Cacophony of Curricula

Maybe I’m just getting old. But when I open the many homeschool-related e-newsletters I receive, and when I visit homeschooling sites, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of curriculum now available to homeschoolers.

One homeschool magazine in particular sends me oodles of offers, to the point where my eyes start to glaze over. I wonder, does this cacophony of curricula overwhelm other people too? Or is it just me?

I run the risk of being seen as hypocritical here, because I, too publish homeschool materials. But I don’t work fast enough to produce anywhere near the vast amount of homeschooling products being produced elsewhere. (I’m still homeschooling and caring for my family, and those things have to come first.) I also don’t send out mailings every other day, because I don’t want to add to people’s already overstuffed email boxes. A good portion of Cardamom’s sales come from word-of-mouth recommendations anyway, as far as we can tell, and we’re grateful for that.

The bottom line? I’m glad I’m not a new homeschooling mom these days. Too many choices overwhelm me at the grocery store, much less when flipping through my doorstop-sized Rainbow Resource catalog. When I first started homeschooling, there weren’t that many choices of what to use, so I just used what was available. Since then, I’ve learned that what you use isn’t nearly as important as that you spend time working one-on-one with your children when they need it.

As children get older, they can be trusted to take on more responsibility for their learning. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t assign them things that we think will be good for them. But the mass quantities of curriculum available now could make people, and especially newbies, think homeschooling means buying a lot of stuff and pushing it all on their children. I’ll be interested to see how that works for them as time goes on.