I have a 4 yr. old daughter named Genevieve, a 2 yr. old son named Curran, and another little one due in the next several weeks. I look at them already and think to myself, “How can I give them the best education possible so they can succeed in life?”
I first look at how I was raised, and what I might do differently. I was homeschooled my whole childhood. My parents decided that Dad would work full time while Mom stayed home to teach me, my younger sister, and younger brother. But Dad also taught us math and science. Mom taught us grammar, history, reading, and social studies.
By the beginning of my senior year of high school, I’d already finished almost all my subjects for graduation, so I studied hard and took CLEP tests to get some of the freshman college courses checked off. At graduation, I had a high school diploma and twenty-seven college credits.
I entered a distance learning accelerated college program to earn my Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in twenty-one months. Because of my head start, I finished in less than twenty.
Because the cost was so much less than four years at a traditional university, even a state school, Dad paid the tuition and gave me the enormous gift of finishing college debt free.
My parents were not rich. In fact, some would call them less well off than average. But they have now put all three of us through college.
So what can I learn from their example?
They did so many things right, but I’ll only mention two.
1. They made good money decisions. If they hadn’t, they couldn’t have survived on one income, and us kids would have been sent to public school. I would probably have believed all the lies about what’s “normal,” what I “deserve,” what the words “hard work” actually mean, and what I “need.” My parents, because they were working, would have had less time to teach me truth.
2. They didn’t copy the public school system in how they homeschooled us. Until high school, we didn’t have a text book for every subject that we grudgingly labored through like some unfortunate homeschool kids. Dad assigned us math computer games to play. Mom read aloud from quality books while I built with Legos. Dad offered cash prizes for subjects we learned. Mom put up posters on every subject from Roman numerals to liquid measurements to maps of the world to simple machines all over the house. I showered while studying a map of the world on the shower curtain. Dad put the push mower and weed eater in the back of our station wagon, and my brother and I learned to earn and manage money by mowing other people’s yards before I could even drive a car. When we went to the beach, we studied the ocean. When we went to the Outer Banks, we studied the Wright Brothers. Dad’s vocation is an industrial safety engineer, so we were the only kids on the block outside during school hours putting out small grease fires in the backyard with a fire extinguisher. Dad even taught a course he wrote based on the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. We learned how to talk to others to make a good first impression on future employers, clients, or leaders.
This is getting long, so in the next post, I’ll talk about how I want to educate my kids.
Let me leave you with one scandalous thought. What if college is not the best option for our children? What if they could learn real skills better, quicker, for less money? What if they could learn to be self employed or have much more appeal to an employer without having a degree from a university?
rebelauthentic 