Ten lifelong lessons of homeschooling

Overnight, the Covid-19 pandemic has turned millions of parents into reluctant teachers. Amongst the poorest families, for whom school can mean full stomachs and a safe environment for their children, homeschooling can come at a dangerous cost. But even well-off parents seem to view homeschooling mainly as an exercise in damage limitation — both to themselves and to their children. I think they are looking at the challenge in the wrong way. My own experience of being homeschooled for ten years suggests both that it can be much less all-consuming for parents than most assume, and that it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for children.

Back in the late 1980s when my mother decided to homeschool my brother, sister, and me, almost everyone she knew told her she was crazy: she would ruin her children, turning us into social outcasts and consigning us to lives of menial work. She did it anyway, for more than a decade. Later, when we’d all turned out okay by most societal norms, the same sceptics put it down to good genes saving us from her risky experiment. They were wrong in both cases. All three of us went on to get undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, including at some of the world’s top universities. My brother and I have found exciting and meaningful careers as entrepreneurs, my sister as a documentary filmmaker. We did so not in spite of homeschooling, but because of it.

A caveat on context. My homeschooling took place briefly in New Zealand and then mostly on a farm in Botswana. It’s true this was a unique and rich environment. But it also entailed barriers to learning: our 1990s dial up internet was so expensive and slow we used it only sparingly. It’s also true that my mother made homeschooling her primary job. But she also wrote books and ran demanding projects on our farm. And looking back, some of the greatest benefits of our homeschooling experience depended on her stepping back from the role of a teacher and into the role of a guide.

This was not how my mother set out to approach homeschooling. Like most new homeschoolers today, she initially took a more conventional formal and structured approach. But a few months of this with three children under seven left her frustrated and bored. For the remaining years of our homeschooling, she took a much more laissez-faire and flexible approach: the primary syllabus we followed was the contours of our curiosity, and the majority of the time she gave us was either to enable our curious pursuits, or to read us books aloud, which she did daily. For the next ten years, an hour or more of reading a day — always books sophisticated enough to interest her — was the only predictable part of my mother’s ‘teaching’.

This free-wheeling recipe preserved my mother’s sanity. I also believe that it underpinned the most useful lessons that homeschooling gave me. These are lessons that any relatively well-off homeschooling parent can give their kids — whether they have all day or just a couple of hours to devote to their children, whether they’re homeschooling on a farm in Africa or in New York City.

Of course homeschooling is not without its challenges. But it has profound benefits which happen also to be especially valuable in today’s professional landscape. These ten have had the most lasting positive impact on my life and work.

1. Follow the unknown, not the known

In school you chase the syllabus: what you need to know, and what, in turn, is known by your teacher. When you have no syllabus, you chase the unknown, asking questions about the most interesting gaps and uncertainties you encounter. This generally leads to the kind questions that have no good answers and which therefore don’t make the syllabus. Until I finally went to school at fifteen, I didn’t realise quite what a different learning paradigm this was. I was bewildered when my teachers would tell me to stop asking questions because “you don’t need to know that”. It seemed to me a ridiculous response from an institution of learning. My experience in life since school has only underscored how following the unknown takes you in much more interesting and fruitful directions.

2. Boredom is a portal

Boredom is often seen as a bad thing, a bug in the system which modern education seeks to eradicate. But boredom is often just what we unimaginatively call the itchy openness of wide, unscripted time and space. Coupled with the agency and latitude to fill that void, ‘boredom’ led to some of the most imaginative and creative pursuits of my youth. If you never embrace boredom, you get too comfortable in your thinking and doing, considering your next steps through a narrower and narrower lens, and limiting yourself to incremental progress. Having time to face down boredom enables leaps into new domains of inquiry and imagination. And over time it doesn’t feel like boredom at all: it feels exciting and full of possibility, a restless hovering on the brink of unexplored frontiers.

3. Compete with a problem, not a person

In school, you’re generally optimising for beating someone else, or hitting a certain grade. When you’re homeschooled, your competition is the problem you want to solve. This reduces the personalisation of failure and sets the stage for falling in love with solving the problem, for its own sake. It also increases resilience — over the long term solving a problem versus beating a person is a much more sustainable source of inspiration and motivation. In today’s knowledge economy, many of the most exciting careers involve the long and bittersweet process of creativity and innovation. For these careers, from academia to entrepreneurship, the dogged pursuit of a problem is a superpower.

