Not Back to School September

Fall is in the air and I’m getting excited. It will be our first year of ‘officially’ homeschooling my soon to be 5 year old and I’ve been researching resources and making big plans in my head about how the year might look. This, I know, is a problem.

After many years of schooling myself—including many spent in academia—the fall leaves seem intimately connected with a sense of new beginnings and new possibilities for me. This feeling never really goes away even after 5 years outside that world.

Despite having left academia with the birth of my son and despite the dramatic change in priorities this brought, I still feel the call of the crisp air whispering: ‘back to school’.

Since my son has never been ‘in school’, I doubt if he hears the same whisperings. In fact, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Nevertheless, September does bring about an end to the lazy days of summer and offers up a slightly more regular rhythm in its place.

In part, my excitement then is simply a desire to get back to our favourite classes, group activities and with these, the more frequent companionship of other home learning families. Nothing wrong here.

The problem of course lies in the fact that my head is still conditioned to feel this time as the beginning of something serious, some start to officially sanctioned learning. My head still wants to make plans, mark calendars and create objectives for our year to come.

My son, on the other hand, sees the rain and puts on his rainboots to go splash around in mud puddles. He sees a pile of leaves as an opportunity not to collect, analyze and label them (though on any given day he might), but more often as a primal call to dive in and swoosh and swoop them with his hands and feet. He has a sense of the changing of seasons of course, but very little sense of the dates on a calendar and their significance (barring his birthday of course, for which he’s already been completely engrossed in compiling a wish-list). His is a deeply somatic experience of seasonal change, one entirely disconnected from any arbitrary learning plans or outcomes.

This is, of course, how it should be. This is why since the day my son was born I knew I’d never put him in school. I want learning to be natural, self-directed, relevant, and yes, totally experiential. I want learning to be seamlessly entwined into the air we breathe (whether crisp or heavy and sweltering). And most of all I want to avoid any sense that learning happens only within the confines of a particular time and place, in the midst of professionals ready at hand to evaluate (and by proxy necessarily devalue) one’s experience, understanding and relationship to the world.

Despite all this, the feeling of possibility that accompanies fall for me is one that I enjoy immensely. It tells me that I still have a love of learning: of books for sure, but mostly of ideas and experiences in all their myriad forms. That this comes up more forcefully for me at this particular time of year is no doubt a product of my schooling. The trick, I suppose, is to harness the joy and passion without succumbing to any preconceived notions of how this should look for my kids.

Essentially, I want to keep this feeling of inspiration alive, while also letting go of the desire to schedule, to plan too rigidly, to approach our home learning journey with mental constructs about what ‘real’ learning looks like. In my heart I know that there is nothing I need *to do* to awaken this love of learning in my son. It has been there since the moment of his first startled breath; since his first clenching of tiny fingers around my own. If anything, the more I try to *do learning* with him (as if it’s something one can do to another), the more he resists and the less love and joy there is. If I can instead remember to trust in my son’s innate curiosity, his unbridled desire to explore and learn, than I know in my heart of hearts that this will lead us both where we need to go.