Education has to mean something to the person doing it

An education can consume a child's day while remaining irrelevant to the life they are trying to imagine. That is a serious failure, not merely an engagement problem. We ask for attention and effort, then offer little account of what either will make possible for this person. A young learner should be discovering reasons to develop their capacities, rather than absorbing the lesson that the central work of childhood has almost nothing to do with their own purposes.

The promise that it will all matter later can become a substitute for making it matter at all. Of course a child cannot immediately understand every future use of knowledge. Adults should introduce unfamiliar ideas and help them see beyond present preferences. But a promise indefinitely deferred leaves the learner with compliance as today's only intelligible reason, while the supposed beneficiary of the education is someone they are expected to become years from now.

The child is living a life now. An interest, a question or an ambition can already make knowledge valuable, and an education can deepen that relationship rather than postpone it. Learning may reveal a possibility they had not considered or change what they think deserves pursuit. Those are experiences of purpose developing through education, which is a better account of relevance than demanding an immediate practical use for every fact.

What troubles me is the opposite experience, in which sustained effort seems to have no consequence except permission to proceed to another assignment. The learner can finish successfully while remaining uncertain what any of the success means. We should not be surprised if that relationship contributes to disengagement. Nor should we pretend that completing more of the same work will answer a question about why the work deserves to occupy so much of a person's life.

A personal education begins by letting the learner's goals and interests affect consequential decisions. Which subject deserves deeper study, where is the explanation failing and what ability does the child want to acquire? An adult can judge and guide the answers without treating them as irrelevant. The curriculum then has information about the person it serves, instead of being protected from that information so the standard arrangement can remain intact.

The same relationship can justify greater demands. Once an ambition is taken seriously, the learner discovers that wanting something is not enough to do it well. Foundations become necessary, errors become worth understanding and effort has a direction beyond avoiding disapproval. Personalization should help the child see and meet those demands, not make the education easier merely because the work is being organized around something they like.

Homeschooling gives families room to create this relation, but a useful curriculum should make the freedom practical. Parents should not have to choose between providing coherent work and taking their particular child seriously. That is why I started The Homeschooling Company. We want the goals and interests to become part of the ordinary education, with support for following them into real understanding rather than a promise confined to the sales pitch.

I want a learner to have more reason to engage with the world because of what education reveals and enables. A meaningful life cannot be supplied by curriculum alone, but the curriculum ought to serve that developing life instead of consume it without explanation. We should ask what the child can now imagine, understand and pursue that they could not before. Those are results worth wanting, long before a graduation date is available to certify them.