S/O What makes information worth teaching?

[HomeAgain]

Does it boil down to a specific philosophy?

I read Educated, by Tara Westover not too long ago.  In it, she details her mostly-unschooled life, where she was taught things directly related to her life and things she was interested in.  When she went to college, however, she had no idea what the Holocaust was- among other things.  She had a less-than-working understanding of history because she hadn't been taught it or pursued it on her own.

So what's important, goal wise, for you to teach or for your kids to know?

[Katy]

I'm not really sure what you're asking.  What is worth teaching is going to change based on your goals.  If your goal is to have a well-educated child, you'll want them to know a little bit of general knowledge from almost every field. That will enable them to not only pursue whatever they want, but have the wisdom to avoid historic pitfalls that have befallen others before them.

If your goal, like Tara's family of origin, is to indoctrinate a specific identity and religious viewpoint, you'll want to shelter your children from many aspects of life so they don't have any reason or ability to contradict you. Of course they may see the holes in your worldview without that education, and distrust it even if they don't know what else to believe. Which is probably what led Tara and the other brother that broke away to do so.

[LindsayLou]

I haven't read the book you mentioned, and my kiddos are just starting homeschool, but my husband and I have set our main goals that won't change:  the kids need to learn their faith, and they need to learn sacrifice, obedience and discipline.  Everything else we teach (all that I've gleaned from these forums and from blogs and from experienced homeschool moms in our parish) will probably change based on my kids temperaments and learning styles.  

[Lang Syne Boardie]

1 minute ago, LindsayLou said:

I haven't read the book you mentioned, and my kiddos are just starting homeschool, but my husband and I have set our main goals that won't change:  the kids need to learn their faith, and they need to learn sacrifice, obedience and discipline.  Everything else we teach (all that I've gleaned from these forums and from blogs and from experienced homeschool moms in our parish) will probably change based on my kids temperaments and learning styles.  

 

They need to learn your faith, sacrifice, obedience, and discipline? Depending on your state's laws, they will probably also need math, social studies, science, health and PE, English...for the academic part, also known as the "school" portion of "homeschool," it's not whether they need to learn, but more a matter of how and when.

[LindsayLou]

Yes, Tibbie Dunbar, that's correct.  Our faith covers all that ?

[8filltheheart]

1 hour ago, HomeAgain said:

Does it boil down to a specific philosophy?

I read Educated, by Tara Westover not too long ago.  In it, she details her mostly-unschooled life, where she was taught things directly related to her life and things she was interested in.  When she went to college, however, she had no idea what the Holocaust was- among other things.  She had a less-than-working understanding of history because she hadn't been taught it or pursued it on her own.

So what's important, goal wise, for you to teach or for your kids to know?

I want my kids to be well-educated across a broad spectrum of topics, but my definition of what topics are important may not be defined the same for each of my children and probably most definitely not compared to other families' definitions.

For example, many of my children have read the great classics in original, etc.  My rising 7th grader will not have those works on her list.  Her academic struggles mean we need to use her energy to solidify far more basic skills than focus energy on reading Homer. 

My kids' personal interests and pursuits also change our definition of what needs to be taught.  My current college student really disliked science. We covered science far more minimally than any of her siblings.  She took one science we designed around ecological systems (we focused on one ecosystem a month--ponds, deserts, caves, etc).  Then she took 1 yr each of the basic sciences.  Her older siblings all took advanced courses in science.

But, as much as my kids' interests dictate what we study, it does not resemble unschooling in any way.  If it had, I am pretty sure the above dd would never have studied any science at all other than ornithology.  

FWIW, I know absolutely nothing about Tara or her educational experience (never heard of her before), but unless her parents refused access to sources that discussed the Holocaust, I think that Katy's post is a leap from your post.  Unschooling is far from being defined as indoctrinating children.  But perhaps in her book Tara discusses her parents refusing to let her read anything that was outside of a specific POV?  That seems to be the opposite of unschooling philosophy to me, so perhaps unschooling is not the most accurate "umbrella" term???  Seems like a lot of control would be exerted to prohibit access to anything with an opposing perspective.

FWIW, I absolutely educate my children from worldview.  Period.  No apology.  Everything we do is taught from our beliefs as Catholics.  Do we read material from opposing POV? Absolutely.  But, we discuss exactly why I disagree with that perspective. ?  

