Filling the bucket

"We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
Albert Einstein

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Albert Einstein

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.”
William Butler Yeats

Ask most homeschool moms for their ultimate educational goal, and they will answer, "I just want my kids to have a lifelong love of learning".  We have a fear that by using textbooks, workbooks, paper and pencil we are killing the joy of learning, and developing children that run screaming from anything remotely interesting.  And so, the circus begins.  We ditch curriculum and pick up something "fun". We implement projects with lots of coloring, cutting, and pasting. We practically stand on our heads in order to make learning fun, and make it stick with our children for a lifetime.  Every heavy sigh, or complaint "I hate..." (science, math, reading, etc.) is taken as our personal failure.  There you go again, Mom: you just killed their love of learning!

The advice typically is: "back off and let them develop their own interests".  How long should a parent wait?  One month?  One year?  Five years?  Twelve?  We don't want to fill their buckets, we want to light their fire for learning.  This is coming from a homeschool mom that has had the same fear, heard the same anti-educational rhetoric, and read the same advice over and over again.  And now I'm ready to challenge that idea.  It's wrong, and I'm not going to sit idly by hoping that some spark gets caught between here and age 18.  I'm also not going to stay up until 4am recreating a rainforest in my livingroom, so that my kids can learn about the Amazon (as cool as that sounds...)

I have enough to worry about as a homeschool mom.  Can I set any expectations at all for my children?  Should I not ask them to think or work or study at all?  It's bad news, but on a shopping trip, most children would rather look at the entertaining boxes of cereal than calculate which deal is better: 2 for $5 or 3 for $6.  Most children do not want to apply themselves, challenge their current level, and put forth work to go farther in their studies.  That's what the parent is for.

Mom (Dad, Legal Guardian, or Personal Tutor) need to set some goals.  These can be co-operative goals, or completely parent enforced.  You decide what needs to be learned; you decide what needs to stick.  And you decide how much those things need to be enforced, or reinforced.  You also pick the materials, and you stick to it (by golly!)  It's OK.  Most likely, you aren't killing anything, even if your child's complaints sound like the neighbor's cat is being skinned alive. 

Go forth and fill that bucket!  (And maybe a fire will get lit along the way...)