Building a Curriculum Around Each Child’s Interests

A one-size-fits-all curriculum cannot care about the interests of each child, however much the people delivering it care about the children. A teacher can be devoted, a publisher can have an admirable statement of values, and a parent can choose the package thoughtfully. But discovering something important about the learner still needs a way to change the education. Without that, the design has no use for the very information its language about individuality encourages you to provide.

Interests develop through encounters with new ideas. Broad exposure gives your child room to discover what takes hold. A plan that assumes it already knows the destination misses the purpose of some of that exposure. Education should introduce possibilities the child could not have named on an intake form, because they had not encountered enough of the world to know the possibilities existed.

A ship in an account of a sea voyage offers several possible beginnings. A child fascinated by it might want to understand the vessel, the journey, the crew's choices or the unfamiliar places. The child's questions can show which part has caught their attention; the broad label boats leaves room for several directions. A diagram and an account of the voyage give the enthusiasm something substantial to encounter. What the child does with them can reveal more than another question about which topics they like.

Suppose they keep returning to the design. Now a question about floating can become an investigation of shape and displaced water, with measurements that distinguish a guess from an observation. If they keep returning to the journey, maps and competing accounts may be more promising. Both paths can involve reading, writing, and quantities, but they are different educations because the person has revealed a different reason to care. A boat picture beside the unchanged exercise would miss that distinction entirely.

Here is where a standard package runs into its own commitments. It may have excellent material on ships, but that material is scheduled for next term, or the unit ends just as the learner has a question worth pursuing. Nobody needs to be malicious for the opportunity to disappear. The course is doing what it was organized to do: delivering the same sequence. That is why I judge a system by what it does, rather than by how warmly it describes the individuals passing through it.

The direction may change again once the child knows more. An apparent love of ships can become an interest in engineering, or the vessel can recede behind the decisions of the people aboard it. This is part of developing a particular person's potential: the education reveals possibilities neither child nor parent could name at the beginning. Freezing the first interest into a permanent profile would reproduce the original error at a smaller scale. We would have asked who the child was once and decided that no further answer was necessary.

At TheHomeschoolingCompany, interests are meant to affect the readings, examples and projects a learner encounters. The reason is not that an education becomes personal as soon as enough fields in a profile are filled. Those choices need to help a family pursue a worthwhile direction, and what happens during the work should inform what they pursue afterward. A responsive curriculum has to keep learning something about its student, because a successful education changes the person it is for.

Public school, private school, and a knockoff standard homeschool package can all fail this test. Moving the same course to a different room does not alter its design. Expose your kid to a broad world, notice what they want to investigate, and require the curriculum to make room for that information. An interest should have consequences inside the education. Otherwise we have politely asked the child who they are and proceeded as though they never answered.