[nixpix5]

It truly depends on a parent's goal I feel. I have rigorous knowledge requirements for myself so it follows that I would like that for my own children. I want them to have a STRONG foundation in history. I truly believe if we do not know our history we are doomed to repeat it. We gather so much wisdom from experiences of the past. I mourn the loss of deep historical knowledge within our current school ideals in the US. 

I require a strong sense of connection with classical education in the true sense of the word; Latin, Greek, western civilization knowledge via history, mythology, and the ancient books (Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Aeschylus and so forth).

Reading through ample great books. British lit, Medieval and Renaissance lit etc.

Strong science with much time spent in lab sciences. Chemistry, biology, physics, microbiology, genetics, neurobiology at a bare minimum. 

Math through calculus as well as statistics.

Economics/finance, computer programming, art, music,government, public speaking, logic, intro sociology, intro psychology, intro anthropology.

Writing through the progymnasmata, essay writing for various audiences as well as APA and MLA format. Also how to write a scientific article based on experiments run. Strong grammar skills and spelling.

A foreign language study that is modern beyond Latin and Greek. My preferences would be Spanish or Mandarin but I let my kids pick based on passion for the language and people. 

I want my kids to have a heart for the world and to study its people, places, customs and history. I want them to walk in their faith and to know not only the what of their faith but the why. I want them to feel an identity within their country's culture and within our family's culture. 

I also want them to know how to learn, to love it and to seek it lifelong. I want them to continually question and wrestle with knowledge. 

Those are my lofty goals. I may not be able to do it all within my homeschool but I want to plant the fire in their hearts to want to carry their education to the next place however far we get here by 12th grade.

[Katy]

10 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

FWIW, I know absolutely nothing about Tara or her educational experience (never heard of her before), but unless her parents refused access to sources that discussed the Holocaust, I think that Katy's post is a leap from your post.  Unschooling is far from being defined as indoctrinating children.  But perhaps in her book Tara discusses her parents refusing to let her read anything that was outside of a specific POV?  That seems to be the opposite of unschooling philosophy to me, so perhaps unschooling is not the most accurate "umbrella" term???  Seems like a lot of control would be exerted to prohibit access to anything with an opposing perspective.?

 

Her parents weren't unschooling.  They weren't really schooling much at all. They were suffering from mental illnesses with a conspiracy theorist worldview.  Read the reviews here and get a feel: https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1530062395&sr=8-1&keywords=Educated%2C+by+Tara+Westover&dpID=41qgBxTjYxL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

 

[Clemsondana]

I want for my kids to have enough foundation that they can dig into anything that they choose.  Knowledge is so interrelated that if you learn one topic it leads to others.  I was taught minimal geography in school, so I made it a goal to teach my kids more geography.  I started in K with finding everything on a map when we learned history...and it made history make so much more sense!  I'm now amazed that schools attempt to teach geography-free history - when you see where everybody was, you can understand their actions a lot better.  If you are a science person, you also need to know random things - so often advances take forever because the researchers don't know enough to ask the right questions.  If you don't know what diet a population eats, then you might not link their disease with the right parasite, or vitamin deficiency, or know why folks from that area tend to have certain alleles of genes that interact with other genes to produce a particular phenotype. 

In one trivial but funny example, I saw a blurb by a social scientist who was linking baby names with economics - something about choosing masculine or feminine names during different financial situations.  I looked at the popular names and recognized the top 2 boy names as the names of 2 excellent college quarterbacks who had been Heisman contenders that year, and one of the female names was the name of a popular soap opera character.  In other words, the selection had more to do with celebrity, but the author didnt seem to know where the names came from. 

While I won't have my kids watch daytime TV lest it be important, I want them to have at least a minimal level of exposure to history, literature, and science subjects, be knowledgeable about our faith traditions, and have sufficient writing and math skills.  This will probably look different for my 2 kids.  If they get a basic exposure when they are young, we can add to it over time and focus on specific areas as they get older.  I'm reluctant to get too narrow too quickly, though.  In my junior year of high school, I contemplated careers in teaching, law, science, medicine, and music.  In the end, I ended up doing science research and then teaching, with music in the college marching band and then church handbell choirs as a hobby.  I had to choose, but had I narrowed my options early, I might have made choices that didn't lead to where I ultimately wanted to go.  

