4 ms·

Totally depends on what you mean by home schooling. If you mean socially isolated, you may have a good point. I have certainly seen this. But being home school

by K0balt 2y ago

Totally depends on what you mean by home schooling. If you mean socially isolated, you may have a good point. I have certainly seen this. But being home schooled can also mean that the kids learn to operate in the adult world, as children, but with expectations of others as adults and an implied sense that they also should strive to meet the bar of mature adult behavior. This happens when children exist in the world side by side with their parents, who have chosen to live a life (for the time being) that will provide a rich environment in which their children can mature. We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family. For the formative years of my children, that is what we did. From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) . They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times. This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. I could never have provided them with the social foundations that they have today in a public school environment, and we didn’t have the money for a high-caliber private education.

graemep 2y ago
We did not go as far as you did, but did move house a lot, and lived in two countries. My kids interacted a lot with adults but they also interacted with a lot of kids too - including school going kids.
idiotsecant 2y ago
Living in a van seems like a less than ideal situation for kids.
- K0balt 2y ago
  We travelled across the continent for a couple of months, , traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer along the way because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies forward to the boatyard in Florida. Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.

by K0balt 2y ago

graemep 2y ago

We did not go as far as you did, but did move house a lot, and lived in two countries. My kids interacted a lot with adults but they also interacted with a lot of kids too - including school going kids.

idiotsecant 2y ago

Living in a van seems like a less than ideal situation for kids.

K0balt 2y ago
We travelled across the continent for a couple of months, , traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer along the way because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies forward to the boatyard in Florida. Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.