Most forms of celebration consist of giving thanks and giving credit. When people celebrate, they don't usually apply the celebration to something outside their experience. Rather, they take a realistic look at what is normal in their life and recognize in it the great gifts.
The world of education (at least the professional world, where people make money at it) is continually looking toward more and more avant garde and sophisticated ways of delivering education. If a masters or doctoral student of education wishes to amount to anything, he had better come up with at least one new idea. The result is a constantly shifting plethora of pedagogical ideas loaded with eloquent terminology and backed by volumes of research.
Meanwhile, Ma and Pa home schooler scratch their heads and wonder if they will ever measure up, if they will ever be able to educate their children at anything near the standard the government claims for its schools.
Well, it's time to celebrate. It's time to have a look at what home schoolers have that an institution will never have, give thanks for the advantages and give credit to the education that is actually happening in our homes.
We all begin home schooling with the same handicap: the impression that the institutional model of education is the norm, and that we will be successful insofar as we are able to emulate this model. Slowly it becomes evident that there are some things that we can actually accomplish quicker and better by totally dropping the institutional model. Over time, if we are attentive to details and courageous enough to take "risks", we discover that institutional schooling is spending its billions of dollars and millions of man-hours trying to accomplish what happens naturally and more effectively in our homes.
Conducting research on refugee children in the wake of WW II, Reuven Feuerstein, a psychologist and educator, discovered significant long term learning disabilities in children who had no concept of personal history and domestic patterns. Displaced children who had missed out on the ordinary daily routines of a home would take years of special education to attempt to correct their deficiencies. Today, one might wonder how the children relegated to day-care or playschool will fare. Feuerstein also discovered that children who missed opportunities to compare and contrast at an early age were intellectually deficient. Comparison and contrast are fancy words for sorting socks in the laundry room, comparing buttons, putting toys away in their respective places, organizing cutlery after drying dishes, and so on. We have no idea of the immense importance of these mundane tasks, and educators who have taken decades to discover their need, spend the rest of their lives figuring out ways to accomplish in the classroom the formative learning that occurs so easily in the home.
Okay, lets crank it up to the next stage... what about jr. high or high school? While today's high schools are intent on pumping details into the minds of students so they can regurgitate at exam time and proceed to forget everything, here and there a few exclusive private schools are employing the age-old methods of reading, discussion, and writing to produce the youth destined to become the world's leaders. They focus on learning about less, but learning it in more detail. This sounds a lot like home schooling, where students pursue knowledge to a level far beyond what their parents or any "qualified" high school teacher might attain, and the surprising thing is it's not a big deal. Grabbing onto an interest and flying with it is as ordinary as apple pie, but in the high schools teachers are pining for students who will take an interest in anything. The only way to get them to study on even a surface level is to threaten them with exams.
And what about adulthood and family life? What is it that makes a happy family? It certainly is not their income and it is not all the activities they get to every week so they have something to brag about in their Christmas letter each year. Rather, happiness emanates from their appreciation for the ordinary things: their life, their faith, their family, their health, their personal gifts, their opportunities to appreciate the gifts bestowed on them by God. Woe to the person who is so busy chasing the "important" things of life that he is incapable of seeing what he has in his home and family life.
It is precisely the ordinary things of life - mundane and boring to the "jet-set" - that are the sources of celebration. It is these things that will form us and our children into mature, capable individuals. These are the things that provide a foundation for learning at all ages, and they are the means by which an education can be applied responsibly to life and work. So celebrate. Sit down as a family and write up a list of the ordinary things that make you better people. Ironically, in the complexity and confusion of this sophisticated age, we are seeing it is the ordinary people leading simple lives who are emerging as extraordinary people, capable and wise.