Reimagining a Living Education: On Homeschooling High School

Welcome to A Mother’s Thinking Love: Living Ideas, Lovingly Shared! Lately, my mind has been occupied with thoughts of high school plans for our homeschool. Continuing to pursue a Charlotte Mason, living education is still very important to us, but I have still been working out what that will look like practically in the last years of our homeschool. After many discussions as a family, we have worked out a path forward. Join me for: “Reimagining a Living Education: On Homeschooling High School”!

A Mother’s Thinking Love is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a way for websites to earn advertising revenues by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Which Way Will You Choose?

I want to begin by reiterating that the educational feast that Charlotte Mason described will still be the foundation of our high school years. After a decade of educating with the philosophy of a living education, you are changed in ways you can’t leave behind. In the high school years, however, there are new considerations on the horizon: callings, careers, and even college. I’ve often found these seemingly more practical considerations pitted against the ideas of those in the Charlotte Mason and even classical education worlds.

One look at the book lists from Charlotte Mason and classical curriculum companies reveals a potential reason for this: time. The sheer number of books students must read during the high school years leaves little time for other pursuits. Those could include starting a business, researching careers, diving deeply into topics of interests, or any other number of things that a person with interests might wish to purse. While this may be labeled by “student led” education, I prefer to call it delight or wonder driven education. In fact, it’s actually just simply part of being human.

The more I have been pondering and praying about this, however, I think there is room in the high school years for both.

You Can’t Do It All, But You Can Do More Than You Think

If we want to give our high school students both, we must be realistic. First, we must admit that our students can’t read all the books. They can read many books but they can’t read them all, and they certainly can’t read them all well. Second, we must remember that a Charlotte Mason education is for all of life. I confidently say that every Charlotte Mason mom hopes her children will continue to pursue a living education after graduation. Our students may not read as many books as are on “The Lists”, but they can still be filled from sitting down to a wide, generous feast. After all, a living education is very much not concerned with merely checking books off lists.

Just Because You Can…

The oft repeated maxim “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” has been ringing in my ears. I could create a high school schedule packed with as many books as is possible to read in four years. After all, this would make for some impressive end of year, social media book stack pictures. I can even use audiobooks to gauge the amount of time needed to read each book. And, I can even have my schedule mapped out down to the minute. But, just because I can…

So, if we are giving our students the best books…

And, if we are committed to a wide, generous curriculum of living ideas…

And, if we only have four more years of home education left…

Why shouldn’t we pack schedules plumb full in an attempt to read ALL the books before graduation?

My Very Non-Expert Thoughts on the Matter

I want to preface this next section, actually this entire blog post and website, by saying I am: not an expert here, not an expert in educational philosophy, and I have not read ALL the books. This is my first time homeschooling high school. And, I am most certainly not an expert on your family. Now, I’ll share my very non-expert thoughts.

Now for my thoughts…

1. Students need time to digest the feast. Yes, students in the high school years are more capable than ever before, but they are also reading more challenging, and more lengthy, works than ever before. If that reading is to be worthwhile, students need space in their days for quiet pondering – just like the body needs a time of fasting after feasting. After feasting, fasting is actually welcomed.
2. Students who have been sitting down to the feast year after year are capable of pursuing good things. Not only that, but I think there is great benefit in doing this while they are still in the home. We can help guide them in the “how”. Also, God is always working in and on our children in ways we cannot see. How thrilling for us, too, to witness that as our students spend time pursing gifts and talents? How wonderful a gift to come alongside them during this time?
3. There is a lot of talk about how we, as moderns, consume vastly more than we create. Creation is an important part of a Charlotte Mason education, but I think there could be a good opportunity to give high school students a bit of freedom of choice in this area. Again, this requires time and space. It might even require a lot of failure. It would be too easy, and potentially risky, to create a high school schedule focused on scarfing down book after book for four years, without creating.
4. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to illuminate my point a bit here. By cramming all the books and all the things into the last homeschool years, we are potentially indirectly communicating some things to our students. We might be communicating that their Living Education is ending with graduation, or at least that we fear it will. So, out of that fear our students will never pick up another book, we require them read them all. This leads to such a burn out that students not only don’t, but can’t, read more – at least for awhile. Thus, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Living Education for Life

But so much about what we are doing in a Charlotte Mason education, both in high school and the earlier years, is about whetting the appetite. We aren’t feeding our children so much they never need to eat again. We are making them hunger after the feast for the rest of their lives. When you sit down to feast and stuff yourself full to the point of pain, you become soured on feasting and on food. When you enjoy the feast just enough, you look back upon the time with fond memories and you joyfully anticipate the next.

As all Charlotte Mason homeschooling moms know, “education is the science of relations.” We lay out a feast of ideas through living books, and our students find those relations naturally. How many relations might make themselves known if students continue their living educations alongside those new pursuits? And, in doing so, we can show them that there is always room for a living education in their lives.

In a future post, I will share a more detailed look at this idea for our high school years.

Thank you for reading “Reimagining a Living Education: On Homeschooling High School”! How do you continue to pursure a living education in the high school years? Share your ideas in the comments below!