What is Learning?

As I prepare for the new school year, I have reevaluated my method of schooling our children.

What is home education? How do I define it and carry it out? These questions gnaw at me.

What do I want my children to learn beyond fractions, American history or science? What drives my desire to teach my children at home?

I have been reading a wonderful book that has tipped my, already teetering, ideas of formal education over and has strengthened my resolve to home educate. It is "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto. In this book he redefines formal education into "schooling". And he drives home the point that it is not what the children learn but what they are taught that is of the utmost importance in our society today. Children are prevented from being free-thinkers and are conditioned to have someone else evaluate their progress. They are imprisoned by the ideals of nameless, faceless bureaucrats whose standards are driven by greed for power or prestige.

His scathing unveiling of the madness behind the educational machine is riveting!

It also causes me to pause and wonder if I have been so conditioned by formal education (of which I had three years in public school and four years in private school) that its evil tentacles of conformity have crept into my own little home school. In all of societal interaction we have been conditioned to conform. And yet, as a Christian I have been warned:

Romans 12:2

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

If I am supposed to obey this command, why do I feel the pressure to do the exact opposite? Specifically in the realm of educating my children? The answer: it is easier to do what everyone else is doing. It takes no thought and little effort to flow downstream. But it takes great vision and much work to paddle upstream.

And so I go on carving out my definition of education. Elucidating what education means to me and for my children. It cannot be found in a text book, discovered in a new curriculum, or revealed in a new organizational method for optimal learning. Learning is simply the joyful gathering of knowledge that lay previously undiscovered until it was unearthed by curiosity. I believe that curiosity is a God-inspired desire. And I intend to cultivate it in my learners.