Think for a moment about the tyranny with which statistics could reign if we gave them sufficient credence. For example, research published by the National Library of Medicine indicates that Hispanic people, Ashkenazi Jews, and Africans are more than twice as likely to experience lactose intolerance as Europeans. Asians and Native Americans are approximately four times more likely than Europeans to experience lactose intolerance as nearly 100% of those populations are lactose intolerant. Therefore, when opening a restaurant, it would make a lot of sense to take these statistics and the racial makeup of your expected customer base into account when deciding how much of a role dairy is going to play in the menu. However, when it comes to an individual person eating at said restaurant, statistics cease to matter at all, and it would be a sort of tyranny to pretend that they do.
“Hans, my friend. Why do you not order a milkshake? Do they not look delicious to your eyes?!”
“First of all, why are you talking in that overly formal and strange manner? And also, because I’m lactose intolerant.”
“What are you talking about?! You’re German. Very few Germans are lactose intolerant. Just have the milkshake. You’ll love it!”
“I happen to be one of the Germans who is lactose intolerant, so what does it matter to me that others aren’t?”
Hans has a point, you know. His friend is talking in an overly formal and strange manner. What a strange guy. And also, what matters to Hans is how much his own stomach will hurt if he indulges in the milkshake.
Consider also that girls tend to get better grades and do more homework than boys. Education Week reported in 2015 that girls completed an average of one hour more homework per week than boys. And the American Psychological Association reported in 2014 that longstanding research has indicated that girls have gotten better grades than boys across all subjects for decades.
But what does that matter to Catherine, if she struggles to do homework and gets poor grades?
We could say, “You’re a girl Catherine, you should be doing better than the boys in the class!” But what relevance does that have to Catherine? Maybe girls do better in general, but this girl specifically isn’t doing well, and that is what matters to her. So when making policy decisions about school, thinking about how boys and girls tend to perform relative to achievement can be productive. But when considering Catherine as an individual student, it’s a distraction at best and can cause real discouragement at worst.
I think of educational research and theories in much the same light. There are a great many theories about what should work in education. There is also a great deal of research indicating what generally does and doesn’t work for students. And making decisions about education policy and approaches using these theories and research makes a lot of sense. But if research and theories are accepted as universally true in the life of individual students, then they become a sort of tyranny.
For example, I wrote an article some time ago titled “Freedom in Education is Good, Chaos is Not.” I essentially argued against unschooling and also against giving students the burden of adult choices in education. I argued that position because I believed in it, and I believe the argument holds up today. I think that for the great majority of students and families, choice is good, but without structure, education becomes chaos. But here’s the question: what if someone just isn’t in that large majority? Should I allow my argument about what generally works for the majority to universally govern what individuals do for themselves?
This past year I met an impressive, recently graduated student. She was intelligent, capable, independent, and had a vision for her life. She wasn’t someone I had ever taught, but I was wishing that I had. Actually, as far as I could tell, she was taught by few people at all because she had been given the level of freedom in her education that I would have expected to devolve into chaos. Except it didn’t because she gave herself structure. Her list of accomplishments was impressive, and it was made up of opportunities she had largely created for herself. So, what does it matter to her that most students aren’t that student and are unlikely to become that student in their teen years? If she is, in fact, thriving, then who cares what usually happens?
If humans were manufactured products, then this conversation wouldn’t be relevant, but they aren’t manufactured products. There is plenty of overlap and similarity in humans, but humans also contain all levels of outliers. Most people you know are between five and six feet tall, but some of them aren’t. Most humans aren’t dyslexic, but some are. And most students need a certain level of structure to thrive, but some students break the rules because they are just different.
Which leads me to a proposition: No theory in education matters as much as what is actually working for a specific student. Education was made for students, not the other way around. Therefore, one rule reigns above all theories: the best education is the one that helps the student thrive.
I offer this proposition because I periodically encounter parents or students laboring under the guilt produced by this tyranny of theories. Theoretically, homeschooling is a great option for students. For many students, that theory works out, and they thrive in homeschooling. But for some it doesn’t, and it need not be a cause for guilt if parents or students utilize private schools, charter schools, or public schools if that is where they are thriving best. It doesn’t mean that there is something necessarily wrong with the family or student. Different people are different, so it doesn’t matter if some students thrive really well in one educational setting if your student doesn’t.
Theoretically homeschooled parents envision their children as great scholars in the traditional sense. We envision them reading and loving the great works, teaching themselves high level math just because they love it so much, and writing novels in their spare time. And these are worthy goals to pursue. At least we should certainly do our best to give our students a strong grounding in the key areas of brain development. But what if the place that a child thrives best is in a technical college learning a trade? What if that is the thing that the student really loves and where the student can see a path for their life? Should this be a source of disappointment or guilt for parents? If you spend your life trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, it seems to me that you’ll mostly just slowly wear down the peg without ever really getting it into the hole.
This is not to say that students shouldn’t stretch themselves, learn skills that don’t come naturally, challenge their perspective on education and on themselves, and generally mature into better students. These are the substance of education. This is also not to say that students can simply ignore the realities of what life will require for them in favor of what they enjoy, because ignoring the realities of life will not make them disappear. But I am saying that no theory or mode of education perfectly dictates what will work to help every student grow and thrive and prepare for the requirements of life because humans are not manufactured products made to specification.
So I put to you some questions to consider. Are you laboring under the tyranny of what should be working for your student? Is your student missing opportunities because you envision students as being made for education instead of education being made for students? Do you feel guilty because your homeschool isn’t working the way that it should? If not, then great! But if so, then remember that this is what homeschooling is about. It is about the fact that not all children are going to fit well into a system designed for mass education. It is about the freedom to choose what works for a given student because that student is unique. And it would be a great irony indeed, after gaining such freedom, to then shackle that student to a specific idea of what homeschooling should look like. Homeschooling shouldn’t look like anything except students thriving.