Eclectic Parent

Today is a great example of what can be done without a curriculum. So many people equate no curriculum with no learning, no plan with nothing getting accomplished. While it’s possible to say our kids are never learning, it is equally true to say they are always learning. We don’t feel that our children need to be doing something education just because it’s 10 AM on a Tuesday, nor do we feel they don’t need to at 7 PM on Saturday night. Our children are almost guaranteed to have gaps in the knowledge assumed for their ages by state standards (then again, so do many children actually attending school), but they also know about a wide variety of subjects to which they would never have been exposed.

We started the day reading some books we grabbed from our bookshelf. A trip to the library could have been much more productive, but we just didn’t get there. The Bus Ride that Changed History: The Story of Rosa Parks, The Colors of Us, Happy to Be Nappy (Jump at the Sun) all got pulled off our shelves and read. We also looked at part of the I Have A Dream speech in I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children. Then we headed off to the MLK parade.

After the parade we went to the festival. Mesa has the parade end at the amphitheater so everyone can go in and continue celebrating. More dancing, more singing. We had to leave to get D to a birthday party. I was disappointed we didn’t see the African drummers, stilt dancers or slam poets we’d seen in previous years. Still the day was only half over and we already had a great deal to discuss.

On the way out we passed a Barack Obama table and started talking about why his was the only presidential campaign that had supporters there. So following a morning of talking about Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, civil rights, and diversity, we started talking about how all the presidents in the US have been caucasian males. D has always been interested in politics. Whenever there are signs out he wants to know who or what they are for. I had recently seen Electoral Compass online and completed the questions. After emailing it to daddy, he and I were talking about it at dinner. D decided he wanted to do it as well. It took about an hour to get a 7 yo through the 30 or so questions, some require quite a bit of explanation, but by the end we had discussed civil rights, terrorism, creationism and evolution, economic equality, immigration and more. So he knew who Obama is and he knows there is a woman running for president; what he couldn’t understand was why there had never been a president that wasn’t a white man. But probably what sparked the most complex discussion was our statement that Arizona tended to be a conservative state. What’s conservative? Which led to financially conservative, socially conservative and both? What kind of issues to you think are important to people who are conservative? Then we went into liberals.

When your discussions can range from race to diversity to historical figures, from political conservative to liberals, to discussions of specific politicians and their positions all before 1 PM who needs to make plans for their kids to learn?