Home Education (Part 1)

The learning experience of the child in the home environment should be foundational to his/her future formal, informal, and non-formal education. Here, the purpose of teaching, prior to attending school, is to develop cognitive, creative, psychosocial, and other life skills. Learning in the home environment should, of course, include development of important habits and acquisition of certain values and attitudes. While play activities are a natural part of the infants’ and toddlers’ life, advanced learning of the said skills should be centrally¹ imbedded in the infants’ and toddlers’ home environment and daily routine. If this could be done from birth up to age 3, it is possible to turn out “home school graduates” who have the potential to learn things at a rate significantly and inconceivably faster than the speed of learning of average and above-average schoolchildren today.

1 I considered using the expression “naturally” in place of “centrally”, but I thought that the former is unclear and confusing. Natural in the context of this talk is difficult to apply to home environments, as they are typically human-made. The point is, there is no such thing as natural education in a home environment that was structured according to the demands of the parents’ civilized world and their economic standing in the community. The issue here is whether it is right for the parents and teachers to work hand in hand in creating a home environment that is conducive to advanced learning without sacrificing the learner’s childhood. My answer to this moral issue is “yes,” as there seems to be no better reason to suppose that leaving the child to learn on his/her own, minus purposive rearrangement of his/her home environment, will make a better unnatural alternative. Education in the civil state is indeed unnatural, but such status does not entail that such education is dishonorable or morally undesirable. Contrary to what the natural educators are trying to suggest, the expression “natural” is a neutral term, i.e., in itself it is neither good nor bad. Its moral or aesthetic value depends on the context in which it is couched and/or the consequences of its application in a certain situation.