This email marks the launch of a series on the rich and perhaps surprising variety in how you might homeschool your children, each approach an insightful critique of traditional school. I hope and suspect that even if you’re committed to (or at least employing) institutional education, you’ll find alternatives interesting (and perhaps even attractive).
I’ve already written about why you might want to homeschool (Individualized attention and pacing through a customized curriculum can achieve, on average, higher academic performance - not to mention value alignment) but now my intent is to describe several (not mutually exclusive) approaches, attempt to steelman them without losing their essence, and then have all the other approaches critique and comment on each other with some imagined personality. I’ve found the exercise quite helpful to our family in thinking about what we value and determining how we’d like to educate our own children.
A very brief introduction to the Thunderdome of Homeschooling:
Traditional school at home: you replicate at home what institutional school looks like at its best. A common starting point for homeschoolers, with a familiar, structured curriculum to be tested; institutional school is also so much more thoroughly studied than anything else that you can pursue a very strong evidence-based academic regime if you’d like.
Classical/Great Books: you have your children spend time with the very best minds that history has produced and emphasize an ancient mindset of timeless values. This approach is something like what institutional school looked like in America in the late 19th century and is a popular choice among conservatives (who have also set up Classical institutions). Especially notable is its use of the Socratic method.
Charlotte Mason / Literature-Based: you emphasize the cultivation of good habits in your children, academically concentrate on books that make their subjects come alive, and otherwise unleash children into nature. Taught by British governesses of the Victorian era.
PhD Dad: you set your kids up to truly master math and reading and trust that all else follows. A back-to-the-basics hack that has been independently developed by at least two highly-educated homeschooling fathers: CalTech chemist Art Robinson and Berkeley/Princeton economics PhD Bryan Caplan.
Pragmatists: you teach what your children are most likely to actually use (life skills, practical knowledge) and deemphasize or eliminate the rest.
Montessori: you recognize the dignity and capability of the very young and constantly seek to set up activities that will occupy your childrens’ whole attention. Derives from Dr. Maria Montessori’s intense observations of children self-directing their learning in the early 20th century.
Unschooling: you act as your child’s librarian, offering and recommending books, activities, and experiences based on their ambitions and delights. One of the two initial main motivations for homeschooling in the modern era, a reaction to the idea that coercive institutional schools kill a love of learning.
Unit studies: you consecutively deeply explore different topics (like Ancient Egypt or the Ocean) and then show how you can understand them through multiple subjects (math, literature, history, science, economics, etc.) It really leans into a particular approach that sometimes comes up in elementary school, though an attractive variant may focus on how the subjects come together in entrepreneurialism.
Specialization: you focus to achieve outsized performance, ruthlessly minimizing or cutting all else. Most often deployed for an extracurricular that a child is especially talented or interested in.
Bible first: your highest priority is to raise children to embrace and understand your faith and all teaching stems from that. One of the two initial main motivations for homeschooling in the modern era, a reaction against the secularism of public schools, though some take it further than others; some combination of it and pragmatism was the first American approach to education.
Mentoring: you maximize your children’s time with extraordinary adults, both formally and informally. Inspired by the childhood experiences of a number of geniuses, though children spending so much time with same-aged children is a modern phenomenon. Could also take the form of apprenticeships (which were once formal and common).
Cyberschoolers: you rethink school from first principles, with an emphasis on using the vast resources online unattainable and unimaginable to those who designed our current school system. Personalization tends to be a major component; Elon Musk is deploying one version of this with his children.
Pioneers: you start with a curriculum designed to specifically entice boys and then tailor it to your specific sons. A reaction to the relative underperformance of boys in institutional schools.
I have tried to read at least a couple of books about each of the most popular approaches and some of the others are more speculative but contain a valuable point of view. You’ll note that some approaches think institutional schools do too much and that, mindful of opportunity cost, we should cut down and focus on the important (they just disagree about what’s important); others think institutional schools are missing something important and so require replacing or adding to the traditional curriculum. Some approaches are more methodological, critiquing not necessarily the subjects themselves but the way in which they are taught. And still others want to see education through a particularly helpful lens. You cannot pursue them all but you can do some mixing and matching.
I’ll deepen the critiques as I write about each (a variant of unschooling, for example, is roadschooling, which involves education as a giant road trip to actually see what you’re learning about in action) and I freely admit that my own biases will come through at various points even though I sympathize with some aspect of all of the approaches I describe. But I ask: am I missing any interesting way that you could homeschool your kids once you’re liberated from convention?