Preparing For The Real World??

"We want our children to be prepared for the real world."

"Don't you think your kids need to experience the real world"

These are statements I have heard more times than I can count in discussions about the merits of public schooling versus homeschooling.  It's implied that school is "the real world" and homeschooling is some kind of utopian virtual reality.

I would like to question the idea that school is representative of "the real world", even the secular "real world".  Where do adults experience being in such close proximity to twenty or more adults of almost exactly the same age for hours a day with all breaks scripted by a bell?  Where do adults experience having to ask permission to leave their workplace for a toilet break?  Where do adults need to raise their hand in order to speak to their boss?  Where do adults need permission from their boss to speak to their colleagues during working hours?  

On the other hand, while homeschooling, my children experience everyday activities that I rarely experienced as a child -  grocery shopping, meal preparation, house cleaning and more.  They also interact regularly with people of all ages in our community.  Something that I rarely experienced as a child.  My daughters have milked goats, raised chickens and slaughtered sheep.  They have also made phone calls to organize buying animals from strangers.  How is this considered less real than the life of a classroom?

For some school serves a purpose.  For some that purpose may be mostly worthwhile.  But please, let us stop this pretence that the purpose of school is to prepare children for the real world.

Not Why We Homeschool

For some time I've wanted to correct a misconception.

It seems that many people believe that homeschoolers - especially religious homeschoolers - are "sheltering" their children from an evil world.  For our family, as for many, many others, this is not why we homeschool.

Yes, at the very beginning we started out of (partly legitimate) fear.  We started from a fear that our children would be bullied and supressed as my husband and I were.  While I think it is fair and reasonable and even desirable to protect small children from some of the abuses that can occur in school (especially in a drug-infested, violent community such as we lived in), that is not why we homeschool.

We don't homeschool to protect and shelter our children, but to equip them.  Yes, one day they will encounter the "real world" and they will need to be ready for it, but it doesn't follow that throwing them into it will prepare them for it.  Would you send your five-year-old son to a brothel to prepare him to resist the temptation of porn?  You don't prepare for a marathon by running one, you prepare first by training for it.

Subjecting our children to immorality at an early age does not prepare them to resist it as adults.

However, that's not my main point.  We are homeschooling our children to give us time to instill in them the values that are truly valuable.  We are equipping them to face a world hostile to our beliefs by teaching them those beliefs day in and day out.  This is hard, and I certainly don't do as good a job at this as I would like.  I also appreciate that many families send their kids to school and diligently train their children in Godly, Biblical values.  I admire anyone who can do that.

It has been through much prayer and seeking guidance that we have concluded that really, the only sensible way our family can adequately and effectively equip our girls for the world they will one day face head-on is by homeschooling them.

I have sometimes heard the experiences of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (more commonly remembered by their Babylonian names of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego) in Babylon compared to the experiences of Christian children in schools.  There is a big difference.  These young men were taken into captivity as teens or young adults.  They were not children, and they were not sent there by their parents!

Coming back to where I started, we are not trying to shield our children from a hostile world, but to prepare them to face it with courage and confidence. We are taking this time while they are young to teach them Biblical values and truth, and to help them to see the hand of God in the world around them.  Even now, as our older girls reach the end of that time, they are gradually experiencing more of the world at large.  If we were trying to shield them from pain, suffering and antagonism, we have failed.  They have all experienced hard things - some very hard things - at home, at church, and in the world at large.  Sometimes the hardest things have been the closest to home.

Avoiding pain is not why we homeschool.  Equipping our girls to rise above pain and grow from it is why we homeschool.

Life As School

Since I'm meant to be keeping records of our schooling anyway, I'm thinking this blog might be a good vehicle for it.  The last couple of weeks have been pretty relaxed, but some learning has still been happening.  Cinnamon taught Pepper to use the swing.  We've been harvesting zucchini, beans and apricots together as well as collecting eggs.  Cinnamon and Pepper have been learning about the different varieties of beans we have, and in the last weeks they've learned a lot about animal husbandry and animal behaviour as we raise a batch of chicks.

It's been amazing to see how the behaviour of our chickens have changed while they've been raising chicks.

The older girls have worked hard on their vege patch which has made good progress

This second photo is a couple of weeks old - I hope to take another one soon.  We had strong winds that left Poppy despairing over her precious plants, but God answered her prayers and they survived against the odds.

Kayaking on the dam has been a great activity for the hot summer days.  Oh, and we learnt a lot about bees when we had a bee colony removed from under our verandah (I haven't included photos of that since they have other people in them)

And *finally* the girls are starting to be willing to play for other people, and Poppy is even *requesting* "family band" (admittedly partly because I let her off piano practice which she doesn't love) - something which used to be a *huge* battle with all of them.  Cinnamon can keep up with her sisters for a couple of pieces, and the older three play Pachelbel's Cannon (according to a somewhat biased Mummy) beautifully.  Welcome to our homeschooling year.  May I do better at keeping records this year!