The Secular Homeschooler: A Nonreligious Guide for Helping Kids Build Competence, Independence and Ethics Outside of a School Environment

The Secular

Homeschooler

A Nonreligious Guide for Helping Kids Build Competence, Independence and Ethics Outside of a School Environment

by Teri P. Moore

The Secular

Homeschooler

Copyright © 2014 by Teri P. Moore

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Invisible Order

Drawings by Iliana S. Moore

Praise for The Secular Homeschooler

Who wants to be dead wood? That’s right — nobody. We all want to be competent and valuable, but when we do everything FOR our kids, they feel the opposite: Useless. This book makes it easy to raise kids who are givers, not takers. Which makes it easier to raise kids, period!

— Lenore Skenazy,

author of the book and blog

Free-Range Kids

Teri has thought long and hard about a different educational model for children. She has ‘inside’ information on everything from free-range style parenting, to building your own educational paradigm, to customizing curriculum based on each child’s personality, character, strengths, and weaknesses. Her advice and strategies for focusing on the Whole Child will resonate with parents who know there is something missing in their homeschooling journey. This is an expansive look at education, where it has gone wrong, and how to foster more effective patterns when bringing children home to learn.

— Kerry Jones,

Administrator at

SecularHomeschool.com

To Iliana and Sequoia, who showed me just what they needed every day, and to Adrian, who always cheered me on no matter what.

Table of Contents

Praise for The Secular Homeschooler

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1. The Educated Idiot

2. Addressing the Whole Child

3. Ethics and Character

4. Self-Mastery and Independence

5. Deschooling

6. Capability

7. Forging Wisdom from Academics: K-8

8. Our Homeschooling Journey: K-8 Academics

9. Forging Wisdom from Academics: High School and College Preparation

10. Trusting Ourselves, Trusting Our Kids

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Any book that takes this long to write owes its presence to many. First and foremost, like every homeschooler, I thank my children and husband, who walked this homeschool journey every single day and taught me everything I know. Special thanks also to my writers’ group, Victoria Montes, Meg Halter, Tanya Spencer, Tanis Galik, Gary Adams, Kathleen Kline and Julie Hammer for their discerning minds and helpful ideas. I’m grateful to Deanna Downs, Tom Karnes and the other teachers and parents at Valley Oaks Charter School for the chance to do homeschool workshops, which always makes me think extra hard. Much gratitude also to Nena Thornburg, Kerry Jones of secularhomeschool.com and Nathalie Marcus of Invisible Order for their astute comments, and my homeschool moms group, for their collective wisdom over the years. For defending what so many of us parents are trying to do, I thank Lenore Skenazy, whose seminal book Free-Range Kids sparked the public debate on experience-based parenting. And finally, thank you so much to my dear friend Marilyn White, who, over many a Vietnamese spring roll, was there every step of the way with her insights on education, parenting and life itself.

Chapter One

The Educated Idiot

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

— General George S. Patton, Jr.

How I Became an Educated Idiot, and How I Recovered

I remember my kindergarten teacher’s first words of praise — how worthwhile they made me feel. I soon learned how easy it was to make those big red A plusses. There wasn’t much to figure out — all I had to do was memorize what the teacher told me, and that was easy. Soon I had wedded myself to a 12-year system at which I could easily excel, and which delivered to me all the recognition of success my ego could want. I loved those big red A plusses! Adored by all my teachers, I was the straight-A, top-of-the-class, overachieving honor student. Everyone was so proud of me. My grades were stellar, which meant I was intelligent, right? My numbers were good, so that meant I was worthwhile, right? I was so proud of myself.

It took years to discover I was incompetent.

School had become my refuge and my best friend. When I graduated from high school, college was a foregone conclusion — and a way out of a dysfunctional house. Armed with scholarships, I aced my way through, determined to be a teacher like those I adored throughout school. But as college graduation approached, I was afraid to leave the campus and the academic life I knew and loved so well. I knew that without the structure of school, I couldn’t cope, or maybe I just wouldn’t want to cope. Deep inside I knew something was missing in me, knowledge that a school couldn’t teach me, knowledge that didn’t derive from A plusses.

