At this time of year, a lot of homeschool parents in the Northern Hemisphere are choosing curriculum for a new school year.
They’re comparing programmes, reading reviews, looking at samples, and asking whether this particular maths curriculum, history course, or online programme is going to be a good fit for their child. I’ve had a few of these conversations myself recently in my role as Program Director of Learning in Depth Quest, as parents decide whether the programme will work for their kids in the coming year.
Even here in the Southern Hemisphere, where we’re halfway through our academic year, there’s something about winter that makes me pause and take stock. How are things going? What’s working? What isn’t? Do we need to change direction?
And here in South Africa, the question of curriculum has been particularly present for me lately because of the process of registering children for home education. Parents are asked to provide the programme of learning they’re offering their children as part of their registration.
There’s been plenty of discussion about what counts as a curriculum, what it means to follow an “eclectic curriculum”, and how parents might take aspects of different curricula and approaches and put them together into their own programme of learning.
So I’ve been thinking about that word "curriculum" a lot.
And because this is something we often do in Learning in Depth, my colleague Brandon Hendrickson has got me into the habit of looking at the etymology of words.
It’s such a simple thing, but there’s so often a story hiding inside a word.
So the other day I asked ChatGPT about the etymology of curriculum.
It comes from the Latin currere: to run.
A curriculum could refer to a racecourse or a running race. The word could even be associated with a chariot. Metaphorically, currere could mean the course of a life or career.
It was only much later, around the 17th century, that curriculum acquired the educational meaning we now tend to give it: a course of study, usually with a scope and sequence and a body of content to be covered.
And that older meaning has been rattling around in my head ever since.
Because what if we thought of curriculum less as a quantity of content to be covered and more as a course to be travelled?
Imagine the terrain
Because we hike quite a bit as a family here in South Africa, this is how I picture it.
Imagine that you’re standing at the beginning of a path through the bush.
Ahead of you is a huge landscape.
There are rivers and mountains. There’s flat ground and steep ground. There are rocky sections, forests, views, valleys, swimming holes, and probably a few places where you’re going to wonder why on earth you thought this was a good idea.
That landscape is everything your child could learn.
And it is vast.
You are never going to cover every square inch of it.
I think that’s worth making peace with.
Every curriculum involves choosing a particular path through the terrain. By choosing one route, you necessarily leave others unexplored.
There’s always going to be a little curriculum FOMO.
You might take the path through ancient history and not get to study local history. You might spend months fascinated by marine biology and miss out on the classic science experiments. You might read these twelve wonderful books and therefore not read those other twelve wonderful books.
You cannot walk every path.
The task is not to cover the whole terrain.
It’s to choose a worthwhile route through it.
You don’t need the whole journey figured out
Thinking about curriculum this way changes something important for me.
It means you don’t have to have all the answers at the beginning of the school year.
You need some sense of direction.
Are we broadly heading east or west?
What matters to us this year? What skills need attention? What ideas would we love to encounter? What does this particular child need right now? What kind of intellectual life are we trying to cultivate in our home?
You may have a fairly detailed map. You may not.
But either way, you can begin walking.
And I think this also gives parents permission to reclaim some of the idea of curriculum design.
Curriculum does not have to be entirely outsourced to institutions, textbook writers, curriculum providers, schools, or bureaucratic bodies.
As parents, we are already curriculum designers — whether our children are homeschooled or at school.
We decide, to a greater or lesser degree, which paths our children encounter.
We choose books.
We choose extracurriculars.
We decide which museums to visit, which conversations to pursue, which questions to linger over, which hobbies to make room for, which tutors or teachers to involve, and what gets protected in the family calendar.
All of that forms part of the course our children travel.
The map is not the territory
There’s another useful part of this metaphor.
The map is not the territory.
A curriculum on paper can look beautifully straightforward.
Week One. Week Two. Week Three.
Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three.
Tick, tick, tick.
Then you bring that curriculum into your actual home and introduce it to your actual child alongside all the other things happening in your actual life.
And suddenly your lovely one-kilometre walk turns out to involve a major incline, several enormous rocks, and a river crossing you somehow failed to notice on the map.
Sometimes that’s fine.
Sometimes you think, Okay! Quick and hard. We can do this.
And sometimes you realise that this particular route is far more difficult than you expected.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the map was bad.
It means you’ve now encountered the territory.
You have more information than you had when you planned the journey.
So you adapt.
Build in checkpoints — and snacks
When you’re walking a long trail, you don’t normally march from beginning to end without stopping.
You reach a checkpoint.
You sit down.
You have a snack.
You look around.
You ask, How’s everybody doing?
I think homeschool rhythms need these checkpoints too.
In our family, we naturally tend to pause every six weeks or so. Often we’ll take a long weekend or go away for a few days.
