It usually starts on the bench at gymnastics. Another mother asks what curriculum we follow, I say we don't really follow one, and there's a small pause – the kind where someone recalibrates who they thought you were. Then the follow-up, almost every time: but why not The Good and the Beautiful? Or, from the more classically minded, why not Classical Conversations? Or that little tutor centre down the road.
I've learned to brush past it. When someone looks properly puzzled I'll reach for the word homeschooling, because it ends the conversation faster than the truth does and lets us both get back to watching a seven-year-old fling herself at a beam. But I've been having some version of this exchange for a while, usually while holding someone else's water bottle, and I'd rather write down what I actually think once and send the link. So here it is. Not a list of what we use – the test I put everything through before it goes anywhere near my children.
Because I don't start from "which curriculum?" I start from a question that sits much further out: what is this for? My answer, after turning it over – in the car, at the kettle, at two in the morning – is uncomfortably simple. Education exists to increase a child's future agency. Not their happiness this afternoon. Not their grades. Not the satisfying tick of a finished workbook. Agency – the plain, load-bearing kind. Can they think? Can they solve a problem nobody has handed them the method for? Can they read something hard and keep it in their head? Can they learn a thing on their own when I'm not in the room? Can they adapt when the ground moves, which it will? Everything I choose is weighed against that, and most things don't survive the weighing.
The first thing the test exposes is whether a curriculum trusts a child. I've come to believe children badly underestimate themselves, mostly because the adults around them do it first. They are capable of far harder work than we tend to hand them – not misery, not busywork, but the genuinely difficult kind, the kind that makes them go quiet and lean in. This is where the classical model and I part ways. Classical Conversations builds on the old trivium: fill the mind with facts first, teach it to reason later, teach it to speak later still. Knowledge now, thinking afterwards. I've come at it almost backwards. I want to know whether a child can think long before I care what they've memorised. I'm not against knowledge – a mind with nothing in it has nothing to think with. I'm against knowledge as the starting point, and against the quiet assumption that reasoning is something a child earns only after years of recall.
The same instinct explains why I can't quite use the beautiful, gentle curricula either. So much of what's on offer is built to remove friction. Make it lovely. Smooth the hard edges so nobody cries. And nobody wants the crying, me least of all - as a mother that still run a business my nerves can take only that much. But the friction is not the obstacle to the learning. Quite often the friction is the learning. Sand it all away and you get a child who had a pleasant morning and grew nothing at all.
The second thing the test exposes is how a curriculum thinks children learn. Most assume a line – this topic, then that one, in a fixed and tidy order. The Good and the Beautiful hops briskly along its line; Classical Conversations marches down its cycles, and when a child lights up at something out of sequence, the honest answer is we'll get to that later. I don't believe children learn in lines. They learn in webs. If my son becomes obsessed with Roman engineering on a Tuesday, I will happily let the worksheet die on the table and spend a fortnight on Rome – the arches and the aqueducts, the maths holding them up, the politics that paid for them, the empire that outlived them. A curriculum that has to say "later" to that moment is optimising for its own order, not for the child in front of it. It's also why Singapore maths is our backbone: it lets a child get properly lost in one idea and stay there until it's mastered, instead of circling the same shallow loop year after year. Depth over coverage. Getting lost in a topic is not a detour from the learning. It is the learning.
The third thing the test exposes is what a curriculum is actually counting. Most count what a child knows. I've stopped believing that's the number that matters. I care what a child can do with what they know – whether it transfers, whether it turns up somewhere it was never taught. It's the difference between reciting a fact and using it. This is also why I'm particular about repetition, which people assume I must be against, given all of the above. I'm not. We use Kumon, deliberately and without apology. But I'll drill a thing when the drilling builds a real capability underneath – automatic arithmetic, fluent handwriting, decoding – and I lose interest fast when repetition is only there to lodge a fact that means nothing to the child yet. Repetition in service of a skill, gladly. Repetition in service of recall, rarely.
Underneath all three is the same suspicion, and it's the oldest one I have: I don't trust any single philosophy that claims to explain the whole of anything. I've never been able to swallow a complete system whole, in education or software or business – I take it apart on the table to see which bits are load-bearing and which are just decoration, which is a tiring way to be and I don't recommend it. Classical Conversations asks for real commitment to its worldview. The gentle curricula ask you to adopt theirs. I'd rather build a portfolio – Singapore for mathematical thinking, Synthesis for collaborative problem-solving, Charlotte Mason for literature and close observation, British grammar for the precision, executive function woven through all of it, physical work through gymnastics and martial arts for the coordination and the nerve. Best ideas, many sources, assembled per child, per subject, per season. None of it came in a box. Most of it is temporary. What my daughter needs this year is nothing like what my son needs right now, and pretending otherwise would make my life tidier and their schooling worse.
I should be honest about the ceiling on all this. I can genuinely admire parts of what I've just rejected. Classical Conversations does Latin, rhetoric and rich literature better than most, and holds children to a height I respect. The gentle curricula are kinder on a bad morning than I sometimes am. And the system I've built is built around two particular children who happen to be curious, driven and able to work alone. I don't know that it would hold for a child who genuinely needs the scaffolding a packaged curriculum gives, and I'm suspicious of anyone – myself first – who designs a system around their own strengths and then calls it universal. It suits mine. That's the only claim I'll make for it.
So here's the honest reason I go quiet on the bench. What curriculum do you follow? It has no clean answer. The question I'm actually answering is a different one. The named programmes ask what a seven-year-old should know. I'm asking what kind of adult I'm helping a seven-year-old become – a slower, stranger question that doesn't fit between someone's floor routine and the drive home. Neither The Good and the Beautiful nor Classical Conversations is bad. They're just answering a question I'm not asking. One can confuse the experience of learning with its outcome; the other can confuse knowing the canon with being able to think. Different mistakes. I'd almost never call what we do homeschooling if the word didn't save so much time. It isn't a philosophy I bought. It's a test I keep applying, one child at a time – does this make them more able to run their own life one day? Everything else is packaging.
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