This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under Education, Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


Rational Homeschooling
Cross-posted to Rational Homeschooling
Well, I have posted on what I consider to be rational parenting. Since the title of this blog is Rational Homeschooling, I figure I should elaborate a bit on what that means to me.
Rational Homeschooling includes:
- Educating oneself on learning, education, cognitive science, etc. to ensure good practice
- Determining what your definition of an educated person is; for example:
- An educated person should have all of the knowledge needed to score well on the SATs
- An educated person should have the skills to research whatever information they may need
- An educated person should have a solid framework of knowledge in the literature, sciences, history and arts in order to fill in the framework with connected knowledge as they develop (my personal definition)
- insert your (educated, reasoned and deliberated) definition here
- Developing specific goals that lead toward your target of assisting your child in becoming an educated person
- Keeping in mind that being an ‘educated person’ is not an endpoint; one is never finished learning. We have only a few years to contribute to our kids’ educations; these are milestones we are working toward, not destinations.
- Treating one’s children as capable of learning anything they set their mind to; capable of knowing when is and is not a good time for them to be trying to learn something; intelligent consumers of information
- Allowing one’s children to make choices in their education so that they become good decision makers and so that they have ownership of their journey
Rational Homeschooling does not include:
- Creating artificial grades to reward or punish
- Demanding completion of items based on purchase price, perceived notions of obedience vs. disobedience, or ‘the principle of the thing’
- Making children learn things the parent him/herself does not know and is not willing to learn
