2001

The assumption that homeschooling parents somehow lack awareness of their children’’s progress, and therefore require formal evaluation of that progress, is related to the fact that homeschoolers function beyond the arena of the schools, and our philosophies and methods are not always well-understood. How do homeschooling parents know their children are learning? The answer to this question is, to put it most simply, direct observation. I have only one child. If a teacher had only one child in her classroom, and was unable to describe the reading skills of that child, everyone would be dismayed— — how could a teacher have such close daily contact with one child and miss something so obvious? Yet many people unfamiliar with homeschooling imagine that parents with just this sort of close daily contact with their child require outside evaluation to determine that child’’s progress. This puzzles homeschooling parents, who cannot imagine missing anything so interesting as the nature of their child’’s learning. No homeschooling parents have twenty-five children, and we are thus free to focus on the enhancement of learning without being continually distracted by the many time-consuming tasks unrelated to learning that are necessary in a classroom situation. This freedom from distraction is a major factor in the establishment of a lively, creative, and joyful learning environment. Any parent of a preschool child could almost certainly tell us how many numbers her child can count to, and how many colors he knows — —not through testing, but simply through many hours of listening to his questions and statements and observing his behavior. In homeschooling, this type of observation simply continues on into higher ages and more complex learning. There are many times in the course of a day when a reasonably curious child will want to know the meaning of certain printed words — —in books and newspapers, on the computer or television, on board game instruction cards, on package labels, on mail that has just arrived, and so on. If this child’’s self-esteem is intact, he will not hesitate to ask his parents the meanings of these words. Through the decrease of questions of this type, and the actual reading aloud of certain words, (“Look, Daddy, this package is for you!”) it seems safe to assume that reading is progressing in the direction of literacy. This may seem to outsiders to be somewhat imprecise, but homeschooling parents learn through experience that more specific evaluation is intrusive, unnecessary, and self-defeating. If the government were to establish compulsory evaluation of babies to determine whether they were walking on schedule, everyone would think that was absurd. We all know that healthy babies walk eventually, and that it would be futile and frustrating to attempt to speed up that process; it would be as foolish as trying to speed up the blooming of a rose. Gardeners do not worry about late-blooming roses, or measure their daily progress — —they trust in nature’’s good intentions, meet the needs of the plants under their care, and know that any further intervention would interfere with the natural flow of their growth. Such trust is as essential in the education of a child as it is in gardening. All healthy rose bushes bloom when ready, all healthy babies walk when ready, and all healthy children in a family of readers read when ready— — though this may be as late as ten or twelve. There is no need to speed up or measure this process. The child’’s progress is not always smooth; there may be sudden shifts from one stage to the next. Thus, formal evaluation given just prior to such a shift may give unfair and misleading information. At a time when I knew (through a reduction in the number of requests for me to read certain signs, labels, etc.) that my son Jason’’s reading was improving, but not, as far as I knew, yet able to read fluently, I told him one evening that I was unable to read to him because I wasn’’t feeling well. He said, ‘”Well, you can rest and I’’ll read a book to you.” He proceeded to read an entire book flawlessly, at a level of more difficulty than I would have guessed. Thus it sometimes happens in the natural course of living with a child that we receive more direct and specific information about his progress. But it should be stressed that this is part of the natural process of “aiding and abetting” a child’’s learning, and that requiring such direct proof is almost always self-defeating. Had I required him to read the book, he might well have refused, because he would have felt the anxiety which anyone feels when being evaluated. But because he chose to read voluntarily, and his accuracy was not being examined, anxiety was not a factor. Homeschooling parents, then, cannot avoid having a good general idea of a child’’s progress in reading, or in any other area. Without testing for specific learning, we may underestimate a child’’s abilities to some extent, but all that means is that we make delightful discoveries along the way. If homeschooling parents do not measure, evaluate and control learning, how can the child himself know when to move on to the next level? If we were to ask a horticulturist how a rose knows when to bloom, he or she could not answer that question; it is taken on faith that such knowledge is built into the miraculous design of the seed. A child’’s schedule of intellectual growth, like the rose’’s blooming, may indeed be a mysterious process, but it nonetheless exists, built into each child at conception. There is no need to impose such a process from the outside, and no one but the child has direct access to this process. Thus any imposition of an artificial structure must necessarily be less successful than simply leaving these determinations to the child. That is, any attempt to make these determinations from the outside represent mere guesswork that is unlikely to