The fact that we as parents have the ability to influence our children in every facet of their lives is something I’m sure you don’t take lightly.
As a parent, you have the ultimate control over your child. You make decisions every day based upon your philosophy of how children should be raised. Your philosophy is reflected in the choices you make for your kids in areas such as diet and exercise, for example, and in the not-so-basic choices such as how children should be put to bed at night.
One of the more complex choices you’ll make for your child is education: you are the one who has the authority to decide how your child will be educated.
The educational model that you choose for your child will affect the course of his or her entire life.
It is a fact that a child’s formal education does not need to be separated from his home life. This runs contrary to the classroom model of education, where the child leaves the home for the majority of his childhood years and consequently is outside of his parents’ sphere of influence for years and years.
Excellence in education does not require a child to leave home. A parent does not need to give up control over a child’s environment in order to educate him.
Incidentally, a parent doesn’t need superpowers in order to home educate. I am a home-educating mom, but I don’t have to know calculus. The self-propelled model of education doesn’t require a parent to be a member of Mensa.
If you have ever felt intimidated by the thought of home educating your child or children, may I assure you that you are already equipped by the fact that you know and love your child more than anyone else on the planet does? Teaching your child to read and write and perform the basic operations of mathematics is a privilege.
You don’t have to; home education means you get to.
In our society today, public and private schools are the primary vehicles used to deliver education to the populace. Both use the classroom model to teach groups of children together at one time. In my book, The Self-Propelled Advantage, I examine both the classroom model and the home-education model, and I provide parents of children in both the classroom and at home with strategies for raising their kids to be self-propelled.
But I have a bias toward home education for a couple of reasons, one of the basic ones being that it is the method that currently provides the best environment for becoming self-propelled. Home education incubates the self-propelled student, whereas classroom education holds him back in comparison.
I look forward to sharing more on this topic as we go along.
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About the Author
Joanne Calderwood has been called America’s Homeschool Mom. She is an underwhelmed Mom of eight great kids, owner of URtheMOM.com, and an author and columnist. Her new book, The Self-Propelled Advantage: The Parent’s Guide to Raising Independent, Motivated Kids Who Learn with Excellence, enables parents to teach their kids to teach themselves with excellence.
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