Julie Bogart - The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life

Ive been homeschooling for decadesfirst as a home-educated student myself, and then as a mother of four home learners (aged, as I write this, eighteen to twenty-eight). For a good bit of that time, Ive tried very hard to create a passion for learning in my children. But as I near the end of my homeschool journey, I realize just how impossible that is.

We cant create a love for education. Like creativity itself, or the romantic version of love, the passion for learning is a mysterious, internally generated force. We cant instill it from the outside any more than we can control a teenagers first hopeless crush.

All those years of experience have finally taught me that my job, as a parent, as a teacher, isnt to persuade my kids to fall in love with grammar or math, history or science. (Thank goodness, because, as Julie points out with wisdom and much-needed humor, thats just not going to happen.) Instead, our task is to provide the oxygen-rich surroundings that will allow sparking new interests to blaze into full life: a rich, varied, colorful landscape in which our kids can find their own paths forward into meaningful, challenging adult lives.

This is what The Brave Learner tackles: the attitudes, approaches, and strategies that we parents can adopt in order to give our children what they really need, the conditions for that magical eruption of passion to occur. Its a much-needed philosophical corrective to our standards-driven, results-oriented educational system, one that too often focuses myopically on test results and successful college application.

There is big thinking here, a philosophy aimed at developing the unique, quirky, sometimes maddening, always magical people living in our houses. But there is also practicalitybullet lists, how-tos, and thought experiments, all vital scaffolding for a new application of principles. Julie doesnt just tell you that children should be exposed to different ways of seeing; she suggests investing in binoculars, a jewelers loupe, 3-D glasses, and a kaleidoscope so that you can physically change the way they see, and draw a connection to perception more generally. She doesnt simply lecture you about how important it is for a teen to develop independence in learning; she gives you a list of learning opportunities to investigate in your own town or city that will put your teenager on the road to independence. She doesnt just advise you to keep a glorious array of supplies on hand, to awaken interest in art; she gives you an abundant list of possibilities that you can take down to Staples or Office Depot.

And she doesnt forget that our kids wont always be home with usand that the season of homeschooling is a short one, compared with our entire life span. When you finish The Brave Learner, youll realize that you havent just been reevaluating your childs learning style; youve begun to reevaluate yourself as well. As Julie writes, Knowing who you are and what brings you joy beyond your children provides comfort and optimism at the end of the homeschool odyssey. Not only that, but homeschooling may lead you to the contribution you are destined to make.

This is a valuable handbook on education, one I wish Id had when my children were young. (Julies were young at the same time, and the wisdom shes distilled here is hard-won.) Yet its also more than that. Its a primer on how to be present in the moment, how to find the immediate joys of life in the midst of our daily laborseven in the days (or weeks, or months) when our kids may seem interested in absolutely nothing at all.

This, too, is reality. The BraveLearner doesnt back away from it. But Julie offers you the courage to accept it, be at peace, stoke that air up with just a little more oxygen, and waitin the settled assurance that your kids, and you, will be well.

Susan Wise Bauer, coauthor of The Well-Trained Mind