Why we ended up homeschooling

“Little Sister”, Agnes Martin, 1962

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As some of you know, Johanna and I moved to Denmark in 2020 to homeschool our daughter, Maud, which has been illegal in Sweden since 2011.¹ Several people have asked me why we chose to do that—I think, mainly, because they wonder if homeschooling would be a good idea for them.

I thought I’d list some of our reflections as we worked through this question. This is by no means an argument that others should homeschool; it’s simply how we grappled with the problem.

TL;DR: homeschooling makes it much easier to individualize education, which makes it more efficient and meaningful.

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1.
Looking back, I can see that the seeds of our decision to homeschool came from the experiences Johanna and I had as children.

I didn’t know it at the time, because this is something that was very much taboo to talk about in Sweden, but I was what they now call a gifted child. I think the first time I got an inkling that this was the case was when I was 12 and met the math teacher that I was going to have in middle school. Looking over my workbooks, he put his hands to his bald head and said, “Oh boy, that way of solving the problem is way too advanced! Where did you learn that?”

For the previous six years, every teacher had pretended that my math abilities were not any different from the other kids (I had never been told, for example, that it was unusual to teach yourself multiplication before you start school, which I did by looking over my brother’s homework). Or did they not realize? I’m not sure. I’m not that much of an outlier; my teachers must have taught several others like me.

But it was not a good environment to be in, as it gave me a confused self-understanding and meant I was never intellectually challenged, with all the negative downstream effects of that. I experienced school as a place where you turn off your senses and conserve your energy before you can go home and teach yourself stuff.

Johanna’s experience was similar, perhaps a little worse.

I now think that some of the conclusions I inferred from my school experience were flawed. I used to think that the best thing that could happen was for school to just disappear, so people would have more time to work on their projects and teach themselves stuff. I later learned that not everyone finds teaching themselves to be as easy as I did. But that feeling—that school was an obstacle to education—was the place that Johanna and I were coming from when we started to discuss what we wanted to do when we had children.

2.
Johanna’s reaction to her experience in school was to become a teacher. She thought that by becoming a teacher and by understanding the system from within, she might be able to do better than the teachers she’d been exposed to. This has to be up there in the Hall of Fame of terrible decisions.

After she graduated from teacher ed, feeling that she was not in any way qualified to teach, she spent a year self-studying the history of education and learning psychology and so on. This was the first time she got to experience just how much faster you can progress when you follow your own curiosity and needs. It was a profound and joyful discovery. Johanna and I both think that just about the most exciting thing in life is to parachute yourself into an unfamiliar discipline and try to master it as fast as possible.

Here is one thing you learn if you spend a year reading the protocols from when the Swedish school system was built: it did not start with people thinking hard about how children learn and then designing an institution to leverage that in the most effective way.

Let me explain it with an experience Johanna and I had in a Peruvian fishing village once. In this village, there were street dogs everywhere: three-legged dogs, four-legged dogs without ears, dogs dragging their pregnant bellies in the ground, and each night, precisely at sunset, a howl would rise above the corrugated steel roofs. It started with a lone dog, then a second dog answered, and a third, and a fourth, until the whole firmament reverberated with a thirty-fanged howl. Schools were the result of discordant, collective howling like that.

Already before the first school houses were built, there were arguments over how the power, tools, and legitimacy that was being accumulated should be used. The result of their—still ongoing—power struggles was a confused compromise that no one seems all that excited about and which we call school.

Among people who are critical of education, there are often narratives about how schools were designed to produce compliant workers—but this is as flawed as the narrative that schools were created to educate. Those who wanted to discipline workers were only one of the dogs. There were many other groups (among them teachers, parents, priests, children, politicians, and poets) that struggled to shape the institution to fit their agenda or pedagogy or ideas of the common good.

Because school exists, and because it has in our imagination become synonymous with education, almost all reformers who care about helping children flourish and grow competent have focused their resources on wrestling for power over schools.

But increasingly Johanna and I felt like the farmer in the old Irish joke when a tourist asks which way to go if he wants to drive to Dublin.

“First of all, I wouldn’t start from here.”

3.
Once we started to think that we needed to build an alternative that started from scratch, we both took jobs as teachers. We did it mostly because we needed the money. But it was also good to experience the thing you are questioning from the inside. You don’t want to be the guy writing critical Twitter threads while failing to understand the complexity of the task of those who are in the arena.

One of the things I came to see more clearly is how wide the distribution of talents and interests and life situations is. I had of course seen the differences between people when I was in school myself, and generally in life, but when it became my responsibility to help a group of kids grow, the differences became jarring. Since Swedish schools organize classes based on age, not readiness, it is almost impossible to give children lessons that are well adapted to their needs. This is not a controversial point—this is the kind of thing teachers talk about at conferences. But my impression is that they underestimate the problem. When I hear people talk about individual differences, it often sounds like they think some kids need, like, 30 percent more challenges, and others 30 percent less. The difference is much larger than that, and much more multidimensional! Pretending we are more similar than we are hurts everyone.

I spent a lot of time helping three autistic 11-year-old boys, whom the school had not been able to serve because they didn’t fit the mold. By the time I met them, they had spent two years sitting in the back of the classroom playing Minecraft; when they took part in school work, they struggled to follow instructions because it assumed familiarity with ideas they had never learned; they struggled to read picture books, yet they were passed along from grade to grade like everyone else. When I tutored them one-on-one, focusing on their specific needs and challenges, they progressed four or five times faster than the curriculum and could catch up in a few months. However, doing that type of individualization at scale is not possible within the institutional framework of normal schools.

Another student I remember was Cecilia, a six-year-old, who was in the class of one of my colleagues and who, when she started school, was already reading Harry Potter. Her teacher was frustrated by Cecilia’s prodigious reading. And you have to have compassion for that. Being so far ahead meant the teacher knew he could never give her what she needed; he was destined to fail as her teacher, and he’d have to live with that and deal with disappointed parents. So, human psychology being what it is, he resolved that conundrum by getting irritated at Cecilia.

For another example of the same dynamic, see this passage from Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir Childhood when her mother enrolls Tove in school:

[My mother says,] ‘and she can read and write without mistakes.’ The [teacher] gives me a look as if I were something she had found under a rock. ‘That’s too bad,’ she says coldly. ‘We have our own method for teaching that to children, you know.’ The blush of shame floods my cheeks, as always when I’ve been the cause of my mother