What Does Modern Vintage Homeschool Mean?

The local church my family and I are a part of is called Vintage Faith. On it's website, it says this:

"Christianity is not a modern man-made 'organized religion,' but one that is organic, others-oriented and deeply rooted in the historical teachings and person of Jesus. We aim to uphold the values and biblical teachings of the early church to create a community of authentic followers of Jesus in today's culture."

As a Christian, I wholly resonate with this approach to living. And it's a similar approach I feel like my family and I are taking with homeschooling.

Historically, kids didn't go to school, at least not in the way that most kids do today. For most of history, children learned in and around their homes. It was their moms and at times their dads... their grandmas, grandpas and in some cases aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins who did the teaching. Kids learned math and reading and writing in many homes. And they learned their family's trade - farming or woodwork or whatever it was that made the family money. They learned to grow and cook their food, they learned to sew and mend and clean. They learned to serve and laugh and play and create. And they did it, not seated behind desks or with their heads tied to textbooks. They learned, by living.

I'm not saying that life was easy for these kids (or for their parents!). In many ways, their days I'm sure were rough. I'm also not saying that textbooks, desks, or even methods of schooling outside of homeschooling, are bad. What I am saying is that when it comes to education, I think there's value in looking at how children learned throughout history and marrying that with learning, and living, in our modern world today.

There is so much available to us today in terms of learning that simply wasn't there in generations past. The resources available in books, online, in classes, clubs and elsewhere are abundant, even at times in number overwhelming! And I am absolutely a big fan of being a part of learning in many of the ways our modern world allows.

My kids attend classes, research over the internet, they use iPhones and iPads, my 6-year-old is making a computer-generated stop-motion film and learning Spanish online. Many modern avenues of learning are amazing! There is so much available to us, often simply at our fingertips.

But similar to those who've gone before us, there's something, I think, to learning in the doing. Not just reading about certain things. Not just being told about certain things or seeing something online. But getting out and doing many of those things. Seeing them with our own eyes, feeling them with our own hands, using all of our senses, as a family when we can, to experience and wonder and immerse.

It's not a necessity for many of our kids to do this as it was for kids in the past. The reason they learned by living is because they had to. A farming family needed their children to feed the chickens, gather the eggs, milk the cows. It was similar in most other working homes. For kids, it was work. Undoubtedly it was hard. But the benefits were there as well. Among many of them, learning the value of an honest day's labor. And the benefit of just plain learning. Learning in the doing.

Can a similar learning-by-doing be done in any number of school settings? Perhaps yes. But we happen to homeschool. It is, I feel, a modern, vintage homeschool. An attempt to marry the many values of yesterday with the opportunities of our modern world today. And hopefully, in this approach to living, we'll learn a thing or two along the way.