What is an Education?
To get straight down to basics to decide how we wanted to educate our children Errol and I sat down and asked ourselves ‘what IS an education?’. And how are we going to get it for our kids?
There is this elusive title of ‘educated’ that we are all subconsciously pushing our children towards and sometimes I am not so sure everyone has actually decided what educated means for them and their children.
Is it finishing high school? Is it earning a bachelor degree? Or a Phd?
For me, I think Mahatma Ghandi summed it up well when he spoke on modern education:
“The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education”
Errol and I have always agreed that we wanted to make conscious decisions for our children’s parenting, not be dictated by what anyone else is doing. When we’ve brought home these incredible tiny people we’ve talked a lot about the childhood & adolescence we want to give them and the steps we want to take to help them reach their full potential.
So, it was never assumed that we would send our children to school (even though Errol and I both met at university studying to be teachers!).
We have had active discussions where we have sat down and talked about the sort of adults we want to raise – about what elements of their characters we want to nurture and encourage and what kind of adults we hope they’ll be; about the education we will provide them. Raising a kid is kinda a big deal and we don’t want to go into it without thinking about where we’d like to end up!
For us – we found that we wanted to raise adults who are content, grateful, well rounded, creative, respectful, able to think critically, have healthy relationships, use wisdom, maintain curiosity, are entrepreneurial and have self confidence. These are our priorities, they are the ‘education’ we want to provide our children and everything else is just details. I truly believe that school is not the ideal place to teach our children these life values.
Statistics show that 58% of children schooled at home report that they are “very happy” with life, compared with 27% for the general U.S. population. 73% find life “exciting”, compared with 47.3%
When Errol and I talk about the things we learnt at school we never once think of the things we wrote out in exams, do you? Students are loaded with information year after year to pass exam after exam to be labelled as ‘educated’ at the end. I am always curious about how much of that information is actually useful to them? Or how much is even being retained? I am never surprised that the people I find the most talented, the most creative and true in their field were never formally trained in that area (um, hello, KIMBRA!).
It seems that so often the focus is on getting our children to mimic facts and information instead of nuturing their own curiosity and intelligence and ability to learn and create on their own. We want to sail them through kindergarten to college and have them popped out the other end ‘educated’. Certainly many college graduates are academically well prepared (and certainly some are not!) but often I think we miss children’s real education; what gives them substance and creativity and makes them unique – in sending them through this system. Academia is a beautiful pursuit but Errol and I firmly believe it is only a small facet of a one’s education.
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
-Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
Please read on to the next posts in our series Natural Learning, Why school isn’t the best place for my child, Socialisation, Convenience & freedom
