Teach your own ... Le grand saut

Kalia n'a pas été à l'école lundi.

Ni mardi.

Et ni aujourd'hui.

Pendant les relâches, on s'est enfin décidé à faire l'école à domicile.

Evidemment, vous allez me demander "pourquoi tu l'enlèves de l'école?". Mais il faut tourner la question dans l'autres sens: "Pourquoi est-ce qu'on l'a envoyé à l'école?"

La responsabilité de l'éducation ET de l'instruction des enfants incombe aux parents. Il faut avoir une bonne raison pour déléguer à quelqu'un d'autre. Et ben moi, des raisons, j'en avais plus tant que ça.

Alors voilà, on a vu le directeur pendant les vacances, qui nous a très bien reçu, et on a aussi vu la maîtresse. Tout deux nous ont proposé de l'aide, de fournir du matériel en cas de besoin, des conseils si on en a besoin. C'est légèrement miraculeux, par rapport à la réaction qu'on aurait pu attendre...

On embarque donc pour une aventure de taille. Il faut savoir que je m'intéresse au 'homeschooling' (voire le 'unschooling') depuis bien avant la naissance des filles, même avant le mariage. J'aimerais bien aller dans le sens de John Holt (j'ai trouvé qu'un livre traduit en français), mais c'est un sacré transformation de mentalité.
 

Kalia didn't go to school on Monday.

Or Tuesday.

Nor today, for that matter.

During half-term, we finally made up our minds to homeschool. The immediate question which comes to mind is probably: "Why are you taking her out of school?" But in fact, it's the other way round: "Why did we send her in the first place?"

Children's education is the responsibility of their parents, so to my mind, the onus is on justifying why you'd choose to delegate that responsibility. I don't mean there aren't valid reasons to do so, but we ran out of reasons.

So we went to see the headmaster last week, who was incredibly open and helpful. We also arranged to see the teacher so that we could break the news to her ourselves, in (what we hoped was) an appropriate and sensitive way. Both of them offered help, copies of useful material, their advice if ever we needed it. Mildly miraculous compared to what we could have expected (and what I feared).

So, we've pushed our little coracle out into the ocean, who knows where we'll end up! I've been interested in homeschooling (and unschooling) for a long time - way before I had kids, or was even married. I'm very interested by the ideas of John Holt (the title of this post is an allusion to one of his books), but it's pretty hard to change our "learning is the product of teaching" mentality.

(M. now you know what we were up to on Thursday. So sorry we missed you, I think that our 2 K's would get on really well)