Why our family chose home-schooling in Bangkok
We all do what we think is best for our children – and, for Monocle’s Bangkok-based Asia editor, that has meant home-schooling. Any regrets? Ask him in 10 years.
Here’s a scene that will be familiar to many parents. We are at a children’s party. This one is in Bangkok but a similar crowd could be summoned in London or Hong Kong. Our eldest is playing on the bouncy castle with a balloon sword; our youngest is getting her face painted. Another parent drifts into our orbit. After introducing ourselves by our progeny (“We’re Lucian and Charlotte’s mum and dad”), one of us asks, “Where do your kids go to school?” The answer to this icebreaker comes swiftly from the predictable list. Now it’s our turn. “We’re homeschooling our children…”
The mood changes, as do the questions: “Are you religious?” I might have asked the same thing five years ago, before we had our first. (We’re not, for the record.) Sometimes, we find common ground; most people we talk to know someone home-schooling their brood, even if they’re not sure why. It ranges from Western expats in the Thai capital, like us, to Chinese in Beijing. A surprising number of parents say that they would like to try it themselves and the trend isn’t limited to our little Bangkok bubble. The numbers are ticking up across the developed world and the idea is creeping into popular culture. A cursory search reveals podcasts offering support and books warning of the potential pitfalls.
Stefan Merrill Block’s coming-of-age memoir from earlier this year, Homeschooled, played right into my own outdated perceptions and ill-informed fears. My finger was hovering over the “buy” button until I found out that the poor guy’s mother was totally off the wall and it was more a tale of child abuse than alternative education. So why do we do it? My wife is Chinese and I’m British. We come from two very different cultures and educational systems but when it comes to our kids, we have landed on the same page.
For us, home-schooling just happened. There was no childhood trauma, strong ideology or chance meeting with an educational evangelist. It was just the way that things unfolded. Our son was born in Hong Kong during the coronavirus pandemic. Schools were closed and that made it easy to opt out of a highly competitive system that encourages mums to take their newborns straight from the hospital to be registered at their preferred school and subjects toddlers to – in my mind – somewhat draconian admission tests.
Moving to Bangkok for Monocle narrowed our options further and presented a clear choice. My wife could either get a nine-to-five job, pausing her artistic career to pay for hefty international school fees on par with private schools in the UK, or stay home and directly guide our kids’ education. Both, we knew, would be hard work.
She chose option two. It was her lightbulb moment, not mine, but the idea clicked right away. It took us a while to get comfortable saying it out loud but this September, Lucian “should” start school (judging by my own UK yardstick) and, well, he won’t be. We’re happy with our choice. Lucian too. Our kids know that they can go to school if they want to – that’s the deal.
The experts, practitioners and podcasters call what we are doing “child-led” learning. I would describe our children’s input at the moment as more of a steer. My son likes to write Chinese characters in the morning and do sums in the evening, so we work around him and there’s no set schedule. Our main job is to expose them to a broad array of interests, spot what takes their fancy and explore these topics together. Normal parenting – just all the time, with no let-up.
Some will frame our choice as a privilege, others as a sacrifice. I see it as an investment – a decision about where we put our time, effort and other finite resources and control how it’s all spent. It’s the educational equivalent of strategic philanthropy. We bought a car for less than the price of two years’ tuition and now take the kids on field trips outside Bangkok.
Home-schooling is actually a bit of a misnomer. Done right, I think it shouldn’t mean spending all of your time at home. There’s a push to rebrand it as “unschooling”. Life is certainly not tethered around the school day or the holidays – a dreaded void to fill for many parents.
This kind of flexibility and convenience is part of the appeal. We’re not following a curriculum and there are only a few fixtures in the weekly schedule, such as swimming lessons, Thai classes and sports. There’s plenty of free play but not a free-for-all. We are the sole disciplinarians and we choose to be strict about behaviour and what they consume. We get to decide every meal, snack and sugary sweet they eat; we maximise the use of paper, pens and other tactile tools while minimising screen time. There are no photos of them posted on social media and no television at home – by far our best decision.
It’s one day at a time. Secondary school will present the next fork in the road but by then we will all know a lot more about the home-schooling hows, whys and what-fors. So far, my thoughts on education, which I have been trying to reverse-engineer while writing this essay, boil down to a mild aversion to authority and a lifetime of hearing teachers, including my mum and sisters, moan about how awful their jobs could be. My decade in Asia might have rubbed off on me too. In the West, we’re taught how to become independent adults, questioning everything and leaving for university at the age of 18, like I did. Toodle-oo! Asians want to keep their kin close. I’m staggered by the number of families who sleep in the same bed as their kids for up to 10 years. I like to think that we’re taking a balanced approach – even though the load is never shared equally.
My wife is the headmistress, the school nurse and everything in between. I’m taking maths, history and geography. She speaks to them in Chinese; I use English. The hardest part for me is trying to forget everything that I have learnt about education from my own childhood and starting again with a blank slate (and yes – we do have a blackboard). Sending children to school has been ingrained in us since the Industrial Revolution, along with the five-day working week and eating three square meals a day. Breaking out of that system and dispensing with all of the useful tools that come with it, from daycare to a structured curriculum, exams and report cards, is a struggle.
As parents, we want to know that our kids are doing well and we defer to teachers and standardised tests much as we trust doctors with our health. We also look to the school playground to prepare our children for life. My programming keeps telling me, typically during moments of frustration, that going to school will “toughen them up” and my wife keeps having to remind me that coping with bullies and being picked on doesn’t have to be a rite of passage.
Without school to fall back on, we’re taking on all of the responsibility for the experiment. We won’t know if we passed or failed for another 10 or 15 years and our children could still turn around and say, “Daddy, why didn’t you send me to school?”
Sound familiar? Ultimately, every parent shares a similar concern. We all make choices. We try to do what’s best for our kids. We’re not experts. No one is. Comparing education styles is like comparing kids. It all depends on personal circumstances and every child’s needs. That’s what I would say if I started a home-schooling podcast. But I still find myself comparing them and worrying about their developments relative to the friends enrolled at St Andrews or Shrewsbury. Their English reading level is behind the curve but they already speak two languages fluently. That comforts me. It’s already more than anyone on my side of the family has ever managed.
About the writer: James Chambers is Monocle’s Bangkok-based Asia editor, managing our output in the region. He can frequently be found reporting in Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City and beyond.
