Choose What Your Homeschool Is For

What do you actually want homeschooling to accomplish? Getting into college, discovering a serious interest, becoming exceptional at it, having a richer social life? Some combination, probably, but the combination deserves an answer before you buy a curriculum. You are no longer required to accept one standard arrangement and make the best of it. You can design the education around what matters, which is a much larger freedom than deciding where the worksheets happen.

A college requirement and a fascination with filmmaking can each make a legitimate claim on the same afternoon. Buying a separate course for each does not resolve the claim; it can simply turn two good purposes into an impossible timetable. You have to decide which deadline matters, what can move, and whether some of the work can serve both. A curriculum is making decisions like these even when it does not explain them. I would rather the family know which priorities it is buying than discover them halfway through an exhausting week.

Filmmaking, for instance, can demand serious research and writing if the student is trying to explain the history of a local building. A short documentary needs a question, sources, a script and a reason for the audience to keep watching. Producing it with other people also gives cooperation an actual object: someone is waiting for the finished script, and a missed decision holds up the filming. That can be an excellent use of educational time. Calling a group activity interdisciplinary does not make it one; the work has to require the abilities you say it develops.

Your child needs a part in choosing this. You can see future requirements they have not encountered; they can tell you which questions keep returning after the assigned work is over. Bring those kinds of knowledge together. If the kid wants to make films and you want stronger writing, investigate what writing a good film actually requires. You may discover that your priorities meet in demanding work neither of you would have found by choosing from a standard course menu.

I cared about this because I was homeschooled and still hated much of my one-size-fits-all curriculum. It was better than public school, but I was working through knockoffs of the same experience. Having control over my time did not automatically give me the education I wanted. I built tools to connect the work to my interests, and those tools became TheHomeschoolingCompany. The point was to change what the education could be for.

The purpose should determine how you judge the result. Finishing the documentary is not enough if the research cannot support its account of the building. A student who revises an attractive story after finding contrary evidence may have learned something more valuable than the original film would have shown. I want individual development to mean this sort of increasing command over the work, not merely the pleasure of choosing it. Test results may serve another real purpose, such as a particular next step, without becoming the only evidence the family is allowed to value.

And experience may change the purpose. The building can turn out to be more interesting than the camera; finding out why it was constructed that way can lead further into architecture than the student expected. A plan that has served them well should be able to accommodate that discovery. You cannot ask education to help a child discover what they care about and then treat a changed ambition as failure to follow the plan. The direction has become better informed because the student did some actual work.

You do not owe a packaged curriculum obedience to its priorities. Decide what you want this education to make possible, involve the person whose life it is, and choose work that moves in that direction. Then look honestly at the result. The ambition is to help your child become their most excellent self, and that demands considerably more thought than finding a convenient way to finish somebody else's idea of school.