Stop Giving Every Child the Same Curriculum

You would not give every child the same prescription without asking what they needed. Why are we comfortable handing every child the same curriculum without asking what their education is supposed to accomplish? The comparison concerns attention, not medicine: the intervention has a purpose for a particular person. A curriculum ought to answer to that purpose, rather than acquire authority merely because it has been packaged for the right age.

Education is instrumentally good for the ends it helps a learner reach. That can mean becoming capable in a field, understanding something important or acquiring knowledge that opens another direction. The value comes from what develops in the person, not from possessing the course. A family can purchase an impressive sequence and diligently follow it while receiving far less of that development than the child's time deserved.

The rocket scientist gives an obvious account of the relationship. A child might want to understand rockets while feeling no immediate attraction to mathematics as a separate subject. When mathematics is taught in relation to that ambition, the effort has a destination. The child needs the knowledge to understand the thing they care about, which is a much stronger reason than having to complete the page because the page comes next.

This relationship does not make the work easy or authorize us to leave difficult parts out. The ambition itself supplies demands, including knowledge the learner did not expect to need. Personalization should make those demands intelligible, with an explanation and pace that help the child meet them. It is an argument for taking the purpose seriously enough to teach what it requires, rather than making an interest into a decorative theme on unrelated assignments.

And the purpose need not sound grand. Formula 1, sewing and mowing lawns can all ask for substantial learning when the education follows them into their actual demands. They involve different kinds of judgment and different uses of the foundations, which is precisely why one fixed arrangement cannot be assumed equally appropriate for all of them. The learner's ambition is useful information about how knowledge might become consequential.

A parent does not have to decide which interest is most prestigious before using it. A pursuit can develop into expertise, reveal another field or show the child that the imagined work is different from the real work. Each is an educational result if the encounter has supplied knowledge and better judgment. We should care what the learner can now do and understand, rather than rank the legitimacy of the original enthusiasm by how impressive its name sounds.

Homeschooling allows a family to make these choices without waiting for a class to share the interest. Our ambition for individual excellence uses that freedom because goals, pace and explanation can belong to one developing person. A generic curriculum throws much of the opportunity away when it leaves the family to force a fit. The freedom to choose a course is more valuable when the course itself is capable of responding.

That is the education we are building at The Homeschooling Company: foundations taught in relation to the goals and interests that make them matter to this child. Rockets and lawn care are not the same undertaking, and there is no reason to pretend their educational paths must be identical. Your child has something they want to become capable of doing. A curriculum should help them pursue it seriously enough that the education is worth more than the fact that it was completed.