https://www.patreon.com/posts/devel...paign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link This is a particularly poignant part of the manual for me, because I’ve come to realize that in many ways, studying this manual as a young NCO was extremely formative for me, as I read this section. Many of the ideas I’ve long held about homeschooling and elementary education—ideas that I thought I had come up with myself—seem to have emanated from this manual, as we’ll see in the conversation below. Education The function of education has always been to prepare people for happy and successful living in the communities of which they are a part. If education is to be of real service to remote and rural communities, we must cease to be awed by traditional subjects and procedures and teach essentials. One of the common refrains we heard, early on, about homeschooling, was that the kids would miss out on some of the basics of education, because we weren’t equipped to teach them. The idea was, because we weren’t going to divide the day up into lessons, and cover a specific spectrum of material subjects, we would be failing the children. As this introduction points out, rather than being awed and intimidated by the schema of the modern “education” system, we should focus on the skills and knowledge needed for the kids to be happy and successful in their community. Of course, as we’ll see discussed below, the kids might decide, as they get older, to ditch the small town, rural living, and move to the big city, with its allure. My response is two-fold: we need to give them the fundamental knowledge to function in broader society, which we’re doing, even as we focus on living in our rural community. As things stand, the rural/urban interface is so prevalent, due to the Internet, radio, and television, that there’s really no division, socially, anymore, unless we create it intentionally. My kids are probably as familiar with the cultural lodestones of their age peer cohort, as their counterparts in New York or Chicago are. The second response is, anyone who has met my kids will realize, the chances of them wanting to live anywhere that doesn’t have the ready access to the outdoors and wilderness that our community has, is absurd, on the face of it. Continue reading...
