Hellobee

I just saw this comment on one of my old posts:

I am curious what the future outlook for your kids might be? I feel like I’m locked in the “grind” because I’ve been taught that this is what it will take to be successful in the future. Your island life seriously sounds like a dream environment for kids though! Would love a post on any ideas on incorporating these ideas/lifestyles into US life… or if that’s even possible!

When we first moved to the Philippines, we always planned on moving back to the US because there aren’t many educational opportunities on our island. But I think the pandemic changed everything.

Olive had just turned 4 and Charlie was about to turn 6 when we moved to the Philippines. Our first two years the kids’ education was largely unschooled, incorporating a lot of learning through our daily activities like farming, nature walks, reading, and family discussions. Learning through play is important at that age, and we wanted to foster the kids’ innate curiosity and interests. The next two years the kids attended a small private school, and that was great too, especially the sense of community and the friendships all of us made. The pandemic hit and Charlie and Olive took a year off from school, mostly just reading a lot of books; having access to a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books has always been a constant in their lives. Then this year we enrolled them in a US-based online homeschool.

I think the pandemic created a whole new subset of homeschoolers that may never have considered homeschooling before. Some parents tried online homeschool for the first time during the pandemic, and didn’t want to go back to regular in-person school. People homeschool for many different reasons including incorporating a religious curriculum, participating in sports, having an IEP, a global pandemic, living on a remote island. Online homeschool took the pressure off me teaching, and I realized that it actually opened up more opportunities. I never considered homeschooling long term, but recently I started thinking, why not?

W O R L D S C H O O L I N G

We hosted two worldschooling families with kids the same age as Charlie and Olive just before the pandemic, and became good friends. Both families had been traveling around the world for a year+ while doing a combination of homeschooling and attending local schools. Following along on their worldschooling journeys stirred the already burning wanderlust in me. It has always been my dream to take at least one year off and slow travel after we leave the Philippines. Online homeschool makes this a more feasible possibility because the kids can do their education anywhere in the world. And since their school is US accredited, their credits are transferrable should they enroll in public school at some point. The kids could augment a traditional education with their travels, learning about other cultures, religions, histories, peoples through firsthand experience.

T H E  C O L L E G E  T R A C K

Right now the kids do online homeschool for 4 hours a day, but once they’re caught up it will go down to 3 hours a day (They’re finishing about 2.5 years worth of school in 1 year). They both start school as soon as they wake up, so they have a lot of free time every day and spend most of it coding. They could become very proficient in coding, or whatever else they choose to pursue, by the time they graduate high school. Homeschooling would enable them to have time to take special courses, college courses, internships/jobs, and work on their own projects. By not following the traditional college track, perhaps they’ll actually have an advantage over other students. The kids are teaching themselves coding by googling, watching youtube videos, taking online courses and just figuring out a lot themselves through trial and error. We want to nurture this kind of independence, passion, and thirst for knowledge, and homeschool gives them more time and freedom to do so.

O T H E R  H O M E S C H O O L E R S

I never knew any homeschoolers when I lived in the US. But I know quite a few on our island, and I have to say that I’ve really been impressed with them. They have all excelled academically (credit is also due to their diligent parents), but more than that they seem to have ownership over their own educational paths. For instance, one high schooler E has been writing a regular column for our island’s newspaper for several years, and she won a nationwide scholarship for a summer college program in the US (that unfortunately didn’t happen due to the pandemic). These parents and kids changed the way I thought about homeschooling because the kids are kind, responsible, motivated, and smart human beings.

.  .  .  .  .

All this is to say that we really don’t know what our future holds for now. It’s hard to make long-term decisions with a pandemic still going on and many other factors to consider. But we haven’t followed a traditional educational track the past six years and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Would you consider an “alternative” educational path for your children?