At Their Own Pace: Meeting Standards the Homeschool Way

Why homeschooling parents can relax about educational benchmarks designed for schools

I got asked by a homeschooler yesterday, "How much of the standardised stuff, etc, home educating parents think is important and how much of it is left out of the way you teach your kids."

It's been my experience that home educators generally cover much the same material as schools do, but in very different ways and at the student's pace. It's a very different approach to school-based learning.

Even though we're told that we still worry we won't cover everything, we'll miss stuff, and that our kids may fall behind. We worry about educational standards and how our kids will achieve them. I write about that in my post Stop Comparing: Why Your Child's Learning Journey Is The Only One That Matters .

The way I see, and I think most parents of kids in school do too, the emphasis in the primary school years is on teaching the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic. Everyone wants this for their children. These are the tools that unlock learning across many disciplines throughout life, which is why they're called the basics.

You can take it from me, as an educating parent you're going to take this a lot more seriously than most parents because you're decided to become personally responsible for helping your child learn how to use these tools.

Think about like this: do you buy the same car as your neighbour, or the one everyone drives, the popular one with the biggest marketing reach? Or do you think about what you need and want, and then buy the car that works best for you?

Home educators put a lot of emphasis on finding resources to work with individual learning styles and needs, something that doesn't occur frequently or consistently in the classroom. With home education you can personalise your child's educational experience to nth degree!

And that will happens anyway. It always does. We naturally end up ditching resources that aren't working with our kid, and constantly tweaking our approach and methods and materials until they do.

And that's your benchmark. Not if your child is hitting some arbitrary standard, but if what you're using to help them learn is actually achieving your - and their - learning objectives. If it's working.

Something else that works in our favour, even though we may not realise it at the time, is the effect home education has in naturally broadening the curriculum through everyday life experiences at home, in the community, and the wider environment. This adds depth in immediately meaningful contexts, rather than the contrived simulations of 'real life' learning usually set up in the classroom, textbooks or online programs.

Most of us find that general knowledge and life skills are much easier to grow and cover in the home educating environment.

By the time the family reaches high school level they have become confident at finding and creating resources to cover the more specialised subjects. Online technologies make it easy for children of any age to study more thoroughly any subject or topic, and at any level. There's no reason for our kids to stick to an arbitrary grade level based on age. They can go back and revise when they need to or forge ahead.

Having said that registered families need to demonstrate they are complying with the regulations, offering their children with a high quality education appropriate to their learning needs, providing educational and social opportunities. Sometimes this is interpreted by the regulating authority as meeting set curriculum standards. We home educators push against this, and instead demonstrate, usually through our homeschooling records, how meaningless and irrelevant that is, and why it is better to allow a child to learn at their own pace, in their own way. Teachers know that, and most bureaucrats assessing home education applications know that too. And if we show that, it's enough to get us over the line.

Home education offers the ability to specialise early, together with the increased ability to acquire a broad education combined with the increased attention from more experienced others keen to help the child learn naturally, and this translates into quality educational experiences.

Achieving educational benchmarks and curriculum standards are important but considered flexible in regards the timing of achieving them: most home educators realise early on that homeschooling doesn't work the same as school, they can't ignore or override their child's individual learning styles and needs in the way that these can be overlooked in a classroom. The practice of home education naturally tailors itself to what works for the individual student, allowing them to progress at a pace that ensures they understand and master the content and skills before moving forward.

Home education is a commitment and it definitely a challenge, but it is also immensely rewarding and does get easier the longer we do it.