Homeschooling Holes

This question was recently asked of me and I thought it was a great question: "I wondered how you know that your children won't leave homeschooling with holes in their education?"

I first need to explain a little about how we home school. We follow the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason, an educator who died in the early 1920s in England. She believed in learning through living books as opposed to textbooks. So, our curriculum has a very heavy literature base. On the right panel I have listed the books the kids are currently reading; it changes every couple of weeks. Apart from phonics, math, and classical music (which I didn't list there), that is our curriculum. That said, here is my explanation for overcoming the fear of "holes":

The goal of covering material for tests should not be allowed to get in the way of relations being made with God, man, and the universe during the early years of school life. Rather than feeling it is our duty to pass children through a system, it should be our duty to ask ourselves how our children can acquire knowledge. . . we accomplish this by letting the children fill in the "holes."

Our knitting the net of subjects makes a sort of hammock: though it has holes, it will uplift and support its owner. While we knit, the children fill in the holes. By means of self-education they acquire genuine, long-lasting knowledge--the real stuff. [Public] education has become "a gigantic sausage machine--the pig going in at one end and coming out educated pork at the other." Are we all to learn a little about all the same things, for example, and express the same opinion of them?

We owe it to our children to stimulate in them a wide range of interests in their elementary years. It should not be "How much has our child covered?" but "How much does he care?" and "About how many things does he care?" The children go beyond just becoming interested in someone or something. They develop a deeper understanding --a greater appreciation--when relations are formed.

~"A Charlotte Mason Companion" by Karen Andreola, pg. 36-37

I don't know about you, but through my public and private education I developed very little interest in the subjects I was learning. I memorized what I was told to learn and spit it back out on a multiple choice test. W.B. Yeats said:

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.

This is my hope for our home school. Rather than love of learning, what I learned in my years in school was how to cram. I left school with plenty of holes and I'm confident my kids will as well. My goal is that they love knowledge and learn how to learn.