In the mirror I saw an educated idiot. I knew facts but they didn’t come together to produce knowledge or wisdom. While I understood that this was partly due to youth, a great chasm between school and life yawned before me. I felt unprepared, deficient, incapable. I couldn’t figure things out for myself, and I knew it.

School was easy; they gave me the formula and I applied it. I looked up the facts and wrote reports on them. Unlike school, real life had questions without answers, predicaments with consequences, and uncharted situations that required self-knowledge and creativity to solve. I had to learn how to think without guidance and discover my personal ethics to ground my life decisions. I had to learn how to cook life without being handed a recipe. I had to learn how to lead myself deliberately through life, not just wait for its assignments. So I set off to force upon myself experiences that would hone resourcefulness and capability, to become my own master, no matter what.

First, I needed to answer a personal question: just what was I made of — physically, mentally, ethically? Could my suicidal and agoraphobic mother who had died terrified to leave the house have been right? Was danger right around the corner waiting to slay me? I had to find out.

That summer I bought a bicycle and rode it down the coast of Washington and Oregon alone, camping along the way. The next summer a friend wanted to bicycle around the whole Western U.S., so I did that too. Stupid? Maybe. And yes, there were some scary moments, but I learned that I was competent and physically strong, and that was priceless.

I loved the exhilaration of sweating through every mile, the challenges inherent in literally navigating my way, and the freedom to learn by my mistakes. I could feel my capability expanding with every decision: what map to use, which road to take, where to camp. If I made bad decisions, I faced consequences. That’s the sheer joy of independence: not just the freedom to do what you want, but the freedom to fail. And I knew I needed more of these challenging and real experiences.

After graduation I joined the Peace Corps and taught school in a remote Kenyan village. This was most fortunate for me because the Third World has many challenges, forcing volunteers to find creative ways to solve problems — just what I needed.

A glorious thing happens when Americans leave the comforts of home: when the bubble wrapping is off they have to be accountable for themselves. There’s no one to ask, nobody to sue if things go wrong, and often no system in place. Living in remote villages, volunteers are forced to live with the consequences of every decision they make.

Moreover, actions that we take for granted here are put to the common sense test there, because when you’re outside your culture, you look at things with new eyes.

For example, we think nothing of defecating in drinkable water because we have done it all our lives. But when you have to haul all your own water from the river and strain and boil it, you realize how precious potable running water is, and are conscious of that human achievement forever after.

Upon returning home, I had to readjust to American ways. Fouling a basin of perfectly good, drinkable water seemed unacceptably wasteful, and still does. Twenty-five years later I still think about how many people in the world don’t have potable water on demand. But the point here is that sometimes you have to go outside your comfort zone, and your own culture, to see things clearly.

Like most volunteers, I spent my first few months seeing what rural Africans lacked that we westerners have, like running water. It took several months of living in a foreign culture for my mind to see past its first-world borders and appreciate what Africa and other older cultures have that we don’t. As happens with most Peace Corps volunteers, immersion in a foreign culture made me question my own culture. This was the best thing about the Peace Corps experience for me. I’ve never forgotten how to pop myself out of American culture to look at it from the outside. While I appreciate my comfortable post-industrial life, I recognize that Africa, and cultures like it, have much to teach us.

In America our children are the most important part of our lives and we tell them so, but we don’t let them actually be important. Just like I did, most American kids go to school all day, which teaches them facts but not skills and keeps them from participating in real life where they might apply learning (which helps turn facts into knowledge). This is hard to discern from the inside; you have to go outside of the school environment to see it. Instead of doing, American kids are studying how to do and not doing.

African kids are doing. Young people in the Third World do not seem to go through the adolescent psychological misery and angst that American children do. As soon as they are able, children in developing countries are given true responsibility. Nobody has to tell them they are important; they know they are, because of the consequences of failure.

