Home-schooling and processing my own firewood are the very catalysts that led our family to homesteading. My wife and I had been teaching in the public school system for nearly 7 years before starting our home school. I had already been blocking and splitting our own firewood for heating our home. I followed You Tubers like Buckin’ Billy Ray and Farmhand’s Companion to learn about wood processing. From FHC, I discovered the beauty of having a milk cow. I wanted one. We were going to get one. Suffice it to say, the journey to homesteading began with homeschooling, and now it has led to home business. We are coming home.
There are so many things coming home has done, and continues to do, for our entire family. The lessons learned in homeschooling have been many. The most important lesson learned for educating our kids has been accepting that each child has unique gifts and abilities. We have spent lots of money purchasing different curriculum for everyone to do, only to quickly adapt and allow for a mixture of many resources to generate a love of learning for its own sake. In fact, the more rigid and scholastic the less the kids get from it. The deep and simple conversations we have as family about life, history, science, economics are what last in our children’s minds…not copious amounts of book reports that suck the life out of novels and history books.
The next would be that the homestead is rich with learning experiences, and must be central to a curriculum. Not everything has to be on paper with a letter grade…although having children write, draw, paint and sing about it, is excellent, and best done organically, not by rigid force, since the purpose of education is not found in utilitarian control. Not formalizing activities to death encourages love of learning. For example, on the homestead, the scientific method is learned quickly and intuitively through trying things out with an expectation of an outcome, only to learn that something else may work better, or not at all.
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Like learning that red light spectrum does much more for winter egg laying than bright white lights;
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A buck and two does in a rabbit colony doesn’t always work out;
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Dairy cows give birth in 279 days and their belly’s drastically change shape right before calving;
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Diet chemistry is extremely important before, during, and after calving.
There are so many more things to touch on that the traditional classroom cannot provide in the empirical sciences.
The last I will touch on, but by no means the end of the list for homesteading curricular resources, is the familial bonds and relationships grown in the home. The trials, tribulations, consolations, joys and losses are shared by a small community joined through deep love. This cannot be taught in public school. The reasons?
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Not enough time,
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Homogeneous group of individuals forced into rows and columns or small groups,
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No allotment for free learning as recess is reduced more and more or its formalized and controlled,
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Everything scheduled and focused on the clock, and finally
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The kids go home to spend only a couple hours with family where there is very little structure for solving problems together…at least not without contrived and scheduled force.
Simply put, the home teaches compassion, generosity, and forgiveness like no other institution.
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Education can be free and public, it doesn’t have to come from a government or private school.