If you missed Part Two, click here.
I'm pausing my work on the Conference talks because I'm pregnant...
Not with child, but with an idea.
A friend of mine has a 12-year-old girl. In her child's 12-year-old wisdom, she's stopped attending middle school, telling her mom she wants to homeschool, but she doesn't want a teacher other than Mom. And she doesn't want to study anything like math or science or reading or anything boring like that. Mostly, her mom says, this wise 12-year-old talks to her friends and plays online games all day long.
The mom is worried for her safety at school, so she talked herself into letting her daughter come home, but she's never homeschooled a child before, and doesn't know what she's doing. Plus she's afraid of the child getting angry at her.
Oh dear Mom - who's ghosting me at the moment because she's afraid of what I might tell her - you've started an advice storm you can't just stop now. So you, dear reader, are getting the big dump of advice.
Our family's homeschooling journey with five kids ended with all of them getting their associates or bachelor's degrees, finding work and learning to support themselves and others, so we managed our way through formal schooling and homeschooling. But there would be things I would do differently now, looking back.
Two Parts to Education
What this mom doesn't understand (and honestly, what I didn't understand when I first started out) was that there are two goals to education.
Today I'm talking about the first one - the practical side.
Education is about learning how to work and how to serve as a member of society. There's lots of different ways to do that.
If my child took him or herself out of school, or refused to work, this would be the first thing I would tell them.
If you don't work, you don't eat. That's a basic rule of life.
There would be chores galore, for a child who's too young to get a job outside the home.
There might even be a small business happening, if the house didn't provide enough work. Offer to babysit, or mow lawns, or volunteer at a local business. That child would immediately be working, and working 6-8 hours a day at least.
If this didn't drive them back to school screaming, there would be one additional assignment.
Choose a Career Path
I would sit said child down and spread out their options on the table, with six cards in front of them.
Society has six areas where work is in demand and where pay meets a livable standard for individuals and families - construction, law, business, computers, healthcare, and education.
Decide on your occupation.
Perhaps said child, whose whole world up til now has been friends and online gaming, doesn't know what to choose.
The first year then, in between chores or running a small baby business, would be involved in six different 2-month units of getting to know each area.
Khan Academy has great videos that break down a lot of different kinds of careers in these areas. Child would watch those videos and report back on what she liked or didn't like.
My friend probably knows people, from her own work or from church, who would be willing to sit down and talk about their work with said child. She could look for ways to get child involved locally with people who work in those fields, and start getting an idea of what a day looks like in each kind of career.
Two months, looking deeply at each area.
After 12 Months
Eventually the child will start to gravitate towards one field or the other. After the first year, exhausted from constant unpaid manual labor and ready to settle down and reach for something that he or she likes and might be good at, my friend and her daughter could sit down and get a plan together for what she needs to do to excel in that area.
Maybe school or college would be required. Maybe tradeschool. Maybe she could just get her GED and skip the whole school system altogether with skills and a portfolio of work.
But the child makes a choice, and works to achieve in that direction, having chosen for his or herself after investigating options. But now she's bought into one field or another, and knows what school is for, and wants something more for herself than doing chores for Mom forever. But those chores have secretly built muscles and a work ethic - something the child didn't have before.
This is where moms and dads have to be ready to be hated for a few years, and not lean on their children for love and acceptance, or this whole process gets short-circuited, and then both the parent and child are cursed for it. The kids will love you again at the end of this when they're grownups and making money, and they'll love you even more for guiding them with adult wisdom and preparing them for their future, rather than letting them play games all day long and then have to go find work with nothing.
So often we think children just know what they should do - but then they get out into the work world after several years of school, with no idea of their direction. Why should they keep going with learning without any sort of idea what they should do? Not all kids love learning for its own sake.
I don't blame my friend. My parents went through that same haphazard process, and so did we. But it's not good to raise children who don't know how to work, and then suddenly expect them to work. Learning to work as an adult when you've never worked before is a crushing process, and sending our kids out into the world with no skills in at least one area of life is not fair to them, or to us, who then have to support helpless adults.
What about the Arts?
Why didn't you mention the arts when you mentioned careers, you say? Why wasn't the arts one of those cards?
That deserves a soapbox all its own, and that's coming tomorrow...
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