Our Educational Philosophy

Responsibility

We are training these little guys to be adults, and we have a shockingly short time to do it.  So, we try to place a lot of emphasis on personal responsibility.  

Work vs. Play

Wherever possible, we send the message that learning is not a chore or a bore.  One way is to follow the child's interests.  Another is to play educational games.  Yahtzee is much more fun than addition flash cards, and teaches sportsmanship and dexterity at the same time.

Teaching

Teachers are responsible for finding the explanation that makes sense to the child.  If the first explanation or motivating example doesn't get the point across, the teacher must not keep repeating it.  Instead, the teacher must try other keys until he or she finds the key that will turn this particular lock.  There is almost always another way to approach any subject.  What worked for one child will not necessarily make sense to another.

Similarly, it's the teacher's responsibility to find or create a context that makes the child want to know about a subject.  Trigonometry can be dry as dust, but if you are surveying land or navigating a sailboat it becomes something you want to know.  The child can't know what trig is good for; that is the teacher's job.

Integration

We try to be "conspicuously integrative" in everything we do.

Maggie Hogan's lecture on "Elementary Science - Keep It Simple" changed my whole view of schooling. In one part, she suggested that we should connect science to geography. Habitats, volcanoes, weather--whatever it is, get a map and find it. Later on, she mentioned that geography should always be connected to food. Then, in still another part, she mentioned tying in theology to studying the skies. I don't know if Maggie intended it, but as she talked I kept linking up subjects until I was absolutely convinced that everything should be taught as a web of connected topics.

Recently, my family took a tour of a veterinarian's office. We saw a tropical bird. So, we looked up the bird and found out it comes from Honduras. We found Honduras on a map. We talked about the people of Honduras. We even went to a Honduran restaurant for lunch! We don't do nearly enough of this, but we try to leave room in our curriculum to veer off onto an unplanned unit study.

Is there a Nova program on the lost Franklin expedition?  Great!  Let's play the ballad of "Lord Franklin."  Let's look at the globe.  Let's talk about searching for the Northwest Passage.  Let's look at canned food, and talk about Pasteur, lead solder, and shelf life.  Let's talk about scurvy, Limeys, and vitamins.  Let's talk about the Inuit, and how they could live in such a harsh climate.  Let's talk about the racial attitudes that contributed to the disaster.  Let's talk about cycles of climate that mean years of ice or years of clear sailing.  What did these Christian explorers think about death, burial, and cannibalism? 

Work Habits

Sitting quietly in rows of desks is a work habit designed for the age of steno pools, just as classroom bells teach children to work in a steam-driven factory where the machines all start and stop together when the whistle blows. Those obsolete work habits are part of what we reject in mass schooling.

Homeschoolers teach our kids a more modern work habit, that of the telecommuting consultant. But, the grad student in the carrel or the office worker in the cubicle are also useful work habits to develop. We are thinking about setting up carrels for our kids, instead of having them work at the dining room table.

Mastery

One of the great failings of mass schooling, from our point of view, is the idea that you could make a C in Spanish I and then go on to Spanish II.  If you build on a shaky foundation, how can your building ever stand?   We strive for mastery in every subject.  In fact, there are only two grades at Saint Columban's: A and Incomplete.  Nobody goes on to the next level until they have this one down pat.

External Certification

Whenever possible, we will get external organizations to certify our kids' achievement.