If I could count the times I’ve been told, ‘I’ve thought about home educating my child but I don’t want them to be weird’, I would be a rich woman. And while it’s a good thing I am not more easily offended I thought that opening a discussion might be a good idea.
If by weird you mean different, then, without a doubt, yes home educated kids are weird!
A lot of the things you might think are weird but actually are pretty normal when you look at them through a slightly different lens.
For example, most home educated kids won’t know what school year they are supposed to be in, and to be honest, their parents won’t know either. They’ll usually have to google the average school ages per year to work it out and tell you. This is because in home education kids work at their own pace, meaning they will probably be two years ahead on some subjects but maybe a year behind on others. Having the freedom to recognise your strengths and weaknesses enables people to get really good at their natural gifts a lot younger, which will probably be the subject areas they end up working in as adults, regardless of whether they learned about them in or out of a school environment.
If you ask a home educated child what they do all day, they might well tell you they play a lot of games, hang out with their friends, or watch television. They give the impression of a lazy, relaxed lifestyle where not much work actually happens, but the truth is, if you don’t have to wait around and have one adult to a maximum of a couple of children, you can be focused much easier and get through the ‘schoolwork’ for the day way before lunchtime, leaving plenty of time for creativity, personal interests and just spending time together. Home educators also use the ‘fun stuff’ as learning opportunities and rarely separate out education from non-education, it’s all learning!
One thing which can make home educated children stand out in a crowd of schooled children is that they may seem younger or not as interested in dating early or know all of the pop-culture references of their peers. This tends to be due to two things. The first is that they socialise without assimilating and by that, I mean, they tend to have friends and enjoy hanging out together, but they don’t feel a need to become exactly like each other to fit in with the group. They know what they individually like and don’t like and that it is okay to be themselves. Having their own style rather than following trends and being interested in other people’s ideas and interests without taking them own as their own are comment side-effects of being home educated. The reason they can seem younger than their peers is they don’t mind acting their ages and aren’t in quite such a hurry to grow up.
Just remember, to a home educated child it would seem pretty weird to have to ask when you need the toilet or wait to get a drink until set times. They might think wearing the same thing every day and looking the same as hundreds of others was a little odd too. We all do things differently from each other at home. We have different foods we eat and unique habits and family traditions. The way we learn can be the same as that if we want it to be, with everyone choosing what works best for them and their families.
Have you actively chosen how you educate?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ben White on Unsplash
