it’s okay to want to do that – even if society is telling you that you’re wrong.

From a historical perspective it is possible to assert that these children are no mere oddity. Homeschoolers are not eccentrics and cranks but keepers of an educational tradition that sustained human beings for thousands of years, as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Compulsory schools, on the other hand, are a relatively recent phenomenon. A modern educational experiment whose results, thus far, are not particularly encouraging. Their failures result in large degree from the neglect of two long-standing historical truths: that parents are natural educators and that family life is crucial to educational success.

David Gutterson