- Contrary to the advice frequently given to homeschool moms, you can not “choose” your homeschooling philosophy.
You must craft it.
You can not simply decide upon a philosophy after you “shop around” in a list of Major Philosophies (Charlotte Mason, Waldorf, Classical, etc) and Minor Philosophies (Project Based, World Schooling, Academic, etc).
You can not superimpose the philosophy of another upon your own homeschool.
To attempt to do so is to believe that a single person possessed every bit of knowledge, insight, and experience regarding the education of children.
The advice to do so flows from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of philosophy.
Philosophy is mutable and personal.
Please don’t mishear me; Formal Philosophy (the work done by those gifted as professional or formal philosophers) plays a vital role in shaping our own.
Formal Philosophy is:
1️⃣ Perspective Demonstrated -
giving you the opportunity to SEE and visualize philosophical ideas applied
2️⃣ Personhood Defined- clarifying, solidifying, and diversifying our understanding of what it is to be a person
3️⃣ Principles as Direction-
offering us a map for our own exploration
4️⃣ Practicalities Defended-
providing some validity to practices that you are instinctively drawn to
Formal Educational Philosophy also impacts the canon and the culture by multiplying the contributions of nuance and ideas for us to explore and glean from.
Formal Philosophy informs and inspires, and it matters.
We should read the theories of formal educational philosophers but we can not simply “pick one”.
And, we must do more than “research”; curriculum reviews and anecdotal posts coupled with beautiful flat lays are not research and that isn’t the work of crafting philosophy.
Formal Philosophy is help for the work of crafting; it isn’t available for “choosing”.
We must think, observe, ponder, question, compare, interpret, and explore in order to build our own educational philosophy…
As did all of the philosophers that we’re inspired by.
That’s the nature of Philosophy.
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