Homeschooling through a schooled mindset
Parents, trust yourself
Homeschooling has grown in popularity over the past few years. The number of students homeschooled spiked during the 2020-2021 school year. It decreased a bit during the 2021-2022 school year, but still remained higher than the amount of homeschooled children during the 2019-2020 school year. Although providing educational opportunities at home, or through local co-ops and non-school affiliated organizations, has become a popular option, many parents still default to replicating school to educate their children.
By and large, homeschooling families rely on, and constantly search for, curriculum. If you join any given listserv or online community of homeschooling parents, which curriculum is best to execute a particular model of education (liberal arts, classical, project-based, etc.) is a frequently asked question. I have even read comments of parents inquiring about curriculum for their two-year-old. Because they aren't sending their child to daycare, they consider themselves homeschooling parents and thus in need of structured lessons.
Preschool has become so mainstream that parents worry their child will be behind, or miss out entirely on acquiring knowledge or some sort of skill, if they keep their child at home. This concern leads them to create, download, or purchase instructional materials for toddlers, when really all they need to provide are opportunities for their kids to experience the world and the things within it. This concern runs so deep that some parents consider getting a degree in early childhood education in order to “properly” teach their young child at home.
Parents want the assurance that their child is progressing as normal and shutter at the thought of them being behind developmentally. This, of course, is normal. Parents don't want to think that their child is going to struggle in the moment or later in life because they don't know something or don't possess a certain skill. They want every door open to their child; they don't want to think that an opportunity is inaccessible. If the kid next door is learning something in school that might help them progress or give them an advantage later in life, they want their child to learn it too.
Another reason that parents default to curriculum is a lack of trust in themselves. This is understandable as children age—mathematical problems and scientific concepts can be complex and those who have spent their careers studying them might be better equipped to teach them—but when children are young, most parents are perfectly capable of aiding their children in learning skills like reading and basic math. The problem is they've been told that they are not experts and thus should send their kids to school or risk them missing out on valuable knowledge and skills that expert professionals impart.
The schooled mindset dictates that there are knowledge and skills that all children must possess, and at a certain point in their childhood. College-educated and trained teachers who work in schools are the ones who have the knowledge and know-how to inculcate the skills—not parents, not the engineer who has worked in the field for decades, not the writer who has published many book, but the professional educator. If a parent elects to educate their child at home, the line of reasoning often goes, they are depriving them of what the experts have to offer, and they risk not setting them up for success later in life. Concerns about socializing and introducing children to those with different life experiences and points of view also arise as reasons why children should be educated at school.
I was a public school teacher at the start of my career, and I have respect for many professional educators, so I don't want to be understood as diminishing those who work in schools. However, notably, I do tend to think that good teachers are born, not made. With that said, some educators who work in schools aren't all that good, regardless of extensive training, and many people working in professions that are not within the education industry, or who stay at home with their kids, are excellent teachers.
When a parent doesn't trust themselves, they might actually be struggling to teach their child a particular concept, but I think more often than not they have learned not to trust themselves because they don't have a college degree from a school of education. They have been told they can’t possibly be an excellent educator if they don’t have a degree in the field.
One approach to education that rejects replicating school is unschooling. Essentially, when a parent unschools they don't use a prescribed curriculum but instead let their child's interest drive what and how they learn. Many parents who unschool believe that before a parent can educate their child, especially if they themselves attended school, they must first deschool.
Ivan Illich coined the term deschool. He advocated for dismantling the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity held by select groups of individuals and institutions, which must be forced onto pupils, which he referred to as consumers. He thought that if society is not deschooled it will become increasingly dominated by totalitarian managers of information (i.e., professional educators).
When a parent deschools they are basically taking themselves out of the mindset that, because they aren't a college-trained professional educator, they can't teach their own children. And unschooling parents reject the notion that they must use a pre-packaged curriculum to provide structured instruction. Most parents in homeschool groups have not gone through this process of deschooling.
If a parent wants to follow a certain curriculum or model of education, such as what Charlotte Mason encouraged, then they should read her work and adopt her model. However, they should do so with confidence, knowing that they are aiding their child in acquiring the sort of knowledge they think is necessary for living a prosperous life, not because a school official says they ought to do so. On the contrary, it seems like many parents who homeschool want to deviate from structuring their homes like a school yet don't, with some not even recognizing that they are simply recreating school in their home.
Self-doubt is difficult to keep at bay, regardless of why it arises, but if parents want to take on the important job of educating their child, they should fully trust themselves to do it well. Once this trust in self has been established, they can progress from there in choosing how they want to do it, whether unschooling or following a particular model. Curriculum should be aiding the parent in educating their child not replacing them as their child’s most important teacher, one with a deep repository of knowledge and skills.