Rural African boys as young as five must herd the family cattle, often the major source of food and money, and protect them from predators or mishap. Failure in their duty would literally mean less food on the table. Soon after they can walk, girls share in the miscellany of household jobs women provide to the family, such as gathering firewood, cooking, sewing, gathering food, caring for young siblings, etc., so a young girl knows how to run a household quite competently by age five or six and has pride in that knowledge. Failure in her duty would be felt by the whole family, whose quality of life would suffer greatly. In other words, African children’s acts and their failures to act have real, tangible consequences for themselves and others. That’s the definition of important. That’s why American kids don’t feel like school is important: it isn’t.

When a child’s actions are important to himself and others, his learning sticks. Because American school children are not participating in the real world, their learning doesn’t stick. By lecturing them in the classroom all day, the school system leaves little time for life experience and instead spoonfeeds information to our children that they have little motivation to remember. So they don’t. Even if a child is the teacher’s pet like I was, whose self-perceived human value rests on his grade point average like mine did, he still only retains the information until the test, after which it is irrelevant to his life.

Our efficient brains are meticulous sifters of short-term and long-term need to know. We don’t consciously feel it happening, but our brains are judging what’s worth remembering and what’s not based on what our life experience shows we need. That’s why kids can remember some complex things, like how to play sophisticated computer games that they enjoy or how to make their favorite breakfast, but not some simple things, like the capital of Belgium or that they were supposed to clean their room.

Right now as you read this, your brain is deciding what to remember and what to dump based on whether the information meets a need in your life, and you can’t even feel it happening. As kids are taught material in school, their brains assess how long it needs to be retained and shuttles it to the appropriate mental file. Test information gets put into short-term memory, to be dumped right after the test. That’s why kids ask is this going to be on the test? Their brains want to know which file to put it in. Tested material is like a grocery list: after we go to the store, it’s irrelevant, so we dump it. How much do you remember from those 12 years?

By contrast, when we are doing, i.e., living real life, we react to changing circumstances and use our judgment to make decisions. Our motivation springs from knowing that we will have to suffer the consequences of bad decisions.

For example, one day we each learned where the brake pedal is on the car, and we never forgot it, right? Our brain understands the necessity for this knowledge and stores it in the long-term files. For these reasons, personal experience is the best teacher.

In Kenya, I was an education volunteer, sent to teach English. But my village was running out of water, which is higher on the human priority list than education. So I had to change my job and become a water volunteer first, teaching myself basic construction and engineering (which I have never forgotten to this day) and asking engineering volunteers to teach me whenever I got flummoxed. When you ask to be taught because you really need to know, the knowledge sticks. I had to assess situations and make decisions based on my own judgment, and I rose to the occasion because I had to. If I failed, the village had no water. There was no one to blame, no one to sue, and no government agency arriving with a pipeline to save the day.

It wasn’t a hard job, but it had to be done right, and for it to be right I had to engage my brain and pay attention, so I did. It was exhilarating. Finally I felt like an adult. I was no longer a passenger in my own life — I had to pick up an oar and row and steer without a map or a guide. I felt my mind stretching like it never had before and it was euphoric.

Wanting to learn — instead of being force-fed information under threat of bad grades — led me to an intense fascination with what motivates people to learn. When knowledge is a reward in itself, grades don’t matter. Finally I yearned for knowledge for its own sake — I wanted to learn more, and learn it by experience, not in school. I wanted to learn more by doing.

After my Peace Corps service finished, I joined the Army. This may sound like 180 degrees opposite of the Peace Corps, but I found that the people were similar: bright, tough and full of just do it for a cause they believed in. Just like the Peace Corps, you can’t succeed in the Army without having a lot of horse sense backed up with initiative.

You would think that an environment of following orders would dampen your decision-making skills, but with its emphasis on leadership and accountability, the U.S. military constantly forces you to take charge of yourself and eventually others. With its policy of make it happen, your supervisor generally tells you what needs to be done (the outcome) but not how to accomplish it (the process). You’re expected to figure that out on your own, whether that means hunting down an instruction manual or an expert to show you how, assessing situations and using common sense to solve problems, or organizing and leading a group of soldiers to accomplish a mission. You’re judged on your results, not on which process you used. Just like the Peace Corps, the military makes you an active learner because you have skin in the game. You’re demanding the knowledge because you need it to get your job — a job you believe in, with dire human consequences — done.

