My Classical homeschooling journey, Part 1...

So, here goes.

I thought it might be useful for others (and for myself) to take stock of where we've got to as a family on our homeschooling journey so far.

My husband and I got married 7 years ago and had our first child around 2 years ago. In the years up to having her, we were passionate about education. It was a common topic of conversation in our hime. I was a PhD student and my husband loved talking about education.

We were both sure of one thing: our education had failed us.

We felt that our UK state education had failed to prepare us for life. It had failed to give us the foundational skills that we needed to thrive. We lacked confidence, eloquence and knowledge - we were both convinced that our writing was poor.

So how could we ensure things were different for our daughter?

Well, homeschooling wasn't on our radar! We had two options:

1. Send our daughter to private school
2. Look for the best state school for primary and then send her to private school.

Yes, private school was our solution. We thought that the extra resources, smaller class sizes, beautiful surroundings and endless opportunities would give our daughter everything we lacked. We thought that it would ensure a confident, eloquent, knowledgable girl who would be able to excel in the world.

Hover, as we started to look into sending her to a private school nearby (well, 20 miles away), we had the following reservations:

- The expense - although the costs were doable (probably) in the early years for one child, we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to afford this education for long. We didn't want my husband to have to sacrifice spending time with the family to earn the huge salary that he'd need. I wasn't convinced that I wanted to work full time to fund this either as I was pretty convinced that I wanted to be flexible enough to be at home at least some of the time.
- The hours - although the school day looked wonderfully exciting, filled with a whole manner or opportunities and extra-curricular pursuits, when I looked at the practicalities, I realised that our daughter would before long be leaving the house at 7.30am and getting home at 6pm as well as being at school on Saturday mornings. Although the environment seemed lovely, was this really something we wanted? Well no...

This is where our homeschooling journey began. It began as we realised that all our other options were not providing what we wanted for our daughter. But, the result was far more rich and rewarding that we ever imagined.

Come back for part 2 to find out more.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why we didn't choose Classical Conversations

I said in my last post that we'd been hugely impressed with the Classical Conversation (CC) co-op that we'd visited while in America and my first steps into the homeschool journey were through Classical Conversations literature. So, you may be asking, why didn't we choose it? We did actually find it very helpful. My first books on homeschooling were published by CC and they were helpful. (For example, The Core ). Well, good question. I'm not here to berate CC, but rather to take you through our thinking and realisations about Classical education. So, here goes. This is why we didn't choose CC: It's more neo-Classical than Classical Classical Conversations. Surely it's the blueprint for a Classical education? Well, I thought so too. But as I began reading, I realised that it's actually a neo-classical curriculum.  You see, some wise people, far wiser than me, have written about true, authentic Classical Education. They helpfully state: ...
Read more

My Classical homeschooling journey, Part 2

So, if you were with me in part 1 ( if not, catch up here ), you'll know that our homeschooling journey was a surprise. We were planning on doing everything but homeschooling: we favoured private school and saw the local primary school as a less-than-ideal, but possible, option. But, about a year since we started seriously considering our daughter's education, we are firmly decided that homeschooling is for us. Let me take you on the next part of our journey... My husband and I were disillusioned with the options before us. We didn't think that the state sector could offer the rounded, mastery that we craved, and we were put off by the costs and travel of the closest and ideal private school. So, our minds went back a few years to 2013. We were on holiday in the US. My husband was attending a Christian conference in Washington DC and we'd contacted some friends to ask if they knew any families that would be able to offer accommodation for a couple of nights befor...
Read more