How Do You Know You've Adequately Covered Each Subject?
Question
How do you know you've adequately covered each subject?
To know if you've adequately covered each subject isn't hard, you'll just have to determine your goals for their education.
How do you define a great education?
Is it good grades and high test scores?
Is it memorization/regurgitation of facts and dates?
Is it measured by how much income one can earn, by how much political power one can amass, or by popularity?
If you choose to follow along with a "conveyor belt" education, knowing if you've adequately covered a subject is pretty easy.
The Conveyor Belt
When your child is on the conveyor belt (usually found in most public, private, and even charter schools), they will learn what they need to succeed in life in a profession, be able to get good grades, and earn a good wage.
Adequately Covering Subjects
As a child, we often (though not always) chose a yearly home school curriculum that had tests in the back of our books. We got grades like in public school and we could check our answers and mark them with a red pen. The curriculum was a really good one where each year built on the previous year, we listened to inspiring teachers, and memorized poetry, we had the arts, and were even taught from a Christian perspective. We came out with a rounded body of knowledge. This is a conveyor belt model in a home school.
Is There More?
Is it possible that that's not enough? Is it possible that your children have a really unique mission in life and it will require their best effort to prepare for and fulfill that mission? If this is the case, public school may NOT actually have adequately covered the subjects they needed to learn, even if they got passing grades.
My husband and I talk a lot about production (what you know) vs. production capacity (your ability to learn) (we got this idea from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).
Production
Production is what you actually know. It is your basic body of knowledge: math formulas, names of important people, dates, music theory etc.
Production Capacity
Production capacity is your child's ability to think, his ability to produce, or his ability to learn new information. This is what my husband and I choose to emphasize. We really care that our kids are great at solving problems, knowing how to use available resources to find answers, and applying the knowledge they have. As kids are really motivated to solve a problem, they delve deeper and retain more; but they are also thinking. They are really paying attention and involved. If they don't know an answer they will be able to find it quickly, and they will know how to recognize true wisdom and apply it. We believe that focusing on production capacity actually gives you more production; it's an instance where less is more.
Determining if Each Subject is Adequately Covered in a Leadership Education
Your child will be giving you daily or weekly reports (based on their age). You will probably choose to have closed-book essay exams and to have them practice teaching what they've learned in front of peers (oral exams). They will write papers about what they are learning, and those papers will be held to a high standard. Students will learn through discussion with you, and you will know if they've internalized the information. While you could choose to use multiple-choice tests, they are one of the most shallow ways to guage a students' knowledge; essay exams and papers are a much more accurate measure of learning.
Why Not Use Multiple Choice Tests?
They are practical for large groups of kids, but don't necessarily test their knowledge. "'Experts know [multiple choice questions] are not the best way to assess higher-order thinking skills,' Schaeffer says. But multiple choice tests are 'easy to design, trial, score, and revise'.... multiple choice questions are useful for judging students' 'factual regurgitation,' but they're not particularly good at judging students' knowledge. If students can eliminate an incorrect answer or two, they can get a question correct without knowing the material" {Source}.
What is the Secret?
A visitor to our classrooms several years ago was so impressed with how much the students were learning that he enrolled as a student just to figure out how they did it. He was a professional teacher with a long career in education, and he was simply amazed at the quality and quantity of our students' learning.
After watching every class period closely for a semester, he told Oliver that he had figured out our secret. 'You made every student the teacher,' he said,'not by putting them in front of a class but by having them do everything a teacher would do to prepare to teach the class and then letting them actually participate in teaching' (Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens, p. 20).
How a Leadership Education Prepares Your Child for His Unique Mission
Having a Leadership Education is the best preparation for life! A deep study of the classics applies to almost any mission. Your child will have spent long hours discussing important ideas with his teachers and other students; he will have spent time reading and thinking; and he will have developed his ability to think deeply, broadly, in short and long terms, creatively and independently. Great education teaches you to effectively write, speak in public, persuade, initiate, lead, influence, and impact. A great education is all about finding who you really are and what you were born to do, and then developing the skills, knowledge, and wisdom to be who you were born to be. Finding out who you were meant to be and then following it into the Depth, Mission, and Impact Phase will leave an amazing mark on the world.