[8filltheheart]

7 hours ago, Katy said:

 

Her parents weren't unschooling.  They weren't really schooling much at all. They were suffering from mental illnesses with a conspiracy theorist worldview.  

 

I didn't follow the link, but based on the above comment, it sounds like unschooling would not be an appropriate descriptor, but no schooling with added familial dysfunction. Based on that information I would not have engaged in this discussion at all bc I do not like engaging in discussions around homeschooling that attempt to connect appropriate homeschooing education to educational neglect.  

[egao_gakari]

LOL, coincidentally I recently sat down with my journal and wrote out my "graduation goals" for our kids. When I was unschooled as a child, my parents certainly didn't seem to have goals! It worked out okay, with the exception of science--but I also had weird gaps in other places. (Had never heard of the Bill of Rights, for example...) Part of why we don't unschool, although I know plenty of people for whom it's worked great ?

Anyway, here's the list I came up with:

Adulting Goals
-Know how to drive
-Know how to get and keep a job
-How to pay bills and taxes
-How and when to get a loan
-How to find a place to live
-How to live within their means

Academic/Intellectual Goals
-How to think clearly and recognize bias/poor thinking in themselves as well as others
-How to express opinions, ideas, and emotions maturely in speech and writing
-I want them to have a love of "useless" knowledge/learning for learning's sake
-I want them to be able to recognize the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and to value those things over everything else

Spiritual Goals
-I want them to love the Lord, and recognize and serve Him in everyone they encounter
-I want them to have ownership/responsibility over their faith and spiritual lives (prayer, church participation, works of mercy) without being directed by us.

Having this list in mind has been really helpful in my academic planning, because it made me realize that "the kind of people I want them to be" has literally nothing to do with whether they complete enough math to get into college, for example.

[Wheres Toto]

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately since my kids are getting closer to high school, and we've been doing this long enough that I have a pretty good feel for their strengths/weaknesses.

Bottom line is I want them to learn to the highest level they are capable of (math), gain an understanding of the world and how it works (science and history), be able to write effectively, and explore areas of interest.

Ds is gifted in math but doesn't like it, so I expect him to cover though Algebra 2 and Geometry at home, then probably take math at the local CC.  Dd, on the other hand, struggles with math.  I will be happy if I can make sure she has a firm understanding through Pre-Calc (which in my day was Algebra 3/Trig) by graduation.  I'm looking at different materials for her than I would use for ds (he's doing Foerster's and Jacob's, I'm considering MUS or TT for her).

They will have more than enough science since I teach science classes for homeschoolers.  I'm working out what I want to get done in regards to history.  I think I'm going to try to finish a cycle of World History through Early Modern (we're about 1/2 way through Ancients), then switch to US History with government and civics as a strong part of it.  We're also planning a Human Geography/World Religions unit for next year.

I do like egao_gakari's list of life skills - driving, applying for a job, paying bills, etc.  

Religion/Faith is a fuzzy area for me.  We go to church most weeks, the kids are in Sunday School, I taught Sunday School for the past 4 years (I'm not teaching next year), but neither of my kids have a strong faith of their own.   I fall under a more Progressive Christianity or maybe Deism, with a lot of questioning in the past few years. We attend a UMC which is very open to taking what beliefs/parts of it work for you and leaving the rest.  At this point, I'm okay with my kids finding their own path regardless of what that may be.

[Bluegoat]

Well, I would not consider that person really even unschooled, however, there are certain approaches found in unschooling that can, IMO, lead to real gaps, which is one reason I don't use that approach.

Like some above, I think it's important to have exposure to a wide variety of knowledge, enough to see i's inter-relatedness, to allow making connections.  

But where more specific knowledge starts to be needed comes out of two things IMO.  One is the need to act as a citizen.  Everyone needs to be able to do this, and that requires knowledge of human nature, political theory, history, science, etc.  It also requires some sense of what a good human life is, what justice is, and what community is.

The second thing revolves around worldview - I think it's very important to hold it self-consciously, knowing what your first principles are, what assumptions your system makes, why you think those are reasonable.  This is where my interest in a "classical" approach comes in because I think that as westerners, that means engaging with western civilization.  We can't know ourselves without understanding, to some extent, the tradition that produced us.  

