Michelle Garrels | @ellegarrels
KEEPING THE INBORN WONDER ALIVE IN OUR children is a continual process. Preserving the curiosity and creativity of their youth requires intentionality. It takes time to let children grow and learn at their own pace, time to daydream, time to get lost in a good book or imaginative play.
It takes courage to homeschool, especially when society questions your every move. And then there are the long days, the lack of time for yourself, and the seasons when fatigue or discouragement get the better of you.
But the time we have with our children is a precious gift we get to unwrap each day. In the years to come when they are grown and on their own, we will remember the beautiful and rewarding, albeit difficult and often harrowing, journey we traveled together.
Homeschooling doesn’t exist to replicate the classroom in the home. And if it did, we would never be able to compete. Homeschooling is about relationships, about individualized education, about freeing kids to learn what they want at their own pace—because we can.
Homeschooling isn’t about keeping children in line with no disruptions. That’s a classroom mentality. Our children are not living in a box. Life is messy, chaotic, and full of distractions, which means learning at home will be too at times. But it can still be rich and beautiful.
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What if we stopped treating children like robots, capable only of inputting and outputting information, and instead treated them like human beings consisting of beautiful dreams, diverse intelligence, and natural talents? Our role would be more like gardening than aggregating.
Our children are gifts to treasure, not trophies to display. They may be little, but they are not small. They are real persons given to us to nurture and care for, not conform or control.
We are coming to a place in society where homeschooling is not an obscure lifestyle choice but a preferred one. Homeschooling is not a liability for a child but a leg up.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR KIDS
No one loves or understands your children as you do. You know their tendencies, their idiosyncrasies, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Other people and even remarkable teachers are doing their best by them. But they have to clock out at the end of each day for the sake of their own lives and families.
The most meaningful part of a child’s upbringing is you. And yet studies show that the average family spends only thirty-six minutes together each day.1 Homeschooling is a return to parent-child mentorship. It brings us closer than anything else ever will.
TAKING BACK YOUR SCHEDULE
There’s something liberating but also unsettling about taking control of your own schedule. At first, you’ll wonder if you’re doing something wrong. Is it legal to let the kids wake up naturally without an alarm? What happens if you don’t start your formal studies until eleven o’clock in the morning?
You might doubt yourself when you spot the school bus rattling through your neighborhood. Or when everyone else appears to be so busy with projects and science fairs and homework.
Surely the lack of activity is a sign of failing our children, right?
On the contrary, peaceful mornings are the reclamation of childhood. Diving deeper into subjects when things are getting interesting and changing course when things aren’t going well are the best way to stoke a child’s passion. There is no bell schedule. You have no academic week, let alone academic year.
Learning is life, and life is learning.
AVOIDING STIGMAS
Whenever I look at the face of my third son, Cody, or listen to one of his long and detailed stories, I can’t help but think about his first four years of life, the ones when he didn’t speak.
Cody was a beautiful and engaged baby, rolling over and tackling physical hurdles as if it were his job. He could run down our steep driveway without stumbling at ten months of age, and at fifteen months he could dribble a basketball with skills that rivaled those of our thirteen-year-old neighbor.
But at two years, he couldn’t communicate verbally besides using a few words like mom or ball. And at three, he still struggled to put two words together. He performed daily concerts in which he played the guitar or drums and sang his little heart out. We just couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Somewhere around the age of four, he started talking a bit more, and we could understand him better with each day. Now, at nine, he still pronounces quite a few sounds incorrectly, but he talks our ears off and we often laugh in disbelief.
If Cody had gone to traditional school, or even preschool, he would have encountered some wonderful people and even teachers who cared for him. But I also know from experience that he would have been forced to deal with something sooner than was necessary—becoming aware of his “disability” through discussions, testing, and schoolyard taunts.
The input Cody receives each day is how coordinated he is as he plays football with his older brothers. How mechanically minded he is as he builds kinetic Lego sets in record time. And how responsible he is as he looks after the safety of his little sisters.
The blessing of homeschooling is that we can be a constant source of encouragement to our children, infusing them with confidence and focusing on their strengths, while simultaneously addressing their weaknesses with the positive tools we have available.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INSTRUCTION AND LEARNING
Instruction is requiring our children to memorize facts and information. It comes from the outside in. Learning, on the other hand, is applying knowledge to their life in meaningful, life-changing ways. It happens from the inside out. Learning is the native method of a wild + free homeschool. A child can be excited about learning and not be ground down by a full day of classes, test taking, and then homework at night. If you can preserve your children’s love of learning, you’ve given them everything.
