Great topic–very relevant to what our family has been talking about lately. We’re going to homeschool our boy, who is a few months shy of 3 years old, and I’ve been thinking a lot about curricula for him.
I read The Well-Trained Mind, and while I like a lot of what it has to say, there are aspects of it that I don’t like so well. While “classical education” (which for homeschoolers means something other than what it really meant in medieval times, for instance) has an emphasis on the classics, generally I think it does not have enough emphasis on good books. I agree with what I’ve read about the Charlotte Mason approach, that the best way is to pick the very best books to read from. “The Well-Trained Mind” has kids using a lot of textbooks and encyclopedias and such, which I don’t like so much. Encyclopedias have their place, of course, and for some subjects like math and higher level science textbooks are fine and no doubt unavoidable. I’d prefer to use the same sort of highly-interesting books that we’ve been using with our boy so far.
The authors make an interesting argument that, in order to be properly mastered, history should be presented as a single, unified narrative. Well, I am no relativist, but history does not lend itself to a single narrative, and anyone who, like Susan Wise Bauer, thinks she can replace all the wonderful history books for children with a single narrative and single point of view, seems to be missing something very important about history. Learning history properly surely requires learning about the richness of perspectives on it (even of Christian perspectives on it–did all historians agree before the ascendancy of nonbelievers in academia?), and what we can get out of it. So, as far as history goes, I’m sure we’ll be seeking out a wide variety of books about it, emphasizing the classics if they are accessible to my little student, and otherwise seeking out the most interesting, best-written, best-illustrated, often best-reviewed stuff.
In the following I’ll just edit & share a little of what I wrote for myself recently.
When we ask about a curriculum, what do we mean? The possibilities are numerous, and can include any combination of the following:
a. A list of books
b. An actual set of books
c. A general list of readings, exercises, worksheets, and the like—an outline of things to do
d. A very detailed day-to-day program of study, that leaves virtually nothing out
e. A list of general subjects, no more than a few dozen long
f. A detailed list of educational outcomes (e.g., state standards for the 1st grade)
g. A list of all of a child’s planned activities while “at school,” whether in schedule form or in detailed daily form
So, in general, a curriculum is a set of things to study. So, I think I would like to have a curriculum. Why? Because, I guess, I’d like to know what to teach to my boy. We’re in exactly the same boat here. Well, I’ve gone through the above list, and I came to a conclusion. For me, curricula of all of these sorts are not realistic as educational methods. Of course, a curriculum doesn’t purport to be a method. The curriculum doesn’t say how it is to be used. It is just “a set of things to study.” Yet, if it is used at all, the curriculum guides and constrains choices, and in that sense it is indeed a method. Or perhaps a better way to put it is this: to adopt a curriculum is to let your day to day work in educating a child be guided and constrained by pre-established choices of books, exercises, experiences, subjects, and outcomes. If a curriculum is to be useful, indeed, it must guide and constrain educational choices.
But I stipulate that a child learns best, by far, when he studies what he wants to study. There may occasionally be essential subjects that he must be forced to study (and I would not start “forced” study until he were, say, five or six), but this seems like a declaration of failure. One can always find creative ways to study a subject, and thereby fill in conceptual and perspectival gaps that are preventing a child from being interested in difficult material. This is what we’re already doing with our boy, by the way. Sometimes we buy a book, or I go to the trouble of making a fancy presentation, only to discover he doesn’t like it. What do we do? Force him to learn? No–we save it. He often comes back to it. We try something else. As a result, he’s always learning, and he’s always learning something he wants to learn, so I think he’s learning more and better, as a result. If I think he’s not learning enough of some subject, I get another book, or think of some new approach, or whatever.
Therefore, if you’re going to take curricula with a grain of salt, at best, as we plan to, you have to plan to be very creative and active in how you teach your child. Maybe some parents aren’t up to that, for whatever reason. I hope we are, however–we’re pretty committed. Of course, you could also go for unschooling, but the more I understand about that, the more I am persuaded that that is not what we want to do. It’s one thing to respect your child’s tastes and aptitudes when he says, “I don’t like this book,” and it’s quite another not to make any decisions for your child at all.
I find with our boy that he is game to read or do most of what we put before him (although it’s gotten harder in the last several months…his two-year-old independence coming out), so that “making progress” is not difficult. And to that extent, a curriculum would be helpful to me, for purposes of making choices. Similarly with things like study guides, worksheets, and lists of outcomes: I look on it, to a great extent, like a smorgasbord, not shackles.
But then, I don’t think that I am “following a curriculum.” I am using a curriculum (a fairly vague one–it’s written out, but not in a form I would want to share with the group) in guiding my boy’s studies. The question for me then becomes how we use a curriculum. I do, after all, have a set of topics, and a set of goals. Moreover, I do want to read some of what others have written about their curricula, to get ideas.
My bottom-line point is that, depending on what you mean by “curriculum,” the curriculum is a rough guide at best, and what you plan to study from day to day or week to week is adjusted based on the interests, needs, and learning style of the child. I’m sure it is useful to have a general “road map” and some goals, if for no other reason than to get an idea of what you want to do. But we (I think I can speak for my wife here) feel it would be mistake to impose constraints in advance on exactly what should be studied.
Look at it this way. Right now, if you have a baby or toddler, you don’t want to show him a lot of presentations he obviously doesn’t like. Why not? Because it turns the kid off to learning, and the kid won’t learn much anyway. Well, why think that will change after a few more years when children reach school age? Surely they will still learn best when they are learning something they want to learn. I want to believe that there is some way to teach every subject that you want a child to learn, and more to the point, there is a sequence of information you can impart that will make the classics (and other sources of solid learning) of interest. You might have to review vocabulary first; you might have to watch the movie, or some sort of introductory video or presentation, first; you might have to read a simplified version of the story first; you might just have to wait and do something else. But if you have the goal to teach a certain subject, I think you can find a way that the kid will enjoy and, as a result, learn most from.
In one way, I want to make a very ambitious curriculum for my boy (later, I’m sure we’ll work it out together), more ambitious than the one in The Well-Trained Mind. I believe he can read all sorts of great books. In another way, if it turns out he really hates a certain subject and nothing can be done, or a certain author, or if he really loves a certain subject and author and wants to study it more than I would have recommended, then we’ll probably follow his inclinations.
I can already give an example. We’ve been reading Winnie-the-Pooh, and he wanted to re-read the “expotition” chapter. Don’t ask me why, he just loved it so he wanted to re-read it right away. So, instead of moving on to the next chapter, we read that one. (I read it to him, by the way–I think he could read it himself, but he still lacks the patience to do so.)
I realize that as children get older, their attention improves, and it’s possible to discipline their time rather better. I’m not saying we won’t adopt some schedules (I wouldn’t try that now); probably, we will. But we’ll make the schedules changeable and flexible. And, more to the point, the content of the schedule will be determined “on the fly” from week to week (I imagine), in order to keep my boy’s enthusiasm for learning as high as possible.