You either enroll your child in a formal school situation or you invest yourself full time as a homeedder, right? Wrong.
When my half-Thai daughter was born 16.5 years ago, I had EVERY INTENTION to ONLY homeschool her. Until her father left with his latest girlfriend when she was 3 years old, and I realized pretty damn quick that almost all homeedders share a level of financial privilege in the form of government financial benefits or child support, or enjoy a level of financial security by having a stable partner who brings in income.
As a single mama in Thailand, which has NO unemployment or child support assistance an NO mandated child support, homeschooling was simply not a financial option. I run an entrepreneurial natural products business for roughly 14 hours a day, 7 days a week to pay for everything, including expensive visas to be allowed to stay here despite being nominated by the Thai court as the sole custodial parent. In 13 years I have received exactly ZERO in the way of monetary assistance. I mom in my spare time. I'm not entitled to any financial benefits from my country of birth (Holland) nor my passport country (Australia) either, and so I finally (painfully) had to take the decision to place her in a formal out-of-home schooling situation. So that I was free to earn money to support us.
This coming school year, her final one, Miss 16 steps up as the President of Student Council at her progressive, bilingual school, Ambassador Bilingual School, and is planning to study at a European university in 2022, Covid willing.
Yes, that's Miss 16 (also on hive as @ploimrt) on the left - her Dutch genes showing clearly in her added height. 😆 She's a 4.0 student who got 3 perfect scores at the end of Year 11 exams (English, World History and Health) and who has received national awards for English, Thai and for public speaking in BOTH languages. Because she went to a good school? Errr - no. Her school is definitely no where near the top layer of Thai private schools. She is way above her peers because I have been soooo acutely aware of the deficits of formal education that I have very pro-actively been a part time homeedder.
We've always done "car schooling" - we cover ALL SORTS of topics in the car as I'm driving:
- weather patterns
- geo-politics (eg how the mountains in western Thailand blocked the colonial English)
- crypto
- money systems of the world and basic economics
- history of many cultures that aren't taught in schools here
- advanced biology
- relationships and basic psychology
- marketing
- conflict resolution skills
- budgeting and personal finances
- comparative religions
- cultures of the world
- business & basic law
- nutrition
It's a serious GROAN factor (laughingly so, cos we both enjoy it) when unexpected traffic jams lock us in for that extra hour of car schooling. 😆
But we've done a lot more than just car schooling.
My daughter was so upset when she started formal Korean class 3 years ago that she came home in tears. Why? She did so well in the entry test she was jacked up into the intermediate class (where none of her friends were). How did that happen? Unbeknowns to me, she had taught herself basic Korean (including reading and writing) on her phone using the internet over the school holidays. She never thought to mention it. 🤣 And so yes, at the tender age of 14, I allowed her to travel alone to South Korea (staying with family of her Korean boyfriend) to practice her language skills and start to see education as a personal responsibility way beyond the classroom.
My daughter also is the 51% major shareholder of our Thai Public Company Ltd - as a non Thai I may not own more than 49%. And so a big part of our homeedder experience takes place in our accountant's office, or when my daughter assists me with business appointments, sales events, legal issues, trademark registrations or (like today) in preparing orders which need to be shipped a.s.a.p.
While we've rarely had the money for extra art or music lessons, I've worked REALLY HARD to connect and share with skilled artistic & musical friends who have inspired and helped my daughter to round out what her formal school curriculum simply hasn't been able to offer.
Even as a weeny little tike, she showed interest in learning all sorts of things (like Reiki) because she saw me modelling a Life Long Learning mindset and because she knew that I always wanted much more for her than the limited scope of formal in-school education.
Cross-cultural education has always been CRUCIAL in our multi-lingual-multi-cultural existence here in Asia. My daughter has travelled with me through the wild (dangerous!) parts of Eastern Burma and various poorer countries in South East Asia, as well as Australia. She knows how to prepare and cook a snake when there's nothing else to eat, and how various cultures live and make do with what they have to hand. Her father remarried a Hmong woman and it has been important for her to GO and spend time in that remote & poor mountain village, where the internet is a luxury only when the clouds lift in cool season and the extended family sleeps in a draughty one-roomed bamboo hut.
I've never had the slightest qualm of pulling her out of school so she can travel or attend cultural-family-business events in remote locations. It's arguably more important than her math class. To the enormous credit of her school, they flex in and around the diverse travel needs of their multi-racial students and are pretty relaxed about attendance levels.
I KNOW this hybrid form of education would be harder to implement in the so-called first world.
Apart from excelling as a student (mostly due to the extra-curricular homeedder mindset, cos she really is super lazy about homework etc 😆 and I don't make her do it) my daughter has been singled out as one of what Thai people like to call a Next Gen Leader. So much so that she is one of the team of 4 people presenting a Leadership Training Course aimed at young people, here in Thailand. Because I am asked, over and over again, how to teach children to be more like her. It's a revenue earner towards her first car, delivered at the end of the long summer holidays, and she's looking forward to earning from more than just her own company. 😆
The irony of hatching out a gorgeous, accomplished young woman whom others see as a leader, is that it came out of a hybrid educational model that I myself created, out of sheer financial necessity. I am OFTEN asked if she has been homeschooled, since she is so clearly out-of-the-box and above average. I always laughingly retort that homeschooling was not an option for me financially and that I've simply plastered the cracks and filled the holes to the best of my-our ability.
I think the issue of homeschooling being tied to financial security could use a whole lot more discussion and air time.
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