For me, that latter is the most fundamental requirement of being educated - if you don't know why you think or believe the way you do, you can know all kinds of facts, but you really aren't educated.  As well as engaging the western tradition, I teach explicitly as I can about our faith for that purpose.  I don't actually believe there is such a thing as "secular" education.  Every program of teaching has behind it certain assumptions about the nature of reality and what is important.  If you don't give that to the student in an explicit way, you give it to them implicitly, where they cannot really engage with it - it simply seems to them to be fact, things that are known.  There is no knowledge of self in that, and it becomes a kind of dis-education.

Those are the things that drive my teaching choices, though they often aren't perfectly instantiated.

[Janeway]

I would like my children to know everything, but that is not very practical.

 

I do plan to spend a lot of time in depth on life and living in the US from the late 1800's on forward. I was not really taught that in school, but my grandparents and great grandparents were still alive so I heard a lot. I realize none of this is really being taught in schools and my children will have no concept of it and I want them to have it. That is just one thing among many that is important to me that my children learn.

[carrierocha]

I have been thinking of a question similar to yours, but more along the lines of "what is the purpose of education?" for sometime. I wanted to understand for myself what I think the whole point of educating my kids is - whether at a homeschool or traditional school - so I could be intentional to pursue that purpose if it sparked any changes in our path.

I have been slowly (verrrrry slowly...) reading through Richard Gamble's "The Great Tradition." (Get it on Amazon). It is really challenging my thinking about what really is important to teach my kids.

In a nutshell, I want to raise kids who know things in a couple of categories:

• Enough facts and figures across various disciplines to understand where we've come from and how the world around them works
• Communication and thinking skills (rhetorical skills really) that allow them to listen well, think clearly both about what others are saying and about their own individual ideas and articulate their ideas clearly
• Have an internalized sense of morality/ethics/character that anchors their thinking and communicating and pulls them into good things like a lifelong desire to learn because they value personal growth, for instance.

To accomplish these things I believe in casting a wide net with our subjects. We are history people, but we are also science and math people. We are intentional to enjoy whatever subject is in front of us because we want to have an ability to inform our thinking from various areas of study. 

I found this recent article about people who have "too many interests" to spark some thoughts within me. It may be valuable to those reading this thread.

[drjuliadc]

10 hours ago, carrierocha said:

I found this recent article about people who have "too many interests" to spark some thoughts within me. 

I loved that article.

[nixpix5]

On 6/28/2018 at 1:38 PM, carrierocha said:

I have been thinking of a question similar to yours, but more along the lines of "what is the purpose of education?" for sometime. I wanted to understand for myself what I think the whole point of educating my kids is - whether at a homeschool or traditional school - so I could be intentional to pursue that purpose if it sparked any changes in our path.

I have been slowly (verrrrry slowly...) reading through Richard Gamble's "The Great Tradition." (Get it on Amazon). It is really challenging my thinking about what really is important to teach my kids.

In a nutshell, I want to raise kids who know things in a couple of categories:

• Enough facts and figures across various disciplines to understand where we've come from and how the world around them works
• Communication and thinking skills (rhetorical skills really) that allow them to listen well, think clearly both about what others are saying and about their own individual ideas and articulate their ideas clearly
• Have an internalized sense of morality/ethics/character that anchors their thinking and communicating and pulls them into good things like a lifelong desire to learn because they value personal growth, for instance.

To accomplish these things I believe in casting a wide net with our subjects. We are history people, but we are also science and math people. We are intentional to enjoy whatever subject is in front of us because we want to have an ability to inform our thinking from various areas of study. 

I found this recent article about people who have "too many interests" to spark some thoughts within me. It may be valuable to those reading this thread.

I love this article so much! I have always been told I have too many interests and spent too much time in college. People in my life have always given me grief for not just being satisfied having an interest or two. I whole heartedly believe that by learning about everything you can, the brain makes deeper connections and synthesizes information across disciplines. I feel I understand the world so much better every time I add a layer to my knowledge base. Thank you for posting this!

[drjuliadc]

On 6/28/2018 at 3:38 PM, carrierocha said:

I found this recent article about people who have "too many interests" to spark some thoughts within me. It may be valuable to those reading this thread.

Not only did I love this article but I’m working through reading his other articles and I love them too.  I got on his list to receive his free information I like it so much.

His info is about learning how to learn.

Thank you.