Taking responsibility for your education choices....not everyone else's

 

When I started home educating I was young(-ish) and like a lot of others around me, incredibly black and white. We had made the choice to not send our children to school and anyone who did, was doing a disservice to their family. 

I look back at those early years now and consider them to be one of my biggest face-palm moments.

Alhamdulillah with age comes experience and wisdom. Something I have learned as I matured and came to understand life a little better is that you can be right, without making everyone else wrong. And this is what I want you my dear sister, to understand too.

It is super easy to unwittingly judge others who take a different path as making the wrong move because it is a way to ensure we validate our own decisions. We don't want to be wrong about the choices we have made for our children and so to convince ourselves we're doing the right thing, everyone else doing the opposite must be wrong.

The truth is, choices you make for your family’s education are right for you. Your choice to home educate doesn’t mean everyone else who goes to school is wrong. And likewise, your choice to school, doesn’t make everyone else who home educates wrong either.

What we need to realise is that we all must do what is best for us according to the circumstances we find ourselves in and the resources available to us.

Some have access to excellent schools while others don’t.

Some can afford the fees of sound Islamic schools, when others can not.

Some are married and have the support of a husband. Some don’t.

Some are married and suffering daily abuse.

Some are battling chronic illnesses from terminal diseases to depression that paralyses while everyone else is healthy.

The schools available to some are terrible and will destroy any child who goes there. Others enable a child to thrive. 

Some children have learning differences schools simply don’t support. Others don’t.
Or, some children have learning differences a parent just doesn't know how to manage.

The point is, none of us are the same. Your right choice doesn’t negate someone else’s. Nor someone else’s yours.

At the end of the day, every parent is responsible for the education choices they make for their children. Whether a child is home educated or schooled, the responsibility lays with the parent. Every parent must take that responsibility seriously. And that choice is not for anyone else to judge.