Why I want to home-school my child

Our daughter is approaching her fourth birthday, and the question of education has moved from abstract theory to immediate reality. Choosing how she will be educated is not merely a logistical decision; it reflects our value system and what we believe about human development, responsibility, and the kind of society we hope she will inhabit and shape.

Like most parents, we began by assuming we would select from existing schooling options. After considerable research, conversations, and visits, we realised that each available path required trade-offs that conflicted with our core values. This article is not an indictment of teachers or institutions. Rather, it is a personal account of how we arrived at homeschooling and the assumptions about education that shaped that decision.

Our aims

Education for us is more than just a means to get a job and earn a living. It is preparation to play a constructive role in society that benefits society as a whole and the individuals within it. That role would include a job which is set within the context of how she will contribute and pay her way in society. It also includes her pursuit of what she would define as her happiness. All parents want their child to be happy but I want my daughter to be happy the way she defines happiness; she is not a proxy of or vicarious for my happiness. So, she will need to start with understanding what her role in society is and what happiness is to her.

Our task as parents would be to equip her with the values & skills to make that assessment and the knowledge & skills to execute her decision. To prepare her, we are looking for the following for our daughter:

• application, not just knowledge

• skills that build on technical proficiency

• values, which the knowledge and the skills she acquires have to serve

Application

How much of that Maslow hierarchy are you still using today?

Schools tend to cram our heads full of knowledge but they don't always tell us what to do with that knowledge. Thus, many graduating from high school remember history as a series of dates and chemistry as a series of two-lettered symbols. Many of us who finish college would remember that famous triangle labelled Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs but nobody told us how to use it. I remember a college lecturer telling us that we would forget 90% of what she taught us because we would never apply it at work. I now understand that the reason why we didn't apply what she taught was that she never taught us how to apply it.

I did eventually learn how to apply Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And many other things I was told I would never apply at work. When I shared it with my staff and co-workers, they invariably reacted as if an old memory was triggered, telling me they remembered it from college. It is such a waste of society's resources to educate people with knowledge that they will never use. Teaching children knowledge without the means to apply it is like giving a can of delicious soup to a starving man but without a can opener.

Ultimately, we learn things in school to understand how the world around us works. I realised that my learning model, and probably many other people, involves having a single coherent picture of how the world works and every new knowledge I acquire adds to, adjusts or corrects that picture. It is an important part of her learning for my daughter to hold a similar picture in her head and everything she learns must link to it. Everything she learns must link to something in the real world, explaining how the world works to justify its place in that picture in her head.

Skills

Can't parents and school coordinate, if not cooperate in equipping our children with life skills

We would like our daughter to learn skills, not just knowledge. And not just life skills which we agree are necessary: like cooking, first aid, hygiene, civic, health, financial, entrepreneurial and so on. Some schools and curricula do teach some or all these skills. Some schools hold an annual entrepreneurial day, for instance. But without the coordination with and involvement of parents, these skills could just become another classroom subject like geography and be forgotten after exams. Not only do these skills need to be lived but they need to be woven into whatever the child does in everyday life, not just for one entrepreneurial day a year. These skills cannot be ringfenced as school subjects but need to be extended to the home and hence, the need for parental involvement.

In addition to these life skills, though, I would add three management skills necessary in our increasingly complex society.

Managing people

You really cannot get by in life without knowing how to manage people. Everybody does, no matter how high up the hierarchy you are or how low down. These include skills such as reading people, communicating, relating in a team, and negotiating. Each of these skills is a whole area by itself and should be interpreted as broadly as possible. Communicating is not just how well a person speaks but also includes reading verbal & non-verbal cues, using non-verbal signalling to send a message across, reading a person's reception while speaking to them, etc. She needs to learn to manage people in social settings, in professional settings, and in familial & familiar settings. She needs to learn to manage upwards to her superiors, downwards to subordinates and sideways to her peers. And in the settings mentioned earlier.

