Like clockwork, when September rolls around, memes begin flooding social media with a consistent message for homeschoolers: Dear homeschooling families, please stop trying to do "school at home" and just enjoy learning.
I see these message and think of all the people who, after brick-and-mortar schools went to the virtual model during Covid shutdowns, were frustrated as they tried to understand lesson plans and help their children complete schoolwork...and decided that homeschooling was not a good fit for them.
I think of the new homeschooling parents who feel exasperated as they try to force their young children into a rigid schedule and curriculum to fill several hours a day because "that's what school is."
This is a problem.
Homeschooling isn't always a good fit for every child at every stage, and I'm grateful that there are some good schools in this country. I'm also grateful for the amazing teachers who work selflessly to help their students; they do tremendous work. However, we can't make our educational decisions based off of dramatic assumptions about what education necessarily looks like. A variety of factors contribute to our conclusions, including the terms that we use.
Specifically, I'm thinking of how we pair the word "traditional" with education.
For the past several years in America, we've acted like a specific model of schooling is "traditional education": a model that involves students from around the age of six to eighteen years old, segregated by age, staying in buildings from around nine a.m. to three p.m., five days a week, nine months a year, to learn a variety of preselected subjects. This is "traditional education." This is normal. This is necessary for the proper education and development of children.
When we embrace this model as "traditional education," we then assume that any method of schooling which deviates from this schema is "nontraditional." These other methods may be good for some kids, but they are abnormal--and treated as such.
However, what we think of as "traditional education" is not exactly traditional. In fact, this whole business of segregating students by grade, for thirty-ish-hours each week in a building, is a relatively new innovation in America.