There is a reason your family life no longer fits the “typical” school year. It’s because you have discovered a secret that has been lost to modern life, but you don’t feel good about it, you feel strange.
I remember feeling strange. I felt weird, even sinful, for a lot of years because I just couldn’t get our homeschooling to fit into “normal.” I bought the curriculum at the correct moment, I sat my children down to “learn” at the appointed day of the appointed month, but something in me was rebelling the entire time.
It seemed as though I would plan, and then life would always get in the way. A new baby, a move, a job change, illness, you name it, interruptions would get us off track, and I always ended up feeling as though I was failing my children.
Finally, I gave in to my own rebellion. I gave up the conventional ideas of what schools were doing, and I started observing the natural ebb and flow of our lives.
I reexamined the conventional patterns and started going with the schedules and methods which fit our family best.
I decided on structure that fits our family instead of trying to fit our family into someone else’s structure. I wanted to give my children the advantage of developing more than their brains. I wanted them to grow in the other areas of their lives as well; their character, their adaptability, and their relationships.
Believe it or not, way back when our country enjoyed a complex literacy rate well above 90% (as opposed to the current complex literacy rate in the US), this is how the entire republic educated.
Back then, the schedule was flexible and made room for the cycles of farming as well as community and family life. In fact, the first compulsory attendance law, enacted in 1852, only required a child to be in school for 12 weeks out of the year, and out of those 12 weeks only six had to be consecutive.
Think about that for a minute.
The entire school year was three months long, and six of those weeks could be done here or there, whenever a child could be spared from the real life learning they were gaining elsewhere.
The needs of the individual, the family, and the community outweighed the needs of the school.
“But didn’t the kids suffer from a lack of education?” I hear you asking.
The evidence suggests the opposite.
John Taylor Gatto, in his book The Underground History of American Education makes the claim that by 1840 complex, not simple, literacy in the US was between 93 and 100%. (It may be interesting to you to read his book and find out how he came to this conclusion).
What this says to me is that our children can be educated excellently without the dictates of the school schedule, and we can switch things up and move in and out of strict academics to get the job done.
If you are feeling pressured to conform to the modern school year, but you don’t feel like it fits your family lifestyle, you just might be surprised to find that you aren’t crazy, or lazy or rebellious, but you have slowed down enough to notice the modern tendency to regard productivity more highly than natural seasons of life.
In fact, we have been so removed from these natural rhythms that we don’t even recognize them.
It’s not our fault. Most of us have been trained in this way from infancy. We were rousted out of bed in the cold of early morning and carted off somewhere, day-in and day-out, for all of our growing years.
This was the system you grew up in and you had no choice but submit. I’m not saying you have to throw out everything and go feral, I’m suggesting you can find that sweet spot where you can honor God’s seasons while meeting the needs of “real world” living.
You don’t have to continue being a slave to the school year. You don’t even have to be a slave to the ways and means of other homeschoolers.
And…you can give your child an advantage, because you won’t just be about educating the brain, but the entire person, in his character, his adaptability, and his relationships.
Interested in learning more?
This one post would be way too long if I shared everything today, so I’m going to make this a mini series. I hope you’ll stay with me to find out more.
Here are some of the things I’m considering sharing:
- How Did The System Take Over
- How I Started Honoring God With His Seasons
- How to Homeschool When Life Gets in the Way
Let me know if you can think of any other questions you have on this topic, and I will try to address them in future installments.
Until then, here is this post in podcast form:
iTunes: The School Year Was Not Made For Your Family
Spotify: The School Year Was Not Made For Your Family
Sherry, I found that I could get away with this unconventional schedule much easier when my children were little and unaware. If we did school through the summer, who cares? They didn’t know any better. Now with almost four teens, and older children, we have an all out rebellion if the rest of the world is off and we aren’t (like for instance for a winter or spring break). It just hasn’t been worth it in these past few years for me to be on a schedule that’s different than the rest of the world. Did you find the same with your kids? Did they resist this as they got older?
We never had this problem, but we were our own little community, so outside friends weren’t that much of an influence. It may have been different if they had had friends who were tied to the school year.