The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life

Connect to your children. The academics matter, but they follow. Your children’s happiness and safe, supportive relationship with you come first. Believe it or not, your children are happiest when they believe you are delighted by them.

The key to a successful education is not remembering the sequence of battles in World War I or getting an A on the geometry test. A robust education is the ability to make meaningful use of any and all information.

If homeschooling stops being a source of joy, begin by shifting your attention to the awesome adult you want to be. Just that shift can inject energy into a flagging homeschool.

A lifestyle of learning begins at home - with parents who create a context that is welcoming of children as they are and that offers them happy experiences, accessible tools, and parental involvement.

Let’s get one thing straight. Homeschooling is messy. The more kids you have, the messier it is.

Learning is not only tied to reading thick old books, writing serious academic essays, and advancing in mathematics. Today, it’s just as critical to be innovative, to collaborate, and to imagine.

Because people are innately social and in search of meaning, our relationships and emotions—not rote memory or the right textbooks—are key to learning. In other words, when your child feels connected and happy, your child is learning the most.

If you send a child to therapy before you've been for yourself, the child rightly discerns that you consider the child the problem. If, however, you've used therapy in your life before asking your child to go, she learns that therapy is a natural choice for people who want to live conscious, healthy lives. Therapy is good emotional and mental hygiene - just as teeth cleanings and going to the gym are good for physical health. Nothing to be ashamed of!

On some intuitive level, I knew that learning had to be more than the mastery of facts. I've experienced it as an adult. I become consumed with a subject like quilting or preparing yogurt cultures, and that topic takes over my life - fabric scraps scattered on the floor, little jars of white sludge cuddled by blankets on my kitchen countertops. When I learned to play guitar in my thirties, no one had to schedule my practices. My guitar lived on a stand in the living room and I tormented our ears multiple times a day until my fingers bled. Passion for learning has that fiery, consuming, can't-stop quality.

A child will risk telling you her desires if she believes you're a receptive audience. She'll conceal them if she doubts your support.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all. —JOHN HOLT

The key to a kinder and gentler homeschool is attending to the details we overlook—the coziness of our homes, the principles of natural learning, and the tenderness of our intimate relationships.

If we believe that education is unique for each child, we can relax into whatever time it takes to learn rather than flipping out when our kids don’t line up with what Becky’s children are doing down the street.

A happy house for homeschool is one where every inch is used for learning, messes are welcomed, people are more precious than furnishings, and household maintenance is a varying standard with fluctuating amounts of help, and we’re all okay with it most of the time.

To have a more effective home education, I realized I needed to abandon the trappings of school and harness the energy of home.

What matters: being open to the varying abilities of our kids and standing with them as they grow. All we have are love and trying.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a child in possession of a good instructor must be in want of an education. Alas, kids don’t care. It’s impossible to demand inspiration, passion, or self-discipline without affinity for learning. Let me rephrase that: you can’t coerce caring. Adults try! We use grades, little statues, and ice cream sundaes to prod kids into reading, diagramming sentences, and practicing piano. Meanwhile that same child will stand in the hot sun for five hours shooting free throws to break a personal record. No reward except satisfaction. How do we get more of that into traditional school subjects?

Remember: sometimes the most sacred moments in our days with our children show no outward educational value.

A better investment of time is to consider how your kids learn rather than what to teach them. Learning is made possible not by better programs, but by better experiences—

The whole world is a series of miracles, but we are so used to them we call them ordinary things. —HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Adults problem-solve when interacting with each other; they lecture about character development when interacting with children. If we start with the belief that each person is driven by healthy curiosity—a hunger to know, play, explore—we can stop shaming our children for poor character and shift to meeting needs.

Encounter forces a shift in perspective to include these human beings, right in front of us, who are different yet reassuringly the same.

They have been taught to value certainty rather than doubt, to give answers rather than to inquire, to know which choice is correct rather than to explore alternatives.

Enchanted education and living are all about small surprises of happy—scattered, littered, peppered throughout garden-variety days.

Happiness shouldn’t be something to end up with; it ought to be the by-product of a whole-hearted, fully lived life.