Question: “How did you manage to get such knowledge and confidence to teach your kids at home? I find I’m terrified of home school because I don’t feel educated enough especially Islamically. Did you memorize the seerah before having children? How did you you get Islamically prepared especially after leaving feminism? I’m still confused on what I believe but I wanna have kids soon and have them be knowledgeable like your kids but I don’t know the first step.”
My answer:
How did I get enough knowledge and confidence to start homeschooling?
The truth is, you don’t actually need knowledge or confidence in order to start homeschooling your children. These are not the two primary ingredients that a parent needs to have in order to start home education.
The two primary ingredients that a parent must have are: a specific sincere intention (نية) that can provide strong enough motivation, and resourcefulness.
Before I started homeschooling my children, I had neither very high levels of knowledge, nor a lot of confidence in myself as a teacher. I utterly lacked these two components which you so generously assume I had!
But what I did not lack were the two more basic, more fundamental building blocks which can be used to gain both knowledge and confidence: I had a very particular intention in becoming a mother, and I had a sense of resourcefulness and willingness to search for and work to gain the traits, skills, and resources I needed to become a competent teacher for my children.
My intention stemmed from my understanding of my role as a mother. I see motherhood as a massive responsibility before Allah, the One who granted my children to me as a test (ابتلاء) and as a gift (هبة) and as a blessing (نعمة). These children are my amanah (أمانة), entrusted to my care by their Creater for a specified amount of time on this earth. I will have to stand before Allah one day and answer for how I have raised my children or how I failed to raise them, what I taught them or failed to teach them, how I passed Islam on to them or neglected my duty to do so. There will be a day of Reckoning, when I will be held accountable for what I did with the innocent Muslim children born upon the fitra whom Allah has placed under my care.
With this understanding of things, my niyyah (intention) was simple and clear in my mind: to raise these children with the best possible Islamic tarbiya I can give. To be the best mother I have the capacity to be. To shoulder my burden with strength and to take my maternal responsibility seriously. To make the tarbiya of my children my personal top priority. To do the important work of tarbiya myself and not to outsource, delegate, or relegate the raising, shaping, or molding of my children and their character to anyone else less invested than myself, their mother.
Tarbiya includes education. I do not think of education in the narrow, superficial way in which some modern people define it, especially from a secular western liberal perspective. I don’t agree that education is merely “academic” subjects like math, science, reading and writing in English (the colonizer language of technology and progress), and the white-washed sanitized history of Europe and America.
RELATED: Digital Cocaine: 10 Reasons to Keep Your Children Away from Screens
I understand education to be much more comprehensive, to fall under the general umbrella of tarbiya of children. The teaching of children is the responsibility of the parents, who maintain and teach their children from the day they are born anyway. From birth, a child is fed, clothed, sheltered, protected, and nurtured lovingly by his or her parents. Then the parents begin teaching the child basic things: how to babble, then how to talk, how to eat, how to walk, how to put on clothes, how to tie your shoe, how to throw a ball. Then the parents teach morals and principles: how to be honest and truthful even when it’s easier to lie, how to be respectful even if we are frustrated, how to share and be generous with others, how to be fair even if we want to be selfish.
The parents teach their child, also, about the world around them because the child is so curious and asks so many questions: Where did we come from? Who made the sun? Why does it rain? Why are flowers so pretty?
The parent answers, Allah created us and the flowers and the sun and the rain and everything else in existence. The parent talks to the children about Allah, who He is, and our relationship with Him as grateful slaves. This is the beginning of the children’s Islamic education and the beginning of their tarbiya.
Naturally, learning the Quran and the seerah follow.
The parent does not need to be a hafidh of the entire Quran or a master of tajweed or to have studied the whole seerah before teaching the children. I do think it’s important for the parent to have a basic level of competence in at least recognizing the Arabic letters and reading the Quran. This makes it more doable to teach your children proper pronunciation and recitation of the surahs they will memorize.
