The Paradox of Choice - Educational Models

The paradox of choice is a term coined by this guy Barry Schwartz. He said that while humans like a large selection of things from which to choose, if there are too many, it causes us to feel less happiness, less satisfaction, and can even lead to a certain type of mental paralysis. 

This is what faces many parents when they start to consider educating their kids at home. I know it did for us! Do we do a full scale Classical curriculum? Online school? Charlotte Mason? Montessori? Unit studies? Un-schooling? If any of these terms are unfamiliar to you, take a second and check this site out. It does a good job of hitting the high points and low points of each curriculum type.

In our family we blend traits from each of these models into our day. We value the logic and Greek and Latin familiarity that a Classical education provides and we emphasize the importance of communicating your ideas in a clear, confident manner, but I need a little more flexibility than most Classical curricula. 

I love Charlotte Mason and Montessori-style learning with their emphases of learning outside, reading worthwhile books, and educating through a child's sense of touch, also called kinesthetic learning. However, we also need to supplement with a solid math curriculum, which we'll cover in the next post.

Unit studies, lap-booking, and notebooking are all ways to learn about a subject and document that learning in a visually-appealing, well-organized format. We're moving to digital format this year since the lapbooks can be a pain to store long term. This school year, the family will be learning about different countries for social studies. August is Greece. For this, the kids will be researching both ancient and modern Greece, looking at their culture, religion, political system, economics, and food. At the end of the month, the kids will present their findings in the form of a Greek play and then serve us an authentic Greek meal. (Because Mama loves souvlaki.) We'll record it and throw the video file, photos, and documents into our cloud portfolio. 

Unschooling is the most polarizing of these methods. My conversations with traditional homeschoolers tend to see the method as undisciplined, lazy, and educationally worthless. Unschoolers tend to see traditional curricula as rigid, mechanistic, and dull. Like everything in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. There are families who commit educational neglect, but I would never call them unschoolers. True unschooling families do plenty of educational activities and work hard at what they're learning, but they spend a lot less time in a classroom producing worksheets or essays. I have a friend who is a committed unschooling mom. We met at a coffee shop in Portland. My girls were doing worksheets. Her kids were enthusiastically debating the merits and demerits of medieval weaponry. I told my kids to put down their worksheets and meet their new friends. Her kids are articulate, interesting humans who love to learn. They have an intentional mother who gives them the tools they need to learn. This is unschooling at its best - field trips, civic engagement, and books everywhere. 

My kids need more structure, so we can't do unschooling in its purest form, but we incorporate a lot of the ideas. For instance, I generally let my kids' interests dictate what we do for science, history, and electives. I keep a mental list of topics that they bring up and guide them to those topics throughout the school year. I also allow them a great deal of latitude when it comes to their reading. The family spends at least a couple of hours reading every day, at least half of which are books of the kids' choosing. This is where you get those challenging kids, folks! My son could not have cared less about reading until his older sister brought home some Minecraft fiction in 2018. I may have rolled my eyes at his choice, but now he will now sit there and absorb an entire Usborne encyclopedia in a morning. He just finished Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. My son is a voracious reader because of an illustrated Minecraft chapter book. And to think I rolled my eyes.

Next up are some of the specific curricula we use in our homeschool.