37 Educational Goals For My Children

I was visiting with some homeschooling friends today and mentioned that I had "non-optional" educational goals for my kids.  I misremembered them as being a huge number (107 I said confidently), but later in the day I looked back through my journal and discovered a much more reasonable number: 37.

So here are my thirty-seven educational goals for my children, which I wrote down in 2010 when they were seven and 4 years old:

1.  Have lifelong fitness and healthy habits
2. Know how to find the knowledge that they need
3. Feel OK joining in on a pick-up ball game
4. Know the basics of riding horses
5.  Be able to ride a bike and drive a car - both safely in traffic
6.  Feel compassion for others
7.  Take personal responsibility
8.  Be honest, of good repute, and trustworthy
9.  Be happy and self-aware
10.  Understand science and how things work
11.  Love nature and be nature-wise
12.  Be able to make plans and set goals and follow through on them
13.  Read and write well enough
14.  Understand statistics
15.  Be math competent
16.  Know history well enough
17.  Love literature and story
18.  Be able to defend self and be safe
19.  Be able to cook
20.  Be able to grow food
21.  Be able to "keep house"
22.  Dress well-enough and be able to take care of clothing (clean and repair)
23.  Speak at least a bit of other language(s)
24.  Perform the basic home maintenance tasks
25.  Perform the basic car maintenance tasks
26.  Have a sense of family and close family ties
27.  Appreciate beauty, wonder, and awe
28.  Be a healthy sexual being
29.  Have good manners
30.  Appreciate community and work well in it
31.  Swim well
32.  Play a musical instrument (well enough)
33.  Understand geography and appreciate world cultures
34.  Have some "woodcraft" and survival skills
35.  Have spiritual depth and grounding
36.  Possess good communication and interpersonal skills
37.  Have good gun safety and competency

Looking back, it is a pretty good list. :)  I think I might refine some of these a bit, with what I know now, but overall, this still holds strong and describes my priorities for my children well.