But the most important person she has to learn to manage is herself. She needs to know why she does what she does, thinks what she thinks and feels what she feels. Then manage herself to channel these actions, thoughts and feelings towards achieving her objectives. If a student is lucky, they may form a personal relationship with the one capable teacher in the school who takes it upon themselves to teach this one student such skills. If they are lucky.

Managing tasks

All learning agents should be partnering daily, not meeting occasionally

Life includes many big and small tasks to be completed sequentially and in parallel. I want my daughter to learn how to formulate her objectives (and those of any other persons involved if they have different objectives) for each of these tasks; work out what needs to be done; identify the steps required to achieve what is needed, and monitor who has done which steps by when. Every task, whether setting up a get-together or launching a new airport, involves these steps. I would rather she learns them from a young age rather than pay exorbitantly later to a project management consultant with a product to sell.

Managing information

Today, many people lack the analytical skills and information to make sense of an increasingly complex world, giving rise to conspiracy theories as people grasp at solutions that are more aligned with their preconceived worldviews, even if they conflict with the facts. Corporate and organisational decision-making has become more challenging as more technical information floods the boardroom, often through subordinates who have become more specialised at an earlier age. This leaves decision-makers with multiple pieces of information that pull the organisation in different directions simultaneously. The vacuum is in the skill to integrate information from all disparate sources into a single cohesive picture so that a considered decision can be made.

I am not aware if this skill to integrate information has been identified as a necessary skill but I guess it requires people to have broad knowledge in many fields, even if these fields do not seem to have anything to do with each other. More importantly, my daughter needs to understand how these disparate pieces of knowledge link up and affect each other in a functioning society and a seemingly infinite universe. She has to learn how to hold this big picture together coherently while knowing where to get the information she would need to make her decision. I am not saying we do not need people with technical skills and knowledge. We do, but technical skills and knowledge could turn out to be a liability if there is no one with the skill to integrate them all into a single cohesive picture for decision-making.

Values

When my daughter was 10 months old, she once picked up my phone, which was on the lock screen. She did not even bother to touch the screen herself but tried to lift my finger up to the screen to activate. I realised she was different from her cousins and her peers in that she had a learning mind and a safe environment at home to learn. This creates another divide between the haves and have-nots to add to the wealth and the digital haves and have-nots that already exist.

Which got me thinking: while she will likely be a very successful adult, what is the point of being a top dog in society if society crumbles around her? For my wife and me, what happens to society is as important as what happens to us. We named her after a British suffragette because she was born 100 years after British women got the vote. You can see our aspirations that she will one day grow to fight for the oppressed in society. Our values are very important to us and integral to the way we bring up our daughter.

Many would say that many of the values and skills that we would like her to acquire are things that should be done at home and not part of the school education system anyway. To me, it really doesn't matter where she learns or how she learns, as long as what she learns is complete in all the aspects that I mentioned above. The learning environment, though, should be integral. It cannot be that learning only takes place in a school, or that she only learns certain topics in school and other topics at home. All aspects of her environment should be fertile ground for learning, all always aligned with each other, much like we are always advised that both parents have to speak with a single consistent voice to the child. As it stands, there seems to be little coordination between the learning environment at home and in school, at least not as much as I would like it to be.

The values of learning and unlearning

I am putting this as part of our value system and not just a skill, as it is fundamental to what I would like my daughter to be.

When I was a teenager, this quote from Alvin Toffler caught my imagination and became one of my defining values. To be able to learn is to be imbued with a sense of discovery, with which she now wakes up every morning. Learning must respect knowledge, which does not fear being acquired, and not be merely limited to information that fits into one's own comfort zone.

