Did you know that the first compulsory education law, passed in 1852 in Massachusetts, only required children from the ages of eight to fourteen to be in school for 12 weeks in the year, with only six of these being sequential?
Did you also know that students of that time enjoyed a literacy rate far above that of our modern day?
We’ve been trained to believe educating takes six to eight concentrated hours of academics every day for five days every week for 40 weeks out of the year.
That’s not true at all. No school in the world is actively “schooling” for eight hours each day.
They are mostly shuffling for at least three or four of those hours; which includes getting to school, standing in lines, taking roll call, moving from class-to-class, taking bathroom breaks, and eating lunch.
And even when children are sitting at their desks, they are not being intensely educated. There is a lot of waiting; on the teacher to be finished disciplining other students, waiting for teacher to answer a question, etc.
I remember well that, even in my very good school overseas with a graduating class of only 70 or so, out of each 50-minute class period, only about 30 minutes (if that) were spent on the actual subject. That ends up being only three hours max of input out of that long day (not including homework, of course).
There are reasons for all of this shuffling which have nothing to do with helping children become well-educated and prepared for life as whole persons; and you will find these reasons are well-documented if you care to investigate. (If you really want to go on a rabbit trail from here, look into the reasons why the German people so easily embraced the Nazi Party. You can begin with a man by the name of Fichte; but you’ll need to go both backwards and forwards from that point in order to get the whole picture. Ahem…).
But YOU don’t have to “shuffle.” You and your children can actually LEARN things.
Lately, we’ve been talking about what makes up an excellent home education, and I promised I would start showing you what applying the four elements of excellent education look like.
First, let’s go back to that picture of the first compulsory education law.
How was it possible to only require children to be in school for 12 weeks in a year? How could a child become educated in that short time?
This is because schools were only supposed to accomplish the academic core of learning; or, as we would call it, the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with a skeletal understanding of history and science. The rest was learned outside of the school building.
Pluck, ingenuity, ambition, and ‘horse—sense,’ all present in the successful
man of the day, were learned in the field, the shop, the marketplace….Admittedly,
literacy was a necessary tool for the successful man, but many parents thought this
was the result of a variety of experiences, one small part of which came from a few
winters spent in the local district school.
Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971
This is what John Taylor Gatto, in his book, The Underground History of American Education, has this to say:
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
I suggest that, instead of ranking our children according to testing and comparison with other countries, we should be comparing them with the children who grew up to forge this nation; people who could brave uncharted land and tame a wild country into the defender of freedom in our world.
And this is what I would like to do; I would like to return to the simplicity of education our forebears enjoyed. While there are other environments, home education gives us the greatest freedom in which to do this.
Allow me to illustrate.
In a home environment, there are two types of learning going on: Informal and Formal.
The informal happens more organically and naturally. It consists of:
- Walking through the natural activities of the day.
- Lots of free-play.
- Interactions with siblings and parents.
- Interactions with those outside.
- Observations of nature, others working and creating, etc. (we can steer the organic and natural—more on that another time).
The formal is what we usually think of as schooling. This is when the teacher/parent is directly involved in reading books, lecturing, and other educational activities. In any given day, and according to age and ability, this formal time can go from half an hour to four or five hours (but the most mature child would be doing this mostly on his own).
The first time I heard anyone talk like this I was like a bird let out of a cage. I loved the idea I could fly around, but my movements were erratic. I was both elated and very insecure. So, I tried numerous variations of the idea of concentrated combined with open-ended learning, and I began to see these four elements necessary for a successful education emerging:
1. Gaining favor with God and man.
2. The tools (skills) for learning.
3. Acquaintance with foundational content.
4. Application of all in the real world.
Within this pattern I set some priorities for our “school time” each day.
1. I attended to the first element first, otherwise it became pushed farther and farther out until it disappeared altogether.
2. I then concentrated on the tools and skills of learning; namely, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
If we only had time and energy enough for these two elements, then I counted our academic time a grand success!
Why? Because if my children had a good moral sense, they would want to naturally be their best selves for God and others, which would include hard work and self discipline. Also, if they knew the basics of reading and writing well, with a good math sense, they could easily tackle the areas of content and application on their own.
