My two eldest children were schooled, then home schooled and then returned to the school system.  It was only when I read Jane Caro’s article regarding home schooling and the public education system that I realised the effect that had on me as an adult educator and as a parent. And my discovery about my children and their education.

My daughter had started primary school and it wasn’t going well. Apparently she was being bullied which was all the little her mother would tell me. But from her words to me, my daughter seemed fine, she just needed to sit somewhere else.

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So when the news came it completely shocked me. My wife had decided to take my daughter out of school.

As usual she had decided with no consultation with me. I was lucky that she had even informed me. Apparently according to my wife there was some loophole in the law. And, of course, I wasn’t expected to question. I was expected to comply.

And once the decision was made, we bought the school text books, learning materials and of course a desk. And my daughter thrived. Under what I thought was her mothers tutelage. Which as I found out didn’t happen at all.

For there were times when my daughter pushed back. She resisted learning during the day. And somehow of a night, I was expected to fill that gap. Which was not easy. I was away from 7 to 7 with each morning and evening doing first and second housework shift (I did cook weekends) as well as the chores required living on five acres. And my wife was a stay at home mother.

Similarly when my wife decided my son would be home schooled and he started falling behind, I also was expected to fill the gap.  My wife did not brook any criticism so I didn’t make any.

Yet what really surprised me was that I became an advocate of home schooling. I ended up reading John Holt, the American pioneer of home schooling. He effectively reckoned we should all be self taught generalists. It was only much later I realised he had much in common with the leaders of the adult education movement.

What I didn’t realise was his ideas applied to me but not to everyone else: most people aren’t generalists. Which as it turned out applied to my children. And as an observer of my own children, for one child, home schooling was ideal but for the other, not so much. One needed structure and the other didn’t. Which meant they both ended up returning to school.

What I did notice was how highly religious the other home schooling parents were. Which meant I stepped back from them and became an observer. Although a small minority had withdrawn their children due to bullying concerns.

Yet the common factor was how nearly all their children left home as soon as they could!

Yet despite that ultimately both educated themselves to the best of their abilities which is the real point of Jane Caro’s article.

Only later I realised that home schooling had awakened in me a belief in in self directed education (regardless of age) or perhaps what my mother aspired to as a primary public school teacher: student self sufficiency. And that’s why we all are teachers: even implicitly, silently and unknowingly.