The Difference Between Schooling and Education: Interview With Kelly

Every so often on the blog, I love to give you a sneak peek into “our life” collectively as homeschoolers by sharing interviews with everyday homeschool moms just like you!

I am especially excited to share this interview I had with Kelly Crawford, author, speaker, and homeschool mom of 11. Join us as we talk about how we hurt kids when we don’t understand the difference between schooling and education.

Meet Kelly

I’m wife & homeschooling mom to 11 kids, living on a farm in the deep South and trying to hold onto a slower pace, but adjusting to the reality of a growing family!

I taught high school English for 2 years and somewhere during that time the Lord began to place people and resources in my life that piqued my interest for homeschooling. At the same time, my husband and I really desired that our kids didn’t follow the cultural norm of recreational dating, because of our own negative experiences, and it didn’t take us long to realize that in order to instill a different value in that regard, they didn’t need to be in mainstream schooling. Of course as we learned more about homeschooling, the benefits became so much bigger than that, and after studying and listening to several homeschooling speakers in that day, we were sold.

I ended up quitting my job to homeschool, pregnant with our 3rd child. But tight finances eventually prompted me to start a blog where I sold some ebooks I had written. Then I started getting requests to speak at conferences (funny enough since I literally have a speaking phobia!) & now I continue wanting to help other parents deschool & learn about a more relaxed, relational approach to homeschooling. I now also have a podcast, YouTube channel and I created a homeschooling course recently that helps moms find clarity and freedom in their homeschooling.

Ecourse: How to Take the Stress Out of Homeschooling

Generation Cedar Blog

Christian Homeschooling With Generation Cedar YouTube Channel

Kelly Crawford | Christian Homeschooling Mom Podcast

How We Hurt Kids When We Don’t Understand the Difference Between Schooling and Education

What is the difference between schooling and education?

There are a number of ways to be smart. John Taylor Gatto was former school teacher who has had a heavy influence on my life. He said he’s come to find out that “genius is as common as dirt.” We’ve tried to make schooling be the sum total of what it means to be educated, what it means to be smart. The truth is that just because a kid is not academically bent, it does not mean that he’s not a genius in another way. So schooling and education are not the same thing in my opinion. Schooling is a subset. Schooling is a fraction of what it means to be educated.

As a former public school teacher, I had kids in my class who were brilliant at some things, but they weren’t academically bent. (See Kelly’s video Open Apology to My Former Students.) But what we did is tell them over and over that they were not measuring up. We have kids growing up in that environment and we can do it ourselves in our homeschool.

If you’re not good at math, you’re not going to be as successful as the one who is. That’s not the measure of what it is to be educated. These kids grow up in that and I think it takes years for them to recalibrate their thinking, discover their worth, realize that they have their own geniuses, and that what they were told all their lives is not true.

How do we hurt kids when we don’t understand the difference between schooling and education?

I go back to the classroom a lot because that is our paradigm. For most of us, that was our experience and so we try to repeat it at home. In a school you have good students and bad students. If you do well in school, if you are academically bent, those are the things that make a good student. If you’re not, then you’re a bad student. Right out of the gate, we boil down what it means to be educated to whether someone is scholastically inclined.

You may have a few in between who are not necessarily academically inclined, but they’re good at adjusting, however, by and large kids are just vastly different.

What is a quality education?

I read an article in Forbes magazine about the six things that determine a person’s success and nothing in that article mentioned anything about academic prowess. Instead it was qualities like…emotional intelligence, relational giftedness, problem solving skills, financial literacy.

It’s not that academics has to be pushed aside, I think as homeschooling moms, when we can finally get it into our bones that how my child performs academically is not the sum total of an education, then it just takes a huge burden off.

I’ve told moms who have come to me in tears at conferences because they think their child is so far behind, “Listen, you could just fail miserably in the academic section and you’re still not going to ruin your kids.” We think we have a lot more power than we have over our kids. God has put in our children and in us the amazing ability to learn and explore and discover. It’s not all on us. We give ourselves way too much credit when we think we can fail our kids.

My passion is to help moms understand that and just relax. Then the textbooks and the academic part can take its proper place. We do academic work, but it’s a tool for us. It’s our servant not our master. If we could stop being enslaved by the book work, it would help a lot.

Kids also need a lot of time. They don’t need to be sitting at desks for 7-8 hours a day. It doesn’t have take that. That’s what grieves me too about the idea of schooling is all of this time that they’re being robbed of when they could be growing and learning their interests. I think about all those teenage boys. They don’t want to hear Shakespeare! They want to do what they are good at. We don’t give them the time.

What practical steps can homeschooling families take to create a more holistic learning environment?

My shift in thinking happened when I started reading other opinions. If we have this one paradigm of thinking, then there’s nothing to challenge us. When I first started reading John Taylor Gatto, my mind was blown.There was this school of thought that I didn’t know existed.

Gatto said some pretty radical things. He’s very critical of this idea of schooling altogether. He calls it “an insane experiment” because compulsory schooling is only about 172 years old. In the history of mankind, it’s a new experiment.

My number one suggestion is to Google John Taylor Gatto and start reading his material. You can find many of his quotes on generationcedar.com. Read and then let his thoughts marinate and then if you’re doing a really rigid school schedule, peel it back a little.

We like to read living books in our family. Read real experiences and historical biographies. Get to know people in history. There are so many ways to get out of textbook measuring.

Ask your children what’s interesting to them and if they don’t know, then make resources available to them. Some of my kids love going to the library (even though we have a library in our home) and having a new set of resources to look at is very inspiring to them.

Whenever your kids ask a question, jump on that and follow it through. The learning that sticks is when we ask questions and find answers to what matters to us in the moment. Just to put something in front of our child…”you need to learn this scientific law…,” if it doesn’t meet him. in real life, it’s not as likely to stick.

How can moms “deschool” their thinking?

After studying John Taylor Gatto’s ideas for many years, I created a course “How to Take the Stress Out of Homeschooling” which is a fast track to helping moms “deschool” their thinking.

This video course is short, about an hour long. I start by helping that deschooling process. I begin with the story of a doctor who lived before the time of microscopes. He discovered why so many moms in the delivery ward were dying. Doctors were doing autopsies on bodies and then going directly to deliver babies. Moms were dying. He suggested that if they would just wash their hands between patients, it would be a tremendous help.

After his recommendation, doctors began washing their hands. The death rates dropped, however, he was ostracized and banned from practicing medicine because people couldn’t wrap their minds around something being different from the way they had always done it.

My point in telling this story is that sometimes it’s that drastic. We have to get out of a way of thinking that we’ve been ingrained in for so long. Looking back at these stories, it gives us the courage to think that maybe there’s something missing, even though we’ve through this way for so long.

Next, I give moms some practical ideas to help make learning more of a lifestyle than a school.