Piney Woods Homeschool

Lately, culture here in America has encouraged parents to send their young children to formal programs for preschool and kindergarten.  People assume that trained professionals need to prepare children for school. Charlotte Mason says parents must direct and instruct rather than defer to professional educators. “It seems to me that we live in an age of pedagogy; that we of the teaching profession are inclined to take too much upon ourselves, and that parents are ready to yield the responsibility of direction, as well as of actual instruction, more than is wholesome for the children.”  CM Volume 1 p. 169 She also suggests that parents must learn educational principles and decide how to apply them in their own home, rather than trying to replicate in the home what the schools are doing. “Though every mother should be a Kindergartnerin, in the sense in which Froebel would employ the term, it does not follow that every nursery should be a regularly organised Kinder...

Have you ever felt pressured to send a child to a preschool or Mother’s Day Out because if you didn’t, your child would somehow be less? Ever worried that if you didn’t make sure your child mastered identifying shapes and colors, letters and numbers, counting, reading, or some other subject before kindergarten that your child would start school at a disadvantage? Have you been concerned that keeping your child at home with you would warp the child’s personality, creating a clingy child afraid to venture out? Our culture today tells us that young children must have professional educators to shape and mold them, or at the least have formal instruction, before they can be ready for the rest of their school career. Even homeschoolers often find these arguments convincing.  But are they true?  What do young children need to prepare them for learning and life? Charlotte Mason lived during the Victorian era, when these same pressures came to bear on parents. ...