Do some kids thrive in more structured environments? Of course. I’ve got a few of them. I’ve learned to make charts and create schedules for my more organized children, and I’ve learned not to care if my other kids wake up late or read fewer books than assigned. My kids are not all going to learn or thrive at the same pace, and I trust the natural learning process.
PURSUING THEIR OWN INTERESTS
There’s only so much time in the conventional classroom. Between the commute to school, discipline issues in class, and the lost hours between activities, students are in a race to learn all they can before the school bell rings. Then there’s homework, extracurricular activities, sports programs, and parent-teacher conferences, leaving no time for their own interests.
Homeschooling clears the deck. Some states have requirements for homeschooling families, but for the most part, you get to decide how much time you spend on which subjects.
Our schoolwork doesn’t span the entire day, so my children have hours in which they can pursue subjects that interest them. My eldest son, Wyatt, wrote two novels before his fourteenth birthday, spent the past year creating stop-motion animation projects that have garnered a respectable following on YouTube, and is currently teaching himself photography.
My middle son, Dylan, taught himself to play the piano by ear, composes his own songs on a laptop, and creates 3-D animations in a software application called Blender.
And my youngest son, Cody, builds bird feeders, toy hang gliders, and catapults out of wood, and he can fix just about anything in the house because he loves knowing how things work.
When you remove the stumbling blocks to education, you’re left with the pull of passion. Each day becomes an opportunity to explore one’s interests and curiosities.
Imagine education being driven by passion instead of pressure.
Educational advisor and author Ken Robinson wrote, “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”2
What if that place were home?
INDIVIDUALIZED ATTENTION
When I think about the varying strengths, tendencies, and weaknesses in my five children, I can’t imagine how a systematic environment would allow them to thrive. I know they would adapt and learn the skills needed to do well, but no one stops to think about the toll it takes on their souls at such a young age.
There is a standard by which students are measured, and there’s no honorable classification for those who don’t fit in. Those who can’t keep up with the standard become outcasts to those who are considered “normal.” Teachers have so many students to consider, our children can’t always be first.
No matter what student-teacher ratio a school might boast, you can’t beat mama and child.
Childhood is not a time for enforced conformity but a time for freedom to learn and explore their interests at their own pace. Our kids have a pretty good idea of how they need to learn. We need only watch and follow their lead.
By giving our children an individualized education, we can move as quickly or as slowly through a subject as our children need. We can take time understanding their learning styles and passions. Think about how much more excited and engaged our children would be if we could take these things into account when planning lessons. Being able to give our children individualized attention, even for a brief time each day, allows us to put the joy back into learning. And joy in learning, my friend, leads to success.
“As teachers, parents, and caregivers, we become not scientists with microscope and laboratory, but naturalists who observe life and nature within its element—plein air (outdoors)—like the modern-day ethnographer observing children in real life to see how and why they learn as they do.”
—JACK BECKMAN
LEARNING AT THEIR OWN PACE
We all know that every child is unique, and yet, for some reason, we still assume this doesn’t apply to learning. Especially when it comes to our own children.
My son Cody may have some learning challenges ahead of him, but I am so grateful he is about to turn ten and is a confident, happy boy. His speech challenges don’t prevent him from getting up in front of his peers at our homeschool co-op to give a presentation. In fact, it’s one of his favorite things to do.
Still, Cody doesn’t fit the mold. He can’t write a paragraph or read a book. But he creates books, tells stories, can identify the violin in any musical number, and can reverse engineer a kitchen appliance like nobody’s business. Even more, no one puts him in a box. Of course, he knows his shortcomings, but he doesn’t have to dwell on them. He’s allowed to learn at his own pace.
Sandra K. Cook, author of Overcome Your Fear of Homeschooling with Insider Information, wrote, “Notice the difference: a child’s disability is the focus in traditional classroom settings, but his abilities are the focus in the homeschool environment.”
But allowing children to learn at their own pace isn’t beneficial only for kids with learning disabilities. My six-year-old daughter, Annie, has been wanting to write and read since she could identify a book’s usefulness.
I would hear her alone at night “reading” stories in her room, trying to recall the plotlines and making up new twists as she went along. She would scrawl lines of gibberish on a piece of paper, bring it to me, and ask, “What does this say?” as if the very marks carried meaning.
Now she’s mastering each letter by copying it onto a personal chalkboard I bought her. She’s stringing wooden letters together to make words and arranging words together to make sentences. And I’ve never asked her to do it. The words and stories are her own creation.
