Finding your own style

If you hang out with home educators for any time, you will soon realise that each family has its own style of home education, and they vary enormously. For those outside the community, there are home educating families who do not seem that different from schools, using commercially available or home made curricula, having set lesson times, homework, tutors.

There are those families who don't appear to be that different from the feckless layabout uneducating families so feared by the authorities... they don't lay down any rules about how their children should learn, don't follow any set plan, and simply talk about a lot of stuff in an informal way.

The vast majority of home educators fall somewhere in the middle, between full-on school, and full-on autonomous education.

Choosing which style of home education is right for your family means examining your own educational philosophy and family style, and deciding what fits in with your personalities, your likes and dislikes and your parenting dynamic too. Everyone is different, every family is different.

Home education is a journey in which you learn more about yourselves, and so it is possible that you will start off in one way and finish quite differently. Some people home educate as a stop gap, between schools, or waiting for a place at their chosen school, and obviously that family needs to consider keeping up with the national curriculum in order to ensure that their child hasn't dropped behind when they rejoin the school system.

You need to look at your personal style of parenting, what other activities have to fit into your week, your relationship with your children, your relationship with learning and education, what resources you have, what resources you think you need, who else can help, who your children are, and who they want to be.

Examining your own attitudes to learning and education, and discovering that although it is a word you have used probably thousands of times, when you REALLY come to think about education it is not an easy thing to explain or define... all these will help to shape the sort of home education which is appropriate for your family. Nowadays there is a lot of information online for you to use, and you can tell if something speaks to you, or seems completely bonkers.

I'd say setting down your educational philosophy is a very important first step, especially in the UK. One of the judgements in court cases reating to home education, set out the idea that home education should be efficient... and it was decided that efficient meant that it achieved what it set out to do. In order to judge the efficiency of your home education in those terms, it is necessary to know
what you are setting out to do. That's where your educatinal philosophy comes in. And that's what may vary from family to family.

Some families may start out thinking that achieving the same sort of qualifications as a schooled child would hope to achieve might be a very important aim for their education. Their educational philosophy and approach would be quite different from a family which rejected examinations because they encourage children to learn to pass exams rather than learning and loving a subject for itself.

Some families will have religious reasons for trying to prevent their children from learning about evolution, computers, sexually transmitted diseases or horoscopes. Others will want their children to gain the widest possible experience of all age-appropriate material. This will all influence your educational philosophy.

Although I know it is tempting to want someone else to tell you what to do and what to think about your educational philosophy, it isn't possible for someone else to tell you what you think... you need to work it out for yourself. And write it down. Then keep looking at it and revise it when your ideas change.