How far must we go in educating our children at home? I mean, do we need to encourage anything but the basics in order to prepare our children for the secular world? When are we over doing education and when is it not enough? And should there be a difference in how we educate our sons and daughters. Do the future men need more education than our future women?
Perhaps, in days gone by, females only needed enough to get married and know enough to send their children on to school. As long as a woman could cope within the confines of the home, she had been taught enough. What more did she need? Although this may have had some truth long ago, our children will be facing a much different world and education is their main ticket to being an accepted part of it.
Personally, I never gave my sons different subjects in the home schooling curriculum than I did my daughters. When they finished their time with me, I wanted both sons and daughters to have had the best I could offer them. I can’t look into the future so I can’t make a determination on what they will actually need as they travel their individual roads in life. I am trying to offer them everything now so they won’t come up short later.
Sons will most likely become the breadwinners. They need to have the intelligence, education and wisdom to find and maintain work that will support a future family. And, in order to become a part of the world, a smattering of many subjects will help them cope with the different people they will meet and work with in their life. A well-rounded person is one who can intelligently converse in a mixed group and, at least know what everyone is talking about enough to make reasonable comments. Too much focus on one goal might find our children struggling to meet a goal life sends them!
I am definitely not in league with women’s lib! I do, however, feel that if we only prepare our daughters for marriage or religious life and structure our curriculum thus, we are doing them a great disservice. In a perfect world, perhaps enough knowledge to be only a mother would be acceptable. We don’t live in a perfect world and we don’t know where our children’s paths in life will take them.
It is interesting to sit down and figure out exactly what a girl needs to know in order to run a household. Math is foremost from doubling a recipe to figuring the square footage of the home. If you aren’t reasonably sharp in calculating skills, how will you know if you are actually getting a bargain when watching for sales, using coupons and shopping for a family? Basic math will get you by but some advanced math will stretch your mind.
English is very important. Even a female needs to communicate and basic adjectives such as cool or awesome can make a conversation pretty tiresome after awhile. If a daughter marries one of the well-educated young men, can she be a help mate or embarrassment when dealing with social situations that come about in a husband’s job? Children learn a lot from what they hear. Shouldn’t we see that our children have a grounding in grammar so our future grandchildren will be literate people?
And we should never shy away from subject because we don’t think our children will need them. My own mother was educated in Germany. In their educational system, everyone studied everything if they opted for higher learning. You took art even if you weren’t interested in it. You took science. You studied math every year. You read the great authors. My mother graduated top of her class and had plans for using her excellent education. World War II put a stop to her immediate plans but nothing she ever learned went to waste. She raised children. She taught them about music and art. She was strict about them excelling in school. And when family circumstances warranted it, she had absolutely no trouble in finding work. What would have happened if her parents had settled for getting her enough learning to get by?
Our sons should be given the best education we can provide, but our daughters should be working there, too. We should never be satisfied to just get by when there is a chance to expand our horizons. As mentioned before, our sons will probably work outside the home. Many of our girls will become mothers. If we did a good job with their education, either in the home our in a traditional school setting, won’t many of our daughters follow in our footsteps? We should think now about whether we are giving them enough to teach their children all they should know.
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