Education or Training by Dave Marks

Before you begin homeschooling it's important to make a decision about what kind of an experience you want for your children. This determines how you want your children to think as adults.

We know from the experiences of watching the controlling of the children in totalitarian governments such as the Nazis had in Germany and the Communists in Russia and the extremist groups in this country such as the KKK and Branch Davidians that children can be trained to think and act as their parents or controllers desire them to. Most of us would not call the children in such situations educated. Even though dictionaries often define the words as synonymous, there is a great difference between education and training.

My understanding of this difference comes from my experience teaching children in institutions and in helping raise my son. I bring to this differentiation some baggage that I have accumulated which you do not have. This means that my understanding and yours may be different and that's fine, we don't have to agree. I'm writing this hoping my thinking on this subject will contribute to your understanding about raising your children.

It helps in illustrating this difference between education and training to look at the outcome of these two types of experiences for children. To train a child means that the child's decisions and actions are predetermined by the child's parents. This means that in training there are specified behaviors expected. The training of the child is based on experiences that are selected by the trainers.

In some ways this is not unlike the training of a horse. The trainer decides exactly how the horse will perform and uses that as a goal for the training experience. If that is the extent of the owner's desire for the horse's performance the training is over and is considered successful. In the case of a child the training would have specific end-result expectations.

I do not consider a child having learned long division to be educated. To me that is training and is training that is essential for the child's education. And there is the difference. Long division is but one part of the goal of education. In arithmetic the end result is known by the parent and child is trained to perform in pre-determined ways. So far we have a trained child. This same conclusion would have to be obtained with spelling, writing, sewing, skating or any of the activities we give children in the process of educating them.

An educated child is one who has accumulated not only the skills presented in training sessions but has been trained to make life decisions based on a set of principles and values determined by the parents. The operative words here are make life decisions. The children must be trained in skills of operation and then taught to apply those skills in the decisions they make.

This last step is the one that is the most contentious and where we are most likely to disagree. My definition of education includes the idea that children should be raised to be autonomously functioning adults. Ones who don't need to be told how to function and don't need supervision to make sure their decisions are consistent with what their parents an society desire. I remember a metaphor from a piece I read in the '60s dealing with raising children. It likened raising children to shooting an arrow. Once an arrow is aimed and let loose, the bowman can not control its flight.

If we apply this thinking to raising homeschooled children it means that for them the word no is an option, because if you teach a child to think, that's what will happen. The child will think. This is where the principles and values come into the equation. An educated child, given a choice will take it. It means giving children the opportunity to make decisions and watch them make them to be sometimes not consistent with their educators' or parents' wishes. If this is not the case and children continually rely on their parents' decisions, they will never be adults but will remain children in their own eyes and in the eyes of society. There are many examples of the results of this type of child raising we can see every day. If people are shown how their decisions can be guided by principles based on a value system, they will not need traffic policemen to watch that they don't break speed laws.

In our country there are whole industries built on an understanding that people have been trained but not educated. America has more people in prison than the combined total from the five next largest industrialized countries. it is estimated that almost one third of the American economy is off the books. This means that there is a tremendous amount of taxes not being paid. And this is not just the result of the behavior of the poorly educated among us. The money stolen by white color crime far exceeds that stolen in street crime. This may be one of the reasons that politicians and lawyers are held in such low regard.

If you train your children to make their life's decisions based on your desires, they may do so. This can be done, but your children will not be educated to function as adults. They will be like trained horses. Their actions will be pre-determined by you and your set of values. Their decisions will be made by you, and they will spend their lives making sure the things they do will be consistent with your desires.

We educated our son to make his own decisions based on a value set we hold in our family. He is now an adult and I like to watch him make decisions. They are not always the same ones I would make for myself, but I've been surprised and delighted by his choices for they invariably are the best ones for him and are never thoughtless. I like the idea that I released the arrow and taught it to seek it's own target.

For more information about the work of Dave Marks author of the writing series,
Writing Strands, visit: http://www.writingstrands.com