In the year 2020, I was just starting a new career in the education field. I had a diploma in the Montessori philosophy and worked for almost two years in a Montessori setting. When COVID-19 was first discovered, no one expected the enormous change that will happen all around the world. Personally, I was very upset about most of the decisions taken during this period and the impact that it had on most of the population economically socially and psychologically. But for me this whole situation was a wakeup call. It helped me find out the real face of a lot of people and organizations that I considered differently before. I took control of my own life and health and took a completely different direction than the one I was taking before. I consider this event as a big switch for me, I am not the same person after it. One of the biggest things that changed in me is my view to the education system.
During the lock down, the nursery where I was working closed. My kids who were then 11 and 8 years old did the whole school program online for almost four months. For the first time, I could see what and how my children really learned in detail. My small son was ok, but I discovered that my older son was not interested at all in most subjects that he studied. He did always the minimum of what he had just to finish quickly and go to play or watch TV. Few teachers started complaining to me about his behavior. I tried to push and encourage him but with no satisfying result. I was disappointed by his behavior; I could see that there was no intrinsic motivation in him to learn and this is the base of what I learned in the Montessori philosophy. I became very upset, and the emails of the teachers made me more upset because they couldn’t generate a spark in my son, and they were only waiting for me to react and solve the problem for them. As the old saying goes, there was one straw that broke the camel’s back. It was one comment from his teachers which was “We are trying to prepare them for the test”. This sentence made me realize that the schools are not here to prepare our children for life but to pass a test. They are not preparing them to be independent, confident, and able to learn by themselves, instead they are preparing them to always be dependent of an authority like the teacher who will tell them what to learn and what is true and what is false.
After this shock, I started searching and looking for other alternatives. I started looking for homeschooling and I discovered a whole new area that I wasn’t even aware off. I consider myself being educated in a manner to never see outside the box, it took me a long journey to arrive to where I am at today. I always thought that the schools are the only option for the children to learn. I had little idea about homeschooling, I thought that it’s the same thing as the school with the only difference that it is done by parents. But after searching, I discovered unschooling, world schooling, different types of micro schools. I read those two books “Free to Learn” by Peter Gray and “How children learn” by John Holt. I attended different online seminars about homeschooling, and I learned about the history of our education system. This is how I concluded that my children shouldn’t go back to school. I had one big issue to resolve which is convincing my husband and my children about that. It took me around two months to do that. I did a SWOT analysis of homeschooling our children and shared it with my husband. I sent my husband from time to time some talks of homeschoolers success stories and some parents of homeschoolers. I prepared a detailed plan for the year and how we are going to tackle each subject. The most important thing for my husband was to have an accreditation in case we need it for the future for college or if we decide to go back to school.
During my research I watched different videos from a homeschooling summit organized by Galileo. I was really impressed and inspired by a lot of the speakers in this summit, and I was convinced to start this journey with my kids just after watching those videos. I knew that I could never do the traditional homeschooling and teach them the same curriculum that is done in school, it was not the right solution for them. I saw that learning this way doesn’t create a spark in them and doesn’t really help them to be independent and find their true purpose in life. When I started looking at what Galileo offered and its philosophy, I loved it. I found that self-directed education was closer to Montessori philosophy because the interest and the choice comes from the child. We prepare the right environment for the child and let him/her find his/her interest and learn. After looking in all the opportunities that we have, I chose to join Galileo and I created a detailed plan with everything that we will do during the year. I added in my plan sports activities that the children can join, which will help them have social interaction with other kids and adults. After the idea of homeschooling matured in my husband’s head, he was convinced that it was the right thing to do. My children were a little bit easier to convince. Their only problem with not going back to school was missing meeting and interacting with their friends, the social interaction was the most important thing for them in school. But during this period of COVID19, the social interaction which is the most important thing is school changed drastically. The kids didn’t have play time together like before, they were forced to wear masks for the whole time in school. These changes helped me convince my children to not go back to school. We decided that we will try homeschooling for a year and then decide what we are going to do in the future after that.