Even if the parents lack this basic knowledge, alhamdulillah there are other options available: use your phone or computer to find videos online of proper Quranic recitation for the children to hear. Children are naturally good at imitating what they’re given, and they can inshaAllah mimic the way the qari’ (قارئ) recites each surah to learn it themselves.
For full disclosure and transparency, I did memorize the Quran before becoming a mother (though I completed my hifdh alhamdulillah while pregnant with my second child). I also studied tajweed (rules of Qur’anic recitation) before I had kids.
As for seerah, I certainly had not studied it before becoming a mother. I actually knew very little of it. But then, as my oldest child was around 3 or 4 years old, I began to learn more. I started to learn alongside my children, listening to the seerah of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم as well as that of many of the Sahaba (I found an old Arabic audio-only series of recordings on YouTube). We would listen to these detailed lectures in the car as I drove places with my children; this to this day is our “car class” for seerah. I learned many parts of the seerah and Islamic history for the first time, with my children. As my children got older and more capable of understanding and grasping concepts, I’d explain important ideas and define big vocabulary words in Arabic for them. Over the past six years or so, we have listened to the prophetic seerah about four or five times now, as well as to the seerah of Abu Bakr, `Umar, `Uthman, `Ali, and Khalid ibn Al-Waleed two or three times each. After so many repetitions, both the kids and I have inevitably learned some things by heart alhamdulillah.
And yes, we also do other subjects like math, English reading, and writing, art, etc. But these subjects are secondary to the primary subjects of Quran (with its tafseer and discussion), seerah, hadith, Islamic history, and formal Arabic. Not all subjects are equally weighty.
As long as you instill wisdom and an Islamic paradigm in your children, they can inshaAllah learn anything else after with success. First you install the lens through which the children will view and understand the world: Islam. The Quran and Sunnah. First, you teach them how to think; then, it’s easy for them to pick up other subjects and studies of other fields inshaAllah, grounded in this essential Quraic outlook.
Understood in this way, homeschooling is inevitable, involuntary. It is not a matter of choice.
So you don’t need to have a threshhold level of immense knowledge or super-high confidence just to even start homeschooling. It’s the reverse. You will gain both knowledge and then, increasingly, confidence as you go along inshaAllah.
My answer:
How did I get enough knowledge and confidence to start homeschooling?
The truth is, you don’t actually need knowledge or confidence in order to start homeschooling your children. These are not the two primary ingredients that a parent needs to have in order to start home education.
The two primary ingredients that a parent must have are: a specific sincere intention (نية) that can provide strong enough motivation, and resourcefulness.
Before I started homeschooling my children, I had neither very high levels of knowledge, nor a lot of confidence in myself as a teacher. I utterly lacked these two components which you so generously assume I had!
But what I did not lack were the two more basic, more fundamental building blocks which can be used to gain both knowledge and confidence: I had a very particular intention in becoming a mother, and I had a sense of resourcefulness and willingness to search for and work to gain the traits, skills, and resources I needed to become a competent teacher for my children.
My intention stemmed from my understanding of my role as a mother. I see motherhood as a massive responsibility before Allah, the One who granted my children to me as a test (ابتلاء) and as a gift (هبة) and as a blessing (نعمة). These children are my amanah (أمانة), entrusted to my care by their Creater for a specified amount of time on this earth. I will have to stand before Allah one day and answer for how I have raised my children or how I failed to raise them, what I taught them or failed to teach them, how I passed Islam on to them or neglected my duty to do so. There will be a day of Reckoning, when I will be held accountable for what I did with the innocent Muslim children born upon the fitra whom Allah has placed under my care.
With this understanding of things, my niyyah (intention) was simple and clear in my mind: to raise these children with the best possible Islamic tarbiya I can give. To be the best mother I have the capacity to be. To shoulder my burden with strength and to take my maternal responsibility seriously. To make the tarbiya of my children my personal top priority. To do the important work of tarbiya myself and not to outsource, delegate, or relegate the raising, shaping, or molding of my children and their character to anyone else less invested than myself, their mother.
