Before we had kids my wife, Ankie used to teach Sunday school. In her class there was a girl whose parents decided on homeschooling.  At the time I never thought I would consider it as an option for our future children;  like many other things we thought we would never do or consider doing before we had kids.  But now, homeschooling is starting to look more and more attractive.

My biggest concern about homeschooling has always been the lack of social interaction with the outside world.  But in the last year I have come to challenge many axioms I previously thought unquestionable.

So far we love our time in Fernie. I think it is highly probable that we will travel significantly for a long time.  This will only be possible if we find a way to get the kids through school. Moving school every 6 months or year does not sound like a viable option.  You also have school years that do not match to most of the northern hemisphere.

Should we consider homeschooling? Kids love the painting in Eunice’s school in Fernie

A few months ago I read James Dobson’s ‘Bringing up boys’.  I don’t want to go into detail, but let’s just say he is a big proponent of homeschooling, mostly for religious reasons.  This was the first time I started considering homeschooling.  The one argument he offered was that team sport offer a great alternative for kids to learn about social interaction.

While reading Hacker and Painters by Paul Graham, I found more reasons to try and explore homeschooling.  In the first chapter ‘Why Nerds are unpopular’ Graham gives his description of the American schooling system.  He makes a very interesting comparison between school and prison.  I have to say he makes a compelling argument.

Since we have been in Fernie, Eunice, our nanny, made a tremendous effort to stimulate the kids. She has found great online resources.  The results has been amazing, they are learning more and more English words, started reading and writing the alphabet and number and started to enjoy drawing and creative activities every day and they love it.

So our plan is to start doing some detailed research on homeschooling and learn if it is a viable alternative for us.

What do you think? Should we consider homeschooling? Give your comments below:

I am busy reading a very interesting book by Paul Graham from Y Combinator. It is a collection of essay’s that he combined into a book titled: Hackers and Painters. Two of the chapters has inevitability forced me to think about my own and the general thinking in South Africa (and most of the third world) around creating wealth.

He write specifically on ‘How to Make Wealth’ which is aimed at showing that startups create wealth through significant increase in productivity and solving hard problems. This is more aimed at individuals. But in the next essay ‘Mind the Gap’ he discusses the impact for society at large. He makes some very interesting points.

He gives three reasons people tend to treat the skill of making money differently to other skills:

1)      A misleading model of Wealth that most of us learned as children. Of which the basic premise is that the ‘PIE’ is limited and the more somebody else gets the less I get.

2)      The ‘dishonest’ or rather ‘disreputable’ way most wealth, until recently (as in a 100-200 years ago) has been accumulated. Before the rise of a middle class in Europe and the industrial revolutions most wealth was attained by inheritance or force.

3)      The idea that great variation in income is bad for society

Now we have many complex problems in South Africa. Could it be a start to examine the way we see the gap between rich and poor?  There are many arguments on both sides of the Rich and Poor gap that hold water.  For instance: how some of the wealth was accumulated through the consequences of Apartheid.

This seems to go back to his second premise above. That wealth that has or appears to have been obtained through dishonest or disreputable means leads to problems.  Therefore corruption and monopolies have no place in our society.  The better our society gets at ridding itself of them the better.