Then, if time permitted, and if everyone cooperated, we could add in more as a group. This would include science, world studies, etc. We could approach this in multiple ways; usually as a “unit study” including read aloud time on the subject, with some video, music, art, cuisine, and on and on included.
To be more specific, we would awaken, usually no later than 7 or 7:30 am, take care of personal hygiene, breakfast, and chores, and then sit down for some read aloud time with discussion. If we rabbit-trailed (which was quite often) things could go on for an hour.
Then, if the conditions were right, we would go on a nature walk.
After this everyone would grab his/her crate of materials and sit around the dining table. Each person had independent assignments to work on while the youngest children took turns sitting with me for their lessons in reading and math.
Our dining table in our homes has been in the same room as our front living area, so I could easily sit on the couch with each small person and cuddle as I gave them their lessons. Lots of times I would have some sort of cookie or snack to share to make the time special. The babies were free to play at our feet while we all kept an eye out for them as we went along.
If I had a child who was more distracted and needed more quiet, I would go into an adjacent room and close the door so we could concentrate better.
These individual lessons took only 15 minutes each, and after I was done with these I would be available to check on the older children and answer any questions they may have had.
After the youngest children finished their book work for the day, they were free to play. The oldest children then continued to work quietly while I sat at the table doing some administrative work, etc.
At some point one of us would prepare lunch. Then, as people were available, they would eat, with the youngest being the most eager. We had a bar in our kitchen, and sometimes we ate out on our back deck, so we didn’t have to clear the table from all the book work.
Sometimes we would put off reading our current novel until lunch time and I would read it while we were eating. These were some of the best times in our entire day.
All told, our “school time” took no more than four hours, with the youngest children needing only a few minutes to a few hours.
Then there were chores; putting “schoolies” up, straightening the general areas, cleaning up the kitchen.
After this there was quiet time. This is when the youngest children slept and the older children had time to read, draw, and do other quiet activities.
Then everyone was released to play or pursue their interests while dinner was prepared, with a quick clean just before Dad came home from work.
Of course, within this framework there was driving older children to work and college. We also included some interaction with other homeschool families at times. However, due to my limited time and energy, we didn’t participate in a lot of activities such as sports, etc.
As for the curriculum I used for the tools and skills of learning, here’s what I ended up finding that worked best:
- My To the Top reading program which I created by combining ideas from different sources and tweaking them for use with my children who sometimes struggled to learn to read (I offer this as a free download on my website, MomDelights.com).
- The McGuffey Readers (primarily) for reading instruction and language arts.
- TheGentle Grammar series, which I formulated based on an old grammar book from the Eclectic Education materials (you can also find this as a free download or purchase it pre-printed on Amazon.com—I try and keep everything very affordable).
- Harvey’s Grammar (which came about during the same era as the McGuffey’s).
- Writing lots of essays and an occasional original story, poem, etc.
- Math using vintage materials such as Ray’s Arithmetics, followed by Saxon math curriculum
- Unit studies with notebooking.
- Literature with notebooking.
- Autodidacting with notebooking.
- Nature journaling.
- Covering general science topics with notebooking.
- Discussion of current events and reading good literature in all areas to develop a Biblical world view.
- Reading aloud from good literature to help them develop higher tastes when selecting their own reading materials.
- Listening to good music and enjoying fine art together.
- Higher level math and science where needed for older children.
I developed assignment sheets to help everyone keep on track. Each sheet was divided into four days, and I used symbols and a letter system to keep things more tidy and easy to write down. The oldest children were more free to fill their academic time with their interests.
I even developed a tracking system by which I could record everything that was going on.
I hope you are seeing a general pattern here, but there are more details I would like to share. I would like to take the pillars one-by-one and concentrate on each to show how all of this could be integrated together.
I hope you will stick with me for the entire series.
If you would like to listen or watch this post as a podcast, here are the links:
iTunes: The Lazy Genius Way to Homeschool
Spotify: The Lazy Genius Way to Homeschool
