I am very excited to announce that I will be presenting at the Secular Eclectic Academic (SEA) Homeschooling Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in July! You can learn all about the conference (and get tickets!) here.
I’m thrilled about this opportunity because finding the online SEA community when I first started homeschooling felt like a long drink of cool water after wandering through the desert. I had been darting from group to group (and learned a lot in the process—I still follow most of those groups), but it wasn’t until I found SEA that it all clicked to me that there were other people approaching homeschooling the way that I was. Being part of that community has given me confidence, a place to work through ideas, and tons and tons of resources. If you’re a secular, eclectic, academic homeschooler who wants about 30,000 new friends, come check out their Facebook community.
I know I promised you robots in the title, so let’s get to it!
My presentation at the conference is titled “Homeschooling in the Age of Robots: How the Humanities Offer a Bridge into an Uncertain Future.” The idea for this presentation was inspired by my own anxieties about homeschooling without having much confidence in how the future is going to look.
This isn’t because I have bought into some dystopian fear. I don’t believe we’ll all be living in Westworld or battling (or marrying) our robot counterparts. In fact, I think the robots that I fear the most won’t even be humanoid. They’ll be code written into computers and giant pieces of manufacturing equipment. And “fear” isn’t entirely the right word. I think that these robot tools will offer a lot to benefit humanity. They’ll eliminate a lot of dangerous jobs and free up time for more creative endeavors for a lot of people, taking over the labor on many mundane, dangerous, and repetitive tasks.
But that means that the economic future is uncertain, and since our educational structure is so deeply entwined with our economic one (and getting more so every day as liberal arts programs are eliminated in favor of job training), that means the educational future is also very uncertain. What kind of jobs will my kids need to know how to do? Entire careers that have been within the human wheelhouse for centuries will likely be gone. What kind of training will they need? There is a good chance they’ll never have to drive a car (they’ll likely be automated) or hand write their notes or make a phone call to get a hair appointment.
What does homeschooling in the face of all of that uncertainty look like? It’s overwhelming enough trying to figure out your child’s own set of talents and interests and determining how much to follow their passion and address their weaknesses. It’s already a philosophical battle (for me, at least) to think through which subjects to focus on for how often and how long. Now we also have to consider that everything we know about how our education links to our future careers, to our future lives, might be obsolete?
It can be enough to cause a bit of a panic spiral. It could cause someone to double down on formal academics in the hopes of outsmarting the robots or to throw their hands in the air and let their kid make mud pies all day long because what difference does it make if there won’t be any jobs?
The answer, though, doesn’t have to take the form of either of these extremes. The answer is the same as it has always been. The best thing we can do is learn how to learn and place ourselves in a larger context that allows us to understand and appreciate connections and depth.
And we already have the tools for this kind of learning. They’re embedded in history, in literature, in philosophy, in art. They are the humanities. Isn’t there something kind of poetic about returning to the humanities just as we see a non-human uprising? Isn’t there something comforting about re-learning who we are and where we have been in order to understand where we want to go?
The humanities offer us critical thinking skills, metacognition, and a contextualized anchor point. With those tools, we can face even the most uncertain of futures, and we can rest assured that, as homeschoolers, we are giving our children the strongest skillset possible as they travel into an especially-murky future.