The Spleen

I'm still trying to wrap my mind completely around homeschooling. Heck, I'm still wrapping my mind around parenting, and I've been doing that for nine years now. Just when you think you have things figured out, the kid grows up a little more and you have a whole new set of things to figure out. That's pretty much been happening with homeschooling as well, in these several months that I've been doing it full-time. So I get the feeling that I could be trying to wrap my mind around this homeschooling thing for the foreseeable future.

One of the things I'm constantly weighing in my mind is how unschooly I want to be. In theory, I love the idea of unschooling. In practice, well, actually, I really love it in practice, so I guess it's the theory after all that gives me pause. I should be clear that what I'm thinking about here is what is going to be best for my son–I'm not trying to figure out what the be-all-and-end-all-holy-grail of homeschooling is for everyone. What I'm struggling with is what is the best way to educate my kid. This is a huge, huge question that is way too big for one post, so I'm just going to try to focus on one or two aspects of this right now, spurred by a conversation George and I had yesterday:

George: What does the spleen do, Mom?
Me (distracted, putting away the dishes): Hmm, I don't know.
George: Let me guess–you're going to tell me to take a science class to find out.
Me (glad that he remembered the clever answer that I'd forgotten): Right.
George: What science class would that be? Biology?
Me: Um, yes, biology.
George: But Mom, didn't you take biology?
Me: Yes, I did.
George: Then why don't you know what the spleen does?

Ok, my biology class was a long, long time ago (in what now feels like a galaxy far, far away). But this brought home an interesting point for me. What was the point of my taking biology all those years ago? I knew I wouldn't be a scientist. I didn't like science, in fact. I did well in it (because I was a super-achiever and worked as hard as I needed to in order to do well in everything), but ultimately, what good did it do me? Why did I bother, and unless my son finds it truly interesting, why should he bother? Shouldn't he spend his time pursuing things he's deeply passionate about, since there are so many of them? Isn't this part of the beauty of homeschooling? (Actually, he's the one who asked about the spleen, so he may end up being passionate about biology. Just humor me; I'm trying to work this out.)

On the other hand, I would never argue against learning even just for learning's sake. I think most subjects or disciplines you study do you some good, even if you don't retain much knowledge of the actual material. I think that each discipline requires you to learn how to think in a slightly different way, or to see the world in a different way, and I do believe that that is valuable. Because if you turned it around on me and told me that a kid who was interested only in science shouldn't have to study the humanities at all, I'd disagree with you very strongly. I think that an education should be well rounded; I really do. And I do want to make sure that George is exposed to science in case it turns out that he loves it as much as he loves literature and history. But if he doesn't really love it all that much, does he truly need a full course in biology? Might it not be just as good or even better for him to learn some philosophy of science, some history of science, and to learn something about how scientists approach problems? And of course, to learn where to go to find answers to questions such as "What does the spleen do"? (If I hadn't been distracted by putting the dishes away, I would have jumped right on that. Note to self: have George research the spleen next week.)

Anyway, as time goes by, I'm feeling my mental pendulum swing back toward more unschooling. Fortunately, I will never have to worry about George's reading skills–he's already reading at pretty much an adult level, currently working his way through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and several Shakespeare plays (the original texts with a facing-page modern-day adaptation) though of course he also reads plenty of kids' books. I have seen that with the tremendous amount of reading he does across such a wide variety of topics, he is educating himself more than adequately in most subjects--for example, he spent an afternoon in my husband's fifth-grade classroom recently and carried out a fifth-grade American history project perfectly well without even having to consult a book. (This was actually a great relief to me, because I have not been consciously focusing on social studies with him at all, but it seems to be getting learned anyway.) And with his passion for science fiction, he's actually learning something about some branches of science (mostly astronomy, I guess, which he'll also get a dose of this summer at camp at the local planetarium). What is really left is math–something I don't think he's going to pick up by reading or osmosis, and something that I do consider to be fundamental, as a sort of basic "language" of the sciences.

So what I've come up with as my new plan for the next few years (um, until I change my mind again!) is that I need to make sure he keeps on reading in, and writing about, a wide variety of subjects, and that he keeps learning math. And while I will certainly always encourage him to broaden his horizons in all sorts of directions, beyond that, I may kind of leave it up to him.