Focus on the Family Magazine - August/September 2023

KIDS & TEENS / HOME SCHOOLING
who God made them to be
Does your home-education philosophy
treat your kids as projects or individuals?
BY LEAH BODEN ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM LARKUM
GROWING UP IN ENGLAND,
I found joy and growth by singing in
a choir, joining an after-school entrepreneurs
club and eagerly serving in
varying capacities in the local church.
I loved to learn and was hungry to
grow, but I seemed to be surviving
rather than thriving in the traditional
British school system in which I was
enrolled.
Even though I felt mismatched
with the university system, I went
anyway. When a professor told me,
“You probably won’t get the best
degree classification, Leah, but you’ll
do well in life. You’re just that kind of
person,” I wanted to prove him wrong.
But he was right. I was never a standout
in the classroom, yet I flourished
in everyday activities.
Later, as a mom new to the world
of home schooling, I was introduced
to the 19th-century British educator
Charlotte Mason, and I realized that
academic and character growth—not
performance—should define education.
My discovery shed light on my own
development and revolutionized my
thinking toward teaching my four kids.
In God’s image
Charlotte Mason’s method was based
in recognizing that children are God’s
work, not products of the educational
system. They’re born whole and able
to connect with the world. Our role as
parents is to create an atmosphere and
provide stimuli that will bring out the
best of who they are. I don’t believe
that God places children in our homes
for us to dictate who they’ll become;
He places them into our lives so we
can help them develop into who He
already made them to be.
This “born-person” approach to
childhood turns the traditional education
path on its head. We don’t need
to race to catch up. We can slow down
and delight in our children.
Person before process
When we view children as projects
or “someone we must educate,” we’re
prone to use standardized curricula, to
read texts only for comprehension, and
to comply with set answers and laborious
testing to ensure that our children
“keep up.” When I first started educating
my children from home, I stocked
up on secondhand readers, math
sheets and a Bible study on character.
I used the latter diligently, but the
books and pages gradually got lost on
our home-school shelves.
As a child, I loved the stories my mum
read aloud in the evening, the variety of
music my dad played around the house,
the classic art on the wall and my journals
full of poetry and innocent secrets.
When we view children as people with
interests, made in the image of God,
we’re inclined to take a different view
to their gathering of knowledge. We
read good stories to our children. We
play beautiful music for them. We take
them into nature. We introduce them
to art. They take time transcribing or
reciting their favorite lines from poetry,
biographies and the Bible, and we
invite them into sincere conversations.
See before you say
To believe that our children are “born
persons,” we must become observers
of them. One of the greatest concerns
I hear from home-schooling parents I
coach is: “What if they fall behind?”
As Christians, we believe that our
kids are born unique. Every hair on
their heads is numbered and known by
God, and each design on their fingers
and toes is distinctive only to them. Yet
when it comes to education, we sign
up for the narrative that all children
should and can learn the same thing at
the same time. But it’s simply not true.
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FOCUS ON THE FAMILY CANADA
AUG / SEP 2023