Tarbiya includes education. I do not think of education in the narrow, superficial way in which some modern people define it, especially from a secular western liberal perspective. I don’t agree that education is merely “academic” subjects like math, science, reading and writing in English (the colonizer language of technology and progress), and the white-washed sanitized history of Europe and America.
RELATED: Digital Cocaine: 10 Reasons to Keep Your Children Away from Screens
I understand education to be much more comprehensive, to fall under the general umbrella of tarbiya of children. The teaching of children is the responsibility of the parents, who maintain and teach their children from the day they are born anyway. From birth, a child is fed, clothed, sheltered, protected, and nurtured lovingly by his or her parents. Then the parents begin teaching the child basic things: how to babble, then how to talk, how to eat, how to walk, how to put on clothes, how to tie your shoe, how to throw a ball. Then the parents teach morals and principles: how to be honest and truthful even when it’s easier to lie, how to be respectful even if we are frustrated, how to share and be generous with others, how to be fair even if we want to be selfish.
The parents teach their child, also, about the world around them because the child is so curious and asks so many questions: Where did we come from? Who made the sun? Why does it rain? Why are flowers so pretty?
The parent answers, Allah created us and the flowers and the sun and the rain and everything else in existence. The parent talks to the children about Allah, who He is, and our relationship with Him as grateful slaves. This is the beginning of the children’s Islamic education and the beginning of their tarbiya.
Naturally, learning the Quran and the seerah follow.
The parent does not need to be a hafidh of the entire Quran or a master of tajweed or to have studied the whole seerah before teaching the children. I do think it’s important for the parent to have a basic level of competence in at least recognizing the Arabic letters and reading the Quran. This makes it more doable to teach your children proper pronunciation and recitation of the surahs they will memorize.
Even if the parents lack this basic knowledge, alhamdulillah there are other options available: use your phone or computer to find videos online of proper Quranic recitation for the children to hear. Children are naturally good at imitating what they’re given, and they can inshaAllah mimic the way the qari’ (قارئ) recites each surah to learn it themselves.
For full disclosure and transparency, I did memorize the Quran before becoming a mother (though I completed my hifdh alhamdulillah while pregnant with my second child). I also studied tajweed (rules of Qur’anic recitation) before I had kids.
As for seerah, I certainly had not studied it before becoming a mother. I actually knew very little of it. But then, as my oldest child was around 3 or 4 years old, I began to learn more. I started to learn alongside my children, listening to the seerah of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم as well as that of many of the Sahaba (I found an old Arabic audio-only series of recordings on YouTube). We would listen to these detailed lectures in the car as I drove places with my children; this to this day is our “car class” for seerah. I learned many parts of the seerah and Islamic history for the first time, with my children. As my children got older and more capable of understanding and grasping concepts, I’d explain important ideas and define big vocabulary words in Arabic for them. Over the past six years or so, we have listened to the prophetic seerah about four or five times now, as well as to the seerah of Abu Bakr, `Umar, `Uthman, `Ali, and Khalid ibn Al-Waleed two or three times each. After so many repetitions, both the kids and I have inevitably learned some things by heart alhamdulillah.
And yes, we also do other subjects like math, English reading, and writing, art, etc. But these subjects are secondary to the primary subjects of Quran (with its tafseer and discussion), seerah, hadith, Islamic history, and formal Arabic. Not all subjects are equally weighty.
As long as you instill wisdom and an Islamic paradigm in your children, they can inshaAllah learn anything else after with success. First you install the lens through which the children will view and understand the world: Islam. The Quran and Sunnah. First, you teach them how to think; then, it’s easy for them to pick up other subjects and studies of other fields inshaAllah, grounded in this essential Quraic outlook.
Understood in this way, homeschooling is inevitable, involuntary. It is not a matter of choice.
So you don’t need to have a threshhold level of immense knowledge or super-high confidence just to even start homeschooling. It’s the reverse. You will gain both knowledge and then, increasingly, confidence as you go along inshaAllah.
