What Do Our Children Need to Know?

Every teacher dreams of working with students who are passionate about learning. Every home educator strives to nurture his or her child's innate potential. We observe an abundance of natural curiosity in our two-year-old and wonder how we can preserve or inspire the same kind of enthusiasm in our older children.

It's rarely a challenge to generate excitement for something a child already wants to do, so why not allow a child to follow his or her own interests? Advocates of interest-based learning, child-led learning, and unschooling all recommend this approach.

Sometimes it's easy to go along with a child's choices: when a ten-year-old happily spends every day reading stacks of books, no one is likely to complain. Other times, it's more difficult: if that same ten-year-old devotes hours every day to playing with Barbie dolls or video games, we are likely to think she should stop "playing" and make "better" use of her time.

How much playing is too much? What role should parents and teachers have in setting limits? As a  home educator, I have struggled to answer these questions for myself while also considering the larger implications of how we as a society choose to educate our children.

I never planned to homeschool my children. My firstborn child happily attended two years of preschool (two mornings a week when she was three, three mornings a week when she was four), had mixed feelings about kindergarten (four mornings a week), and became utterly bored and frustrated in first grade. By the end of first grade, my husband and I knew we needed to find an alternative. After reading extensively, finding a statewide support group (the New Hampshire Homeschooling Coalition), and consulting a friend who homeschooled her children, we decided to try homeschooling.

Where to begin? I went through what turned out to be a neverending trial-and-error process. I started with math and language workbooks I had borrowed from the school, or what is known as a "school-at-home" approach. My plan was to keep things interesting by supplementing the traditional skill-and-drill curriculum with all kinds of games, projects, and field trips. It took only a few weeks for my daughter to begin tearfully rejecting the arbitrary assignments in the workbooks, and since she was already working "ahead of grade level" (whatever that means), I couldn't see any reason to force her to continue with them.

We went back to our old routine of reading together for fun, playing games, messing with art supplies and cooking projects, and spending lots of time outside. Wanting to trust my instincts but worried that I might be missing something, I read books by respected "unschoolers"—John Holt (Learning All the Time), Linda Dobson (The Art of Education), Nancy Wallace (Child's Work), Mary Griffith (The Unschooling Handbook), and Sandra Dodd (articles in Home Education Magazine)—all of whom advocated a child-led approach. They argued that kids learn faster and retain more of what they learn when they follow their own interests. I considered the way my daughter had learned how to walk, talk, and even read (on her own, at age 3), and I decided the unschoolers might be right. Surely, my daughter would learn what she needed to know as she got older. Or would she?

Niggling doubts persisted, because along with the books on unschooling, I also consulted World Book's Typical Course of Study, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer, and What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (Core Knowledge Series) by E. D. Hirsch. I couldn't help asking myself: does my daughter really need to know all of this stuff? According to the Core Knowledge Foundation, she does:

"The Core Knowledge Foundation believes that for the sake of academic excellence, greater equity, and higher literacy, elementary and middle schools need to teach a coherent, cumulative, and content-specific core curriculum. . . .  Every child should learn the fundamentals of science, basic principles of government, important events in world history, essential elements of mathematics, widely acknowledged masterpieces of art and music from around the world, and stories and poems passed down from generation to generation." ("Why Knowledge Matters," CoreKnowledge.org)

So, we're faced with a challenge. How do we balance our childrens' need to pursue their interests with our desire for them to be fully literate, well-informed, productive citizens? How do we reconcile what a student wants to know with what a teacher or parent feels a student ought to know? While we might want to take a leap of faith, and believe that our children will make good choices, what role do we have in guiding them?