There’s No Endpoint to Learning
Learning doesn’t have an endpoint—you know that because you are still learning almost as much as your kids are while you homeschool them!
We start homeschooling because we want our kids to love learning.
We often keep homeschooling because WE fall in love with learning.
It’s a paradox, right? Maybe you thought you hated history in school and now you can’t get enough of it. A couple decades or four under your belt, and suddenly ancient Egyptian embalming methods are riveting!
- I never read Jane Austen in high school or college. It was a thrill to discover her charming wit in my thirties.
- I discovered that multiplication (the word) comes from “multiple” which is precisely the reason I didn’t learn how to multiply as a kid. I somehow missed the point—that each times table described multiples of the same number, added together in a shortcut! Thank you Cuisinaire rods.
- I became an expert at naming our backyard birds, and we had so much fun making homemade suet.
- I can’t believe that I actually saw Saturn, the real planet with the real ring around it, through my own son’s telescope!
- Never have I been more interested in what comes out of an animal than when we dissected owl pellets.
And since these experiences have been as meaningful to me as they were to my kids (maybe moreso, if I’m honest), then I don’t have to worry about my kids and what they are learning now. Sure, there’s the school-subject dating introduction service I provide them (making matches, hoping they swipe right). But there will be so much more left for them to learn after they leave home, on their own time table, perhaps even at the hands of my grandchildren.
Lifelong learning means your whole life, not just until eighteen. We, who homeschool, know this in our bones. We are the lucky ones.
This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!
