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Explore the enriching journey of home educating four children to secondary school's end, rooted in Christian principles for academic, social, family, moral, aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual reasons with unexpected outcomes.
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Why We Home-Educated and Why We’d Do It Again Michael Goheen Burnaby, B.C.
Introduction • Background • Home educated four to end of secondary school • Lecture worldwide in education • Why did we home-educate? • Not: academic excellence, character building, moral training, protection from wicked world • But: Christian education • Why would we do it again? • Fruits and results we never anticipated
Academic Reasons • Excellent education • Read/write/think creatively and critically • Able to foster strengths of each • Breadth of subjects: e.g., able to teach intellectual history, art history • Extracurricular activities and subjects. String quartet. • Important foundational studies: Biblical and western worldview. • Explicitly Christian: most important consideration. • Kids enjoy learning; curiosity remains. • Verbal skills • Flexibility
Social Reasons • Develops leaders • Not primarily peer-oriented or dependent; ‘lemmings’ or clones • Boundary breaking: Age; gender • More positive interactions per day • Contribution to broader community • Relationships: kids at home are forced to work through problems when they disagree, argue, or fight • Support group. Family relating to family not just kids. More wholistic.
Family Reasons • Friendships: Kids and parents • Flexibility in schedules: enabled us to be involved in other creative things • Marnie continued to learn as she prepares and reads. • Marnie really knows our kids • Fathers are able to play bigger role in lives of kids. • Learning same subjects at different levels • Kids learn from each other. Older teach younger. • No homework! Have evenings together.
‘Spiritual’ reasons • Family worship. Single most important dimension of our family • Many spinoffs have come we did not anticipate
Moral reasons • Able to develop moral maturity. Following scenario common: kids learn from peers, learn things not acceptable to parents, parents lay down law to curb behaviour, legalism, friction • Moral fibre and convictions; peer-orientation not factor.
Aesthetic Reasons • Kids able to develop insight and discernment in: • music • art • drama.
Emotional Reasons • Develop more healthy emotional stability. Not peer and social pressure. • Security • bullying rampant in (also Christian) schools; • pressure for ‘romance’ • ‘Adolescent angst’: Comes from grouping together kids who struggling with identity
Learning/Life Integration • Ongoing connection and discussion between life and learning. No artificial (‘rational’) structures. • Better prepared for so-called ‘real world’
Public Life • Able to criticize and analyse current events • Analyse critical areas: e.g., media, globalization, economics, technology
Challenge • Challenge each of you to list some categories and list/talk about benefits • Tell stories • Talk about struggles