When considering elementary education, its important to define your goals. Institutional education has a few of them: raising test scores, drilling core skills, and keeping everyone safe. And that seems fine. I mean, who could argue? Who doesn't want higher test scores, more skills, and safe children?

But who decides the best way to test which skills and how do we define safety? If I can support the goals of institutional education, I have no faith in their methods nor their results. Looking deeper, I value a different set of skills, different ways of testing those skills, and I have different boundaries for safety. Its taken me years to begin to think clearly about goals and skills in homeschooling because I had to separate my thoughts and feelings from all the presumptions and indoctrination I carried over from my own education.

First of all, if one could get their hands on a concise list of skills from any above average high school, achieving them isn't difficult, its a matter of logic. You want a set of academic skills, go get them. Pick a skill. Any skill, Periodic Table Flash Cards for sale, a dime a dozen.

I have deeper concerns. I want to help my children develop in a neurologically complex way. I couldn't care less which academic industrial skills they collect--beyond reading and writing proficiency. I want to know their dendrites are branching and reconnecting. And no one knows exactly why or how that happens. I feel pretty certain it has more to do with good food, a rich environment, and sensible trustworthy sane example than any specific skill set. Running through the woods would equal multiplication tables would equal fingers in goo would equal floating through deep brackish water would equal solitude would equal eating eggs the color of sun-pumpkins sauteed in more butter---all unfettered by bells or arbitrary limits. I suspect the core elixir nourishing dendrite growth has more to do with emotions and the cascade of chemicals they unleash, than any worksheet, multiple choice answer, or backpack full of arbitrary requirements. Love being the go pedal and stress the brake.

I think intellectual and moral safety are more important than achievement testing, rigid attendance, and academic progress. A lot of smart folks worry that homeschooling will stifle intellectual safety for children by limiting their freedom to think outside the sphere of parental influence. And that will be true and is a genuine risk in certain households. But its a specious criticism because academic indoctrination has proven as dire a concern, especially with regard to institutionalized racism, classism, and teachers who are bullies. Elementary education teaches children not only how to think but how to feel, and this is where homeschoolers score advantage.

Thinking integrated with feeling equals moral development. Morality will dictate your future more than skills and will always dictate happiness more than income. Genuine feelings of compassion, willingness to exist inside the boundaries of reality and moment by moment awareness, the ability to identify and express your truth, and to assess the value of that truth with regard to reality---these are the crucial curricula for elementary school. I'd like to teach the children to be happy and calm, to tell the truth, to reach out creatively, to flexibly tolerate the necessary intrusion of what you don't want, and to dispel any unnecessary intrusions as needed. These skills over diagramming sentences and math recall, please.