"We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes."

I've been looking into the Charlotte Mason method and the Well Trained Mind approach -- for my own self-education, mind you, not for Sarah, although I may present bits to her to see if she'd like to try them for herself. On one Charlotte Mason-y site they suggest that, before you start putting together a CM-inspired homeschool curriculum for your child, you ask yourself what your ultimate goals are -- why are you homeschooling, with what sort of skills and knowledge and experiences do you want your child to come away from their homeschool experience?

I've been mulling that over for a few days, now. I know why we're homeschooling (sort of -- I come up with additional reasons every few months, as we discover a new benefit -- and I'm not sure I've ever typed my reasons up here. Maybe I'll do that some time this week.), but what are my ultimate goals, here? What do I want Sarah to get out of it, and what do I want to get out of it myself? Those are excellent questions.

I want her to come out of this homeschooling experience loving knowledge, loving reading, loving the process of learning new things. I want her to love words and word games; to love music and math and the act of creation, whatever it is she chooses to create. I want her to have the basic skills necessary to be able to do anything she takes it into her head to attempt -- that is, to be able to figure out how to go about learning any new skill she wants or needs; to be able to examine new information for its accuracy, logic, internal consistency; to be able to imagine forging her own path if that's what it takes to make the life she wants. I want her to be able to hold her own in any conversation, even about a topic she's never encountered before. I want her to be confident and compassionate and content in her own skin. To have a sense of possibility and purpose and her own power, and a sense of how one goes about building a life filled with delight and community. I want her to know that a full life is about more than how you make a living.

I want her to be comfortable enough with the rules (of culture, of grammar, of society itself) to know exactly what she's doing when she chooses to break them. And, yes, I want her to know the difference between infer and imply, to recognize a logical fallacy (or a rhetorical device) when she sees it, to recognize a reference to Yeats or Shakespeare or the Bible (or the West Wing!) when she sees *it*.

What do I want for me to get out of our homeschooling experience? To have the incredible good fortune of settling into a front row seat as she decides for herself what *she* wants out of our homeschool experience.
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I really like this quote that IDEA posted on facebook, today: "The ultimate aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their own education and through that process to continually reinvent themselves." - Elliot W. Eisner, emeritus professor of Art and Education at Stanford University