What Home Educators Can Add

From Howard Gardner (HT: DD).

"The time has come to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to a college professor. And we evaluate everything along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many different abilities that will get you there."

Autonomous home educators can add to this. They know that you don't have to HELP SO MUCH. You don't have to peddle stuff all the time. You don't have to run about creating a schoolie curriculum that could appeal to any one of seven intelligences. You just have to lay the world open to your child and listen to what grabs their interest. If the child can't access their area of interest for themselves, you help them get at it somehow. Your work then is usually done and you are only likely to know more about the subject than you child after a couple of months if it happens to be your own area of interest.