All along, I’ve never doubted that Annie would learn to read when she was ready. I’ve seen firsthand how it’s her passion that drives her to learn, not the drills and exercises.
All children deserve the right to discover things for themselves in their own time. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget wrote, “Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself.”3
Children want to experiment, explore, and do their own research. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should sit back and do nothing. Piaget urges us to guide children “by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it.”4
When children play with math, they engage in what psychologist and author Peter Gray calls “pure math.” This, he observed, is “what real mathematicians do, and it is also what 4-year-olds do. Playful math is to numbers what poetry is to words, or what music is to sounds, or what art is to visual perception.”5
I am not concerned at all about the varying paces of learning in my children, nor am I willing to rush them to do things before they are ready. Henry David Thoreau, who coined the phrase wild and free, also wrote, “The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think the same is true of human beings.”
THE WHISPER OF HOMESCHOOLING
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Sometimes you don’t know what your heart desires until you experience it. That’s how it was for me.
“My children will go to school,” I said. “No weird, unsocialized children in this house.” I was certain of it. When my eldest was three years old, we began thinking about preschool.
Wyatt had speech difficulties and more food allergies than we could count, but I didn’t want him to miss out. No matter how hard it was for me to let go, I decided he would go to preschool.
I enrolled him in a two-day cooperative preschool that was a beautiful blend of Montessori- and Waldorf-inspired philosophies. Long before I knew the origins of these methods or what they meant, I was drawn to the small classrooms of eight or fewer and the focus on child-centered independence, free play, dramatic play, and artistic experimentation.
The fact that it was a co-op meant that I had to be in the classroom every other week as the teacher’s assistant. It was the perfect environment for both Wyatt and me.
There was a brief circle time in which the children gathered for a song or two, a beautiful storybook reading, and gentle movement such as yoga or stretching. Afterward, they took turns changing the month, the day of the week, and the weather picture on a beautiful cloth tapestry.
But otherwise, there was never a moment when the children were forced to sit at a table doing exactly the same thing as everyone else.
They did art projects, took turns with the sensory tables, worked puzzles, built structures with wooden blocks, dressed up in costumes, served meals to one another with hand-sewn fabric food, and went outside to play every single day, no matter the weather.
I was fortunate to stumble upon this gem of a preschool back when homeschooling was not yet a whisper in my heart. The school was tucked away on a lone, forgotten country road. It wasn’t flashy or boasting of its academic prowess, and I almost dismissed it.
But now I can see how my heart was searching for a different way of learning all along. A way for my children to have the freedom to explore and discover through play, nature, music, and books. A way for them to be children while growing in independence, interdependence, and imagination at the same time. And a way for them to have beautiful opportunities to learn at their own pace. They were treated as individuals, free to grow and go about in their own way.
That tiny preschool ruined me for traditional education forever.
We moved to another state the following year, and I was forced to find a new school for my son. This time, there weren’t as many options, and he ended up in a four-day-a-week program.
It felt like a corporation for toddlers. There was a dress code, and there were rules for the playground, systematic lessons by professional educators, and strict rules for drop-off and pickup. I had to practically push my four-year-old out our sliding van door with his sack lunch. No time for a proper goodbye. It was quite traumatic for both of us.
All the while, there was a tug at my heart. A voice gently calling. A whisper. Something telling me that this wasn’t the way. I didn’t heed it, but I didn’t stifle it either. I let it settle into the quiet spaces of my heart. My son went to school. Made friends. Got good grades. And our days became captive to the schedule and system assigned to us.
The whisper grew louder and louder until I could no longer ignore it. Passion began to well up inside me. And one day, I awakened to find that the voice within me had become my own.
THE ONES WHO ANSWER THE CALL
Most of us who do this are unlikely homeschoolers. We didn’t plan to do it this way. We didn’t know if we could do it or even if we should.
We know the drill. Kids go to school. That’s what they do. And their lives become an endless race—to the bus stop, to the next reading level, to Christmas break, to the finish line.
But there’s a quiet voice calling out to us. Nudging us to see our children for who they really are. Inviting us to give them the freedom they truly desire. The freedom to learn and grow at their own pace, to follow their passions and see where they go, to explore the world without an agenda.
We might not have all the answers. Doubt will creep in at times. But we know our children. And we know the right path—for us.
I know you’ve heard it too. You wouldn’t be reading this book if you hadn’t.
It’s the call of the outdoors. The call of childhood. The call of more time as a family. The call of wonder and adventure. A stirring inside you—to do something different, be someone different.
So here we are. The ones who have answered the call.
The call of the wild + free.