Those pauses are useful.
Not because we sit around conducting formal curriculum audits, but because stepping off the trail for a moment gives us a chance to notice what has been happening.
Is this working?
Is someone exhausted?
Has something become much easier?
Are we enjoying this?
Do we need to go back?
Do we need to change the route?
Or do we just need a sandwich before we keep walking?
Sometimes you follow the marked trail
Some people are wonderful planners.
You may want to get the map out beforehand and know exactly which route you’re following.
You’re taking the red path.
The red path is well marked.
There are signs along the way.
You know where the steep sections are likely to be, and you have a fairly good idea of where you’ll end up.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes what a family needs is not necessarily an easy path, but a predictable one.
A well-designed boxed curriculum can do exactly that. Someone else has already scouted the route and placed the markers for you.
At certain stages of family life, that can be enormously helpful.
Sometimes you go bundu bashing
At other times, you might decide to leave the marked trail completely.
In South Africa we call this bundu bashing — heading off the beaten path and making your own way through the bush.
Educationally, that might look more like unschooling, self-directed learning, or simply following an interest that wasn’t anywhere on your original plan.
You suddenly find yourselves obsessed with mushrooms.
Or music production.
Or Roman engineering.
Or birds.
Or some ridiculous question somebody asked over breakfast that has now swallowed the entire week.
There is something adventurous about that.
You don’t always need to know exactly where it will lead.
And importantly, these aren’t two opposing philosophies where you must choose whether you are a Marked Trail Family or a Bundu Bashing Family forevermore.
You can do both.
You can follow the trail for maths and head wildly into the bush for science.
You can follow a structured course for one season and go completely interest-led in another.
There are many ways to travel.
Sometimes you hire a guide
And sometimes there’s a particular stretch of terrain where you want an expert.
When my husband and boys go sport climbing, for example, we’ll sometimes hire an experienced climbing guide.
He knows the crags.
He knows the routes.
He can belay, advise them, and help them attempt something they wouldn’t necessarily be able to navigate safely or confidently on their own.
Education can work this way too.
Sometimes you hire a tutor.
Sometimes you sign up for a course.
Sometimes you find a mentor who knows a particular field well and can guide your child through it.
That doesn’t mean you’ve handed over the whole journey.
You’ve simply decided that, for this particular stretch of terrain, a knowledgeable guide would be useful.
Take the detours
Then there are the moments when someone spots a river.
You’re hot.
Everyone is tired of walking.
And somebody says, “Can we go swim?”
It wasn’t on the plan.
But why not?
Take the detour.
In a homeschool, that might be a field trip that suddenly becomes possible.
It might mean abandoning the normal schedule for a few days because something interesting has captured everybody’s attention.
It might even mean deliberately taking a break from a subject.
We do this with maths.
At the end of a chapter, my boys get a day of no maths. At the end of a larger section of their programme, they sometimes get a whole week.
And in that time, they’ll often choose something completely different: programming, music production, or another project they want to explore.
Then we go back to the path.
The detour doesn’t destroy the journey.
Sometimes it’s the thing that makes the journey memorable.
And sometimes you just keep walking
Of course, not every part of a hike is a magnificent view or an unexpected swim.
Sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other.
There are stretches that involve showing up.
Again.
And again.
And again.
That might be doing your spelling every morning.
Learning the rules.
Practising multiplication facts.
Doing two pages of maths.
Reading the difficult chapter.
Some learning really is built through the accumulation of ordinary steps.
There is room in the curriculum for adventure.
There is also room for trudging.
Both are part of travelling through the terrain.
You are designing a course, not controlling a journey
I think seeing curriculum this way takes some of the pressure off.
You do not have to have everything figured out from the word go.
Because you can’t.
You don’t know exactly what obstacles are ahead.
You don’t know which unexpected interests will appear.
You don’t know which curriculum everybody will unexpectedly hate, which book will become a family favourite, which question will send you down a six-week rabbit hole, or which apparently insignificant experience will become one of the things your child remembers years later.
A good plan matters.
So does agility.
You choose a direction.
You study the map.
You begin.
And then, as you encounter the actual terrain, you adjust.
You can stop.
You can rest.
You can call in a guide.
You can choose another route.
You can take a detour.
You can even turn around.
You will miss things. That’s inevitable.
There are always paths not taken.
And if one of them matters enough, perhaps you’ll come back one day.
Because the aim was never to cover every square inch of the landscape.
The aim was to travel well through it.
And I want to plant one final seed.
This idea isn’t only about our children.
If curriculum is the course we travel, then perhaps we also get to ask:
What curriculum am I designing for my own life?
What am I reading, learning, making, noticing, and exploring?
What paths am I following?
Where am I heading?
That’s a question I want to come back to.