@seunoyebode recently talked about homeschooling as a sleeping billion dollar industry, and I couldn’t agree more. He talked about how schools are not returning on investments and are getting way too expensive, especially university - indeed, a degree is still the high watermark for a “good education”, isn’t it? Also, convergence of other career pathways like remote work, ease of entrepreneurship might be redefining how education helps/hinders that. Cue the well-known narrative of the tech billionaire who dropped out of college.

I’m a big fan of homeschooling too. Besides the points he mentioned, I believe there’s a few other social forces converging on the popularity of homeschooling:

• Falling citizen confidence in public institutions in general
• Easy access to almost comparable teaching content (e.g. see Khan Academy) on the internet
• Lowering expectations for paper credentials from employers - mainly in tech industry so far but might be a forward signal of things to come in other industries, though professions like lawyers, academics and doctors perhaps will always need credentials
• Rising awareness of parents that schools no longer provide the social mobility it once gave
• Poor mental health of children with too much stress from school, homework, classes/tuition outside of school
• Rising awareness of parents aided by the network effects of the internet, that there are other options beside state-provided education (in fact, this had been the practice for rich elites since forever)
• Long runway of education (up to 10 years from 6-16, or more including university), making it hard for education to respond and adapt to a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous unfolding of how industries and the economy will change by the time students emerge at the end of the 10+ years education pipeline. Major education curriculum updates are massive undertakings that take years to review and implement, if ever, so that contributes to the lack of agility. A career of a Youtube influencer was probably the last thing educators thought of preparing students for when it became a possibility.
• Many school systems are increasingly moving towards credentialism (just about acing the exams) and not really learning, interests or developing the child’s diverse abilities. This doesn’t imply that teachers and education professionals are insidiously creating that - many just unknowingly follow the incentive system to get good grades for students, and the measurement just ends up being the main goal itself rather than learning.
• The stress from school take the love of learning out of young children from an early age, so much so that they stop learning and stop wanting to learn after graduating and going into the workforce. But the fast changing economy requires lifelong learners, which governments now are hard-pressed to ‘solve’ (a problem that ironically, they created in the first place)     

@seunoyebode also shared a link to The Wonder Years School, a blog by Asim Qureshi, which was a fascinating read of how a family in Malaysia is doing homeschooling. The fact that he was nearby in neighbouring country Malaysia hit close to home and heart, in terms of relevance and context. I pretty much gobbled up all his blog posts in one sitting. Some points I took away from Asim’s experience:

• His kids study hard but only half a day
• 1-to-1 attention
• Little stress, lots of free time
• No bullying
• Finishing A levels when other kids are doing PSLE (note: they’re not gifted)
• Getting A*s all the same. In fact, doing better than mainstream school kids (he shared a US study which showed how homeschool kids do better academically than mainstream schools)
• Learning other skills like cooking, financial management
• ️Still getting social needs met by playing sports and going out to meet other kids
• Good, loving, happy, calm kids 
• Costs waaay less than a private school, but of course, more expensive than state schools
• He got his kids to focus on one A levels subject for 8 months, took the exams and was done with it forever, instead of spreading it thin over 10 years for 9 subjects like many of us did (this is more related to the British GCSE system. Not sure how other systems work)
• He didn’t get his kids to do all 9 subjects in one go and cram like crazy for the exams. They took one or two subjects at a time, went for exams, then conquered another one another time. Sometimes the kids interest and ability to understand for different subjects progresses at different rates, so this method worked well to the strengths and weaknesses of each kid.
• His younger kid took the same exam as his other older kid, because different development rates for different subjects, which I thought was child-centred and awesome
• But they seem focused on the current education benchmarks like GCSEs (which I’m not so sure about future utility), but still pretty mind blowing method of homeschooling
• And more points he mentioned in this blog post

Granted, it takes a very particular family-work-lifestyle set up for his homeschool to work. He did mention that ideally a parent must stay home, and must be able to teach. They must be able to afford it too, and have the time to teach the kids. But it’s not a lot of time teaching either. They taught in the early years, but soon got experts/online courses in to assist, and also trained the kids to learn how to learn, and how to google for answers and learn independently. I must say, I’m super impressed how he pulled it off on his own, inventing his own method along the way based on the needs and capacities of his children.

@keni mentioned some good counterpoints about how mainstream schools should be improved before advocating for homeschools. While I’m more on the homeschool side, but I do agree that homeschool is not for everyone, and certainly not a silver bullet solution for what mainstream schools don’t do well in. Revamping mainstream schools still has to happen because most will still depend on the State for education, but in the meantime, parents who can afford homeschool and can do it well have an alternative if they feel mainstream school isn’t for their kids. Mainstream schools have a lot to learn from homeschools and vice versa, and homeschoolers don’t have to feel like social deviants just because they are outside the system.

I love that there are good, viable alternative choices now available instead of the state-run monopoly previously, and parents can get to choose (though not in all countries - homeschooling is illegal in Germany for example). In the end, it’s not about one being better than the other, but more about how each side can learn from each other, and how this education ecosystem needs more diversity in order to serve the infinite diversity that is humanity.