This makes you pay attention and remember what you learn, and because it’s being used — it’s knowledge, not random facts. Contrast this with passive learning, in which someone else thinks you need to know something that you don’t see the use of: the school model.

In military training, they give you more tasks than can be done in the time allotted. They want to see if you can prioritize, if you can distinguish between which rules should bend and which shouldn’t, and if you can judge when you should be delegating tasks and when you need to just drop everything and do it yourself. You quickly learn that respect is conferred not by rank but by competence. Being on the receiving end of such training was challenging and often frustrating, but also exhilarating because mastery required living by your wits and your principles. And success makes you proud of yourself because you had to figure it out yourself.

Because it’s focused on outcomes, the military has become smart and creative. For example, military leaders have learned that the way to straighten out an able but rebellious recruit is not to babysit him but to burden him with responsibility. That way he has a focus for his energy and a stake in the job. They know that rebelliousness is crying out for a cause, not micro-management. Generally, this tactic harnesses initiative and straightens that recruit out. This is why many businesses like to hire ex-military people. They know they’re getting someone who is in charge of himself, who is accountable for what goes right and what goes wrong, and who doesn’t expect to be spoonfed. They’re getting someone who is motivated to learn.

When my enlistment period was over, I didn’t want to give up learning about people and their motivations. I had observed what motivates people to learn, but wanted to know more about what motivates people to be ethical. I joined the Los Angeles Police Department, where one can’t help but study human motivation in the crime played out on the streets of the city every day.

I asked to work in Southeast Division in the high-crime South-Central area of Los Angeles because I thought I would learn more in a higher crime area. There I met many people who had no regard for life — animal, child or adult. I also met many of the bravest people I’ve ever encountered, some who, at great risk to themselves and their families, testified in court against the gangs that infested their neighborhoods and who went about their daily lives in this troubled area with rare courage. Why do some people stand up for what is right, and others prey on society? Maybe it has to do with how they were taught in their youth.

As a patrol officer I also got a chance to work with America’s violent youth up close. The problem youth in whose lives police officers typically intervene have no jobs or responsibilities, paid or unpaid, even as teenagers. These energetic, directionless young people reject school as a useless, irrelevant waste of time and seek out what looks like an important life to them: the gang leaders and drug dealers who are living exciting and dangerous lives, and who are happy to recruit these youngsters to do their dirty work. Or, just as bad, these youth give up on themselves and turn to hopeless drug addiction. The fact is, humans are hard-wired to seek meaning in their lives, which involves actions with consequences and contributing toward an important goal. In the absence of meaning, they’ll seek danger because it feels like meaning, or they’ll just check out.

Surely, we can do better. There must be a way to bring real meaning to kids’ lives so they will not only feel important and valuable, but be important and valuable. And it has to start young. But to fix the problem, first we have to see the problem. So, what are schools like now? How are children treated today? Soon I had a chance to find out.

Eventually my husband Adrian and I had two children, and it was time to leave the police work that I loved to concentrate on raising our children. But I never stopped thinking about personal motivation. For so many years my high opinion of myself had been based on my high grades and what teachers thought of me instead of what I thought of myself based on my ability and ethics. In struggling for those big A plusses, I learned to cleave to someone else’s idea of what was important and let my own judgment atrophy through lack of use. Then I went out into the world only to find myself incompetent.

While I wanted our children to do well in school, I couldn’t let them become educated idiots like me. My husband and I wanted our children to be educated, but also able to think for themselves and to have the backbone to do what they believe is right, which doesn’t necessarily come with schooling. We wanted them to develop their own iron-clad code of ethics to steer their behavior and forge not only knowledge but wisdom. We wanted them to learn from real life, real people in real situations, and to judge and learn for themselves.

When it was nearly time for our eldest child to start school, I decided to revisit the school environment. Spurred by my observations on the streets and what my own child would be facing, I set out to understand American public education for myself, sitting