4. Forget what others think

Without the intellectual sedative of your teacher telling you what to do, and your class rank telling you how successful you are, you are forced to consider things based on first principles and deeply justify your own opinion. This is the bedrock of critical thinking and is immeasurably useful throughout life. Of course competitive environments and clearly defined playing fields are ultimately unavoidable and have important benefits. But homeschooling can inoculate you against the dark side of norms and orthodoxy, where benchmarks and the opinion of others constrain original thinking and creative daring. In a world in which other people are clearly getting plenty wrong, worrying too much about what they think of you seems absurd to the graduate of homeschooling. This thick skin is a weapon for any creative pursuit. I would certainly never have written a book or founded several ambitious startups had I allowed myself to worry much about all those voices arguing these endeavours were doomed for failure.

5. Love the process not the goal

Exams and tests cast a long shadow over schooling, and become its focal point. Exam completed equals work completed. In homeschooling, without predefined goals, there is much more scope to focus on the how of learning and on the process of mastery, with all its intrinsics rewards. Careers are, of course, filled with goals, but the professional stage is also increasingly uncertain. And having great processes, especially great processes for learning, ultimately puts one in a stronger position to pursue the fluid and fast-evolving goals of modern professional life.

6. Outsource teaching to books

Stories create mental coat-hangers for ideas, expanding the space, structure, and conceptual relationships in the wardrobes of our minds, and increasing our retention of knowledge. They also teach imagination and empathy for people who aren’t like us, both essential skills in today’s professional world. Experiencing books read aloud has additional benefits. It increases the sense of immersion in another world and the vividness of the facts. It also makes you a better writer, teaching you to hear the music of prose. I’m a decent writer — at twenty-five I wrote a well-received book about growing up in Botswana. I think I owe my proficiency to being read to over a period of many years. The benefit, of course, extends well beyond writing books: being able to write clearly, and the clear thinking this entails, is one of today’s most powerful whitecollar skills. It’s certainly one of the top skills we look for when hiring in my startup.

7. Go deep before wide

We were encouraged to find and follow obsessions and fascinations. My brother would take apart any mechanical or electrical device he could get his hands on. My sister taught herself the Latin names of all the trees on our farm. I started a business selling ethical eggs and immersed myself in Greek mythology. My mother didn’t care what it was, as long as we all went deep on something. My experience of mathematics was a good example. My father was a frustrated flying doctor who longed to make enough money to sustain him being a full-time farmer. As a way to wind down in the evenings, he would frequently sit in his study with a small roulette wheel and work on systems to beat the house. I would sometimes join him. When I finally went to school, I had gaps in several core mathematics disciplines. My probability, however, was university standard. It turned out that an affection for the subject, and some depth in some dimension of it, was all I needed. After a few weeks of extra lessons, I could manage the full high school school syllabus. Ultimately, mathematics became one of my favourite subjects which I went on to take at university.

8. Concentration is a muscle

The combination of going deep into stories, through books, and deep into rabbit holes of curiosity conspired to make my homeschooling a masterclass in concentration. This has proved immeasurably helpful in a world where simple shallow thinking tasks are increasingly being performed by machines, leaving to humans only the complex thinking tasks, which demand deep concentration. Cultivating concentration early also helps in the ongoing battle against device-born distraction, a blight of the smartphone age.

9. Ownership

When no one tells you what to do, nothing interesting happens unless you make it happen. And when you have ownership of every day, it doesn’t take long to realise this adds up to ownership of your destiny. Homeschooling is the ultimate lesson in personal accountability, the extraordinary value of which needs no further exposition.

10. The best work is play

Recent research has shown that play is not an activity, but rather a state of mind that is creative and open-ended. Looking back, I think this is the most consistent thread that runs through my homeschooling. It continues to run through my work, which I love with an embarrassing passion. To me, work has never seemed like work in the ‘yawn and can’t wait for Friday sense’. Provided it involves a meaningful problem, and is approached with a spirit of inquiry and a watchful eye for creative ways to improve, work feels like play.

So parents, relax. Read your kids a few great books, then step back and help them find their own way. One day, they will thank you for it.