Things that are Supposed to be Good (re Homeschool Curricula)

Dear Reader,

My husband’s previous job offered lots of family friendly benefits. They would provide sick day care for your kids. And camps during school vacation weeks. Sounds great, right? But the truth is, their interest is in keeping the worker at work. Free sick day care at your office building may be better than sending a sick child to work or having to use up a vacation day. But it is not really family friendly. It make it easier to have a family and work at the same time. But it does this by keeping the family and work apart. The parent is able to work because somebody else is caring for their child. To my mind, that is not really family friendly.

All of which made me think that there are some things which are supposed to be good on the surface but underneath are not really in our best interest.

And I have been thinking lately that this can apply to a lot of things in the homeschooling world too. Now I am happy to be homeschooling in a time when there is so much available. I can’t imagine doing this twenty years ago with fewer resources and less internet access to boot. But we need to remember that all those companies out there trying to sell us curricula are businesses. They are trying to make money. Even if they are owned by other homeschoolers who seek only to sell the best, they are still looking for a profit. There are many, many books and resources out there that promise to be the way to teach your kids word roots or time stables or any number of other things. We would be wisely skeptical of ads on TV that promise us a great lifestyle if we just buy their car or breakfast cereal or detergent. But when it comes to curricula, I think many homeschoolers have a kind of desperation that causes them to lose their perspective. We want so much to succeed. After all, what is more important than our children’s education? That we are not as discerning as we would be in other areas of life.

There is an awful lot that our kids either don’t need a specific curriculum for or don’t need at all or can wait till they are older for. But if you look through many homeschool catalogs, it is easy to feel that you are juts not doing enough.

So let’s take a deep breath. Let’s refocus and ask ourselves: Do I need to teach my kids this? Maybe it is something they will pick up on their own without a curriculum. Do they need to learn it now? Do we have room in our schedule for this? Will I be overburdening them with too much work, especially of the fill-in-the-blank kind?

Nebby

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