Home schooling can work, and work really well if its done right. I take some heat for keeping my youngest home this year and doing his preschool work with him. He'll start kindergarten in Sept and I think thats fine. I cant do homeschooling - forget about bio, I dropped out when the frog autopsy chapter started lol! And trigonometry? I dont remember the first thing about it (except that a triangle has 3 sides lol!) Anyway,, the older years would be so much tougher than the younger years.
Hareem, the classical education of the elite - it sounds great but maybe later on you should temper it a bit with some of the more contemporary approach. Schools for the elite are geared toward royalty, diplomats, jet-setting high society...the type of people who for their life career will be philanthropists, hold diplomatic posts, hold government offices and/or sit on the board of directors for major corporations. It doesnt prepare the "typical" person for a "typical" life yeah? Its wonderful for their younger years but as they get into their older years you may want to shift the focus a bit....just a thought :)
...not that I'm implying your kids will never be philanthropists or heads of state...they very well might!
Peace Mamaof3
I would like to thank you for all the encouraging words you have been giving my wife for the past few months on this topic. I also commend your proactive prowess in the domain of educating your young ones. The philosophy that we like to utilise stems from our religion which tells us that we should seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.
Homeschooling is brilliant for this as we can crystalise our learning and solidify our understandings as and when we need to introduce learning material to our children. We will be thinking about subjects more intimately and as my wife is proving to herself she is learning alongside our children, albeit in a different way to when she was a child.
Homeschooling classics to us is more than just teaching dated material, rather it is about accessing the wisdom of the ages. It is more in line with the method of learning rather than the content. So to express my first point is that we will indeed be subjecting our children to contemporary material, however, they will acquire that material in a manner which is in line with the classical models.
For us the concepts are important and we wish our children to develop a relationship with their knowledge, rather than use their brains like computer processors regurgitating information in order to answer questions on an exam paper, we want the knowledge they hold to be weighty enough to move their hearts in and stimulating enough to make them act upon the edicts of that knowledge.
We want them to love to learn and hence the latter years of homeschooling will mean they will exceed us in knowledge, but we hope they will use us to engage with our experiences colouring their understandings giving them the ability to make just decisions. We wish for them to carry knowledge like one carries a treasure i.e. with a sense of burden and respect.
We will provide for them mentors in areas that they wish to excel in and will constantly challenge them to learn more and act upon what they learn. Elite schooling has a basis in this world of educating that control as an integral piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the New World Order can be effective, but we wish to provide the same opportunities not so our children can be controllers within the system of control, rather to rise above the controllers and provide access to humanity that there is a life outside control. The red pill that will take them out of the Matrix not to create disorder but to show the light of self-discipline and control over oneself. Fear of nothing except The Judge, The Just, to teach them a world of virtue beyond consequence that ethical beahviour means to act righteously without the potential penalties looming over us, that to be rich one must be altruistic and content with little.
Unfortunately none of these values are being reflected in contemporary education. However, elite schooling although does not do this either it does in fact teach the skills necessary to move masses and create fellowship and leadership, pragmatism, oratory. Crtical thinking can be obtained within the framework of contemporary education however at a muted level. The aspiration and class based thinking is itself a symptom of the mental shackles of the modern education system that we wish to break, in ourselves and in our children.
As amana has already said that Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric are the steps that classical education teaches. These are fine tuned and proven methods dating back to the times of the Greek philosophers. Where many children will have academics on their CVs we wish our children to have capabilities on their CVs. Time being an important asset but not a limited one. Learning for us is life long and where school may have made us dislike certain subjects homeschooling may lead us to appreciate them in the long run.
This is the reason why we are doing what we are doing it is mainly because we are not content until we maximise the faculties that we have been given, tempered against the values we must uphold. We pray that our children grow to become leaders of the pious people of this world, as the Qur'an teaches us to aspire to these ends.