When I first found out that there was a thing called homeschooling I thought it to be an exaggeration. Even before I had read about this kind of education, I was thinking about all sorts of objections and problems, so I somewhat understand those who protest against it before they know what it’s all about. This idea seems  to be at first so bizarre, so eccentric and so different from the usual ideas on education that it’s easier to place it in the ”nonsense” category.

I didn’t go that far, but I was wondering how a parent could teach his child all sorts of things he may not have a clue about. At that time I thought you needed serious skills in an area in order to be able to teach it and that learning depended on the teacher and the way he organized it. Now I know that:

Learning belongs to the learner.

No matter how well you prepare and organize the learning activities, you can’t make a child really learn something if he doesn’t already want to. You can, sadly, make him memorize until test day in order to avoid the hated F or get the desired A, but aren’t we turning learning into a means of avoiding punishment or earning rewards? The truth is that you cannot trick the child into learning in a profound and long-lasting manner.

Children know how to learn.

They were born with an insatiable curiosity and a passion to learn about their environment, both being an essential part of the survival instinct that has made us come so far. I write it one more time: children know how to learn! How else would they come to walk, talk, manipulate objects, memorize events, identify and express feelings and do all the things we marvel at in their first years?

Learning belongs to the learner  + Children know how to learn = Children learn on their own.

If you’ll read Teach Your Own, by John Holt, you’ll learn that parents who home school their children quickly see that the little ones don’t need them as teachers, but as loving parents. As they grow up, they ask for less and less help and, when they do, it’s very different from the “helping” that occurs in school.  Kids don’t want neither other people’s questions nor their solutions. They have their own questions and interests and they want to find the answers themselves. And if they ask for help, we should do it just as they asked, because far too often we destroy their curiosity by robbing them of the discovery, in our (sometimes exaggerated) concern for their learning. So, there are no academic sermons and no formal teaching!

Learning never stops.

It’s amazing to me how many of us think they’ve finished learning the day they graduated from the last educational institution, when, in fact, our mind never stops wondering, solving problems, memorizing data and events and analyzing  the environment. So, don’t marvel at a dad who’s learning about dinosaurs or the universe side by side with his kid, because passions are sometimes contagious or just because he loves him so much that he wants to share his interest.

Children need a parent, not a teacher.

Children need respect, autonomy and support according to their needs, not the unfair student-teacher relation. They don’t need an authority to tell them what to do, to decide what is good and bad, what deserves attention and effort and what doesn’t. They need a parent who explains, shares and encourages interests, supports efforts, gives advice without ordering around and helps without overwhelming. Kids need normal and equal relationships with the adults who play a major role in their lives. Only then they will develop the confidence and values we want them to have.

These are the main ideas that opened my mind to homeschooling. I don’t expect, of course, that they get everybody’s approval, because I know that they are opposed to the mainstream perspective on learning. But I do admit that I would like to at least awaken the curiosity of those who reject it from the start.