My daughter was born with an innate curiosity which leads her to discover things by herself and for her to choose what lessons she wants to learn that day. In some ways, I am envious of her because she wakes up every morning eager to embark on another adventure in learning. I want her voracious appetite for learning to continue but it is not something that happens by chance. She has to be provided with the right environment for her to explore without the undue alarm that many parents experience on realising the risks of certain unfamiliar knowledge. Unlike many parents, we do not shy away from letting our daughter play in the rain, climb trees, cook, use kitchen knives or understand death at the age of two. She has to be free to fall and make mistakes without fear of retribution or ridicule. Learning should be an adventure, not a chore.

To unlearn means she will need to drop whatever skills are no longer relevant and not have her self-esteem dependent on the value of no-longer-useful skills gained in the past. This need to unlearn becomes increasingly critical as society and the economy become more fluid. We have seen social trends and entire occupations arise and become obsolete in a matter of years, not generations, as in the past. This acceleration, caused by technological advancement, will become even more pronounced in the era of Artificial Intelligence. As AI begins to automate jobs at the more professional end of the scale, professionals today do not have the luxury of placing too much value in their past training and past experience. Especially if they cannot be brought over to the new roles they will have to carve out for themselves in the new economy. Whatever is not relevant in the new economy has to be unlearned, no matter how much effort was expended to learn it in the first place. Or how much a professional identifies with a profession that is slowly doomed to extinction.

The education system aims to prepare students for the first job in their careers, but I aim to prepare my daughter for the last job in her career. I have no idea what that last job is or whether it even exists today. To be ready for that last job, though, she needs to have a fluid mind, adapting to circumstances as they change and learning & unlearning daily like eating and breathing. She has to know how to learn and unlearn.

Our options

Having outlined what we want education for my daughter to achieve, the next question became whether existing schooling options in Malaysia could realistically deliver it. We looked at kindergartens, state-run schools, Chinese medium schools and private/international schools.

Kindergarten

Are teachers in your kindergarten just trying to survive the day?

My wife is an early childhood educator but we quickly agreed that we will not be sending our daughter to kindergarten or childcare nursery. The main reason in our experience was that many centres in Malaysia are mostly based on low-cost labour. Many staff, though not all, were just earning a salary and thus seemed to be just seeking to get through the day with the minimum of fuss for themselves. Many have no qualifications, even though kindergarten teachers are required to have diplomas but this recent requirement is not enforced. Many repeat the childcare practices of their parents, which are no longer relevant in the modern world and, more importantly, not consistent with the values that my wife and I hold. We just cannot see why we would want to outsource something as critical as our child's education to someone far less qualified than us.

Many kindergartens work on the basis of the lowest common denominator. If you want to get through the day with the minimum of fuss and cost, procedures have to be standard and cannot be customised for any individual child. As such, procedures would have to work for all children, which would practically be for that one child who lags furthest behind. For instance, if one child has difficulty eating whole foods and can only take porridge, the entire class would have to eat porridge, as it would be more inefficient and costly to cook porridge for one child and whole foods for others. Allowing parents to customise what their children get would have worked but would have complicated logistics beyond the capabilities or energies of staff seeking to minimise their fuss at work. So, the entire class end up moving at the pace of the slowest child, be it dietary needs or learning skills.

Common in your kindergarten?

Kindergartens as business entities are intended to be efficient at the lowest cost. This often means staff are not able to tend to the individual child if the activity is best done with the group as a whole. Using the example of meal time again, many kindergartens we come across choose to feed the children rather than let them feed themselves. This is to ensure every child finishes at the same time instead of complicating the schedule with a staggered finish time, as children eat at different paces. And of course, feeding the children rather than letting them feed themselves means there is less mess. So, many toddlers do not get to learn to feed themselves at meal times as early as they could have.

In Malaysia, we do not have a watershed bedtime for children, as children sleep at the same time as adults. Malaysian children supplement their sleep in the afternoons. This is encouraged in kindergartens, as it gives the staff a break time and woe betide any child who deprives the staff of their break time by staying awake. Also, it is common practice for nursery staff to turn on the TV or any other screen to entertain children after the nap, without regard to the content. Our daughter, unfortunately, does not fit into this pattern as she does not take afternoon naps and watches only content we have curated. She feeds herself and is very independent, choosing to do things herself instead of being processed. As a result, she isn't exactly the most popular child among nursery staff when we drop her off on those few occasions when we need a babysitter.

There are kindergartens which attempt to get children to learn through personal exploration. I would caution against including Montessori in this category: without a trademarked quality control other than a few lesser-known qualification bodies, the label has been unreliably used for marketing purposes rather than a guaranteed indication of quality. Some preschools try to provide customised education, at least in part. They are invariably highly expensive. Customised education does not come cheap.

State-run schools

Fighting in a Malaysian state-run school

State-run schools were easily discarded as an option, as they do not provide the level of quality we seek. The exceptions are the elite schools for which you either need connections to get in or have a long track record of academic achievement in the state-run school system. In any case, the values taught in the Malaysian state-run schools do not exactly align with ours, but that is something for another article.

Chinese medium schools

Even with the drawbacks, Chinese schools in Malaysia attract a 15% non-Chinese enrolment

Chinese medium schools were long considered in Malaysia as providing reliable education at affordable costs but eventually, we also discarded that option. While they do have a good track record of academic achievement, our daughter has long taken charge of her own learning even at this early age and if this continues into her schooling years, it will probably not sit well with a didactic method of teaching common in Chinese medium schools. For a while, I thought of letting her go to a Chinese medium school to understand that there are other ways of education but concluded that this is going to be too traumatic for both the child and the teacher, for very little narrow learning benefits.

Education systems throughout East and South-East Asia are based, directly or indirectly, on the venerable Chinese education system and its Confucianist basis. The Chinese language is unique among the world’s major languages in that Chinese characters are not phonetic-based and do not have an alphabet, and thus, there are no dictionaries for common use. Traditionally, you cannot teach yourself Chinese using books and dictionaries, like you can with English; someone has to show you the character, tell you what it sounds like and tell you what it means. (Of course, today's apps replace the teacher, so you are not really teaching yourself.) So, learning the Chinese language is a matter of memorisation, which is why the Asian education system is so much based on rote learning.

Furthermore, it is not enough to reproduce the character. You have to write it in the prescribed order of strokes. So, if you faithfully duplicated a Chinese character but in the wrong order of strokes, you will still get a scolding from the teacher. What it teaches the child is that, in life, there is only one correct way of doing things and you have to find out what that correct method is and follow it. This ingrains conformity and procedural correctness over independent exploration. We see this in graduates who await instructions rather than figure things out for themselves. Whether this outcome is still necessary in modern contexts is debatable.

On top of that, Confucianist societies assign very high regard to the position of the teacher. When I was young, I came home one day and complained to my mother about the teacher and got another beating because, obviously, I hadn't learned my lesson. And I remember her remarks, "How can the teacher be wrong?" In Chinese medium schools, the teacher cannot be wrong and children are conditioned to follow what they have been told. It trains children to follow authority, which is why many often grow up with little self-confidence.

The Asian education system has been instrumental in training engineers, accountants and other professionals needed for the Asian economy up to this stage. And the system sits well with the conformist and top-down nature of the society. But in my view, this emphasis on procedural correctness may encourage conformity over exploration. I am not sure how a change agent of society that I am training my daughter to be can fit into such a school system.

Private/International schools

Private and International schools in Malaysia were generally of good quality, but we were concerned about habits and values, which our daughter may pick up through peers from income and class backgrounds that we do not share. We understand that in private schools, there is sometimes tension between the school that sets the rules & methods and the parents who pay the fees. This creates much uncertainty over the running of the school if it is constantly subjected to this pull and push between parents and the school. (Somehow, there seems to be less of this tension in tertiary institutions, where parents play a smaller role in monitoring the running of the institutions that their children attend. Wonder why?)

While peer pressure exists in any school system, the middle-class peer pressure in private and international schools is much higher, as the consumeristic pressure looms larger. While some of the items and clothes we like happen to be branded, it is a rule in our household that we do not buy things because they are branded or merchandise. We want our daughter to be comfortable with what she has, uses and wears. While I recognise status signalling is a fundamental part of our human society, we do not want her to vest her self-esteem in how her peers see what she has, uses and wears. Her self-esteem has to be based on how she sees herself.

The problem with education systems

I soon realised that the problem with most education systems in the world and especially in Malaysia, is that they are geared towards mass education as required when the education system was first established back in pre-Victorian Britain. Modern mass schooling expanded during industrialisation, driven by the need for standardised literacy and numeracy for standardised work in industrial workplaces. While many reforms have been introduced since industrialisation, the structural core of mass standardisation remains. This sits uncomfortably in today's world of diverse work requirements and methods. Especially when we want an education that is based on our personalised values and focused on diverse knowledge & very specific soft skills. The education system is not designed to be customised and any customised education would have been extremely expensive.

The end goal of education systems

Education systems, by their nature, are structurally organised around teaching delivery, and assessment systems often measure instructional outputs rather than long-term learning outcomes. Teachers are there to teach: this is obvious in the name of the profession. This often means that teachers and teaching institutions are internally assessed within the system on how well they teach and the techniques of teaching, but teachers & institutions are rarely directly assessed by anyone outside the system. The key public measures are examination results, which education systems have evolved for comparisons within the system. I know there are attempts to introduce external measures, but at this point, they remain rudimentary and exploratory.

Must every child be learning the same thing?

I believe the main beneficiaries of the education outcomes of students, the employers and the students themselves, do not directly assess the effectiveness of the education system. The only exceptions seem to be training institutions set up by employers to supplement the training that the education system is unable to deliver. One therefore has to question whether educationalists should be the ones assessing whether their fellow educationalists are producing results expected by the economy and society. Especially when there are inadequate formal requirements to refer to the key beneficiaries of education outcomes, other than an informal consultation process, often initiated by and using a process determined by educationalists themselves.

Not all is bad

It would be unfair and inaccurate to suggest that education systems are uniformly deficient or that thoughtful educators do not exist within them. Many teachers operate with integrity, creativity and deep commitment to their students despite structural constraints. We occasionally come across teachers with a passion for their profession and those under their care. Some schools experiment with inquiry-based learning and genuine collaboration with parents. There are institutions, including within Malaysia, that attempt to cultivate independent thinking and personal exploration rather than mere examination performance.

Internationally, there are also systems worth studying, even if we are unlikely to have access to them. Scandinavian models, for example, are often cited for their later school starting age, reduced emphasis on standardised testing, strong teacher training requirements, and cultural trust in professional educators. Their success appears to stem not from a single technique but from systemic coherence: alignment between societal values, teacher autonomy, curriculum design, and assessment methods.

We also like aspects of the New Zealand system, particularly its integration of indigenous identity and cultural narrative into mainstream education. That deliberate inclusion of heritage and worldview resonates so much with my wife's indigenous identity. It demonstrates that education can be both academically rigorous and culturally grounded.

Our concern, therefore, is not that good education does not exist. It clearly does. The challenge is accessibility, consistency, and alignment with our particular values within our local context. We are not rejecting the education system wholesale; we are acknowledging that, for our family, finding an affordable and reliable institutional partner that meets our criteria is uncertain.

If the system evolves, or if we encounter a school whose philosophy and execution align with ours, we would gladly reconsider. Our decision is not ideological opposition: it is a pragmatic response to changing conditions.

Drawbacks of homeschooling options

Homeschooling is not without drawbacks either. First and foremost, schools do not just provide education; they also provide childcare for working parents. We see this during the pandemic: the economy cannot reopen while schools remain closed. Homeschooling requires at least one parent to not work or work from home. If the child is old enough, the parent may be able to work part-time. Having reliable part-time childcare can help alleviate the burden but some sacrifice is definitely called for. Dual-income households may lose earnings, career progression, and professional networks. Even part-time work arrangements demand careful scheduling and flexibility that not all employers accommodate. On the flip side, I must say that spending time with your child in their formative years is something you will never regret. Families must decide, therefore, which trade-off they are prepared to carry.

The parents' temperament is also critical to homeschooling. They have to manage the overlapping roles of educator, curriculum planner, and developmental observer, all beyond their traditional role as a parent. During lessons, a certain level of patience is required together with skills to explain complex concepts in simple terms. Maintaining instructional authority while preserving the parent-child relationship requires emotional regulation and self-awareness. Outside of lessons, there are a lot of planning and scheduling skills in play. At all times, they will need to track progress, hold a holistic view of their child's abilities. including socialisation, skills and exposure, and the next learning trajectory. This includes knowing when to push, when to pause, and when to seek external expertise. Unlike institutional schooling, there is no default structure to fall back on.

We also recognise that many parents feel they do not have the knowledge or teaching skills to conduct homeschooling. In many cases, I believe this reflects social conditioning rather than an actual shortfall of knowledge or ability: we are led to believe that only trained teachers are competent. In reality, primary-level instruction does not generally require advanced subject expertise. Still, confidence is a key ingredient in this enterprise and if that is in short supply, homeschooling can become stressful rather than empowering. Some parents are willing to try but sustained opposition from spouses or in-laws can undermine the stability required for it to succeed.

Homeschooling need not be binary. Hybrid arrangements - such as three days in school and two days at home - can provide structure while preserving flexibility. Some schools offer blended models that combine institutional instruction with parental involvement. Elements of homeschooling can also supplement conventional schooling: project-based learning, deeper exploration of topics of interest, independent reading frameworks or structured life-skills education at home. In this sense, homeschooling exists on a spectrum. Full withdrawal from the system is only one point along that spectrum.

Our choice

Education systems were built for stability. Our daughter will grow up in volatility. Artificial intelligence, automation, and shifting social structures will redefine entire professions within years, not generations. The central skill of the future may not be mastery of content, but the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn continuously. The education system evolves slowly because it must serve entire populations. We do not expect it to transform within the short window of our daughter’s childhood.

Whether homeschooling remains our long-term path is uncertain. We are not under the illusion that homeschooling guarantees success. It carries risks — intellectual, social, and personal. It requires time, humility, and the willingness to admit mistakes. But every educational path carries risk. What is certain is that we cannot outsource responsibility for her formation entirely to institutions whose incentives and constraints differ from ours.

We recognise that we are fortunate to even consider this option. Many families rely on schools not only for education but for economic survival. We have to seriously consider sacrificing at least a part of our careers to be the agents of learning for our daughter. Only homeschooling would allow us to customise the education that my daughter would need to equip herself to be an effective contributor to and a change agent in society. Our decision is not a prescription for others. It is simply the most coherent response to our particular values, resources and child.

If education is ultimately about forming judgment, resilience, and moral clarity, then our responsibility cannot be delegated without scrutiny. For now, we choose direct involvement and take ownership of the process. We may revise that choice as circumstances evolve, just as we expect her to revise her own assumptions throughout life. If we are proven wrong, we will adapt. If we are partially right, we will adjust. What matters most is not any ideological position on education, but that we remain attentive to her growth in accordance with our values.

Time will reveal whether we were overly ambitious or appropriately cautious. Either way, we accept the responsibility for the experiment.

Every child is different and we will have to find an effective method for each one

I expect that one day, society as a whole will be able to evolve the education system from its pre-Victorian roots to one that can support a spacefaring society. Much as it took the better part of two centuries for it to evolve to the state it is today, it will take the better part of two centuries to evolve the education system to the state it needs to be. Just that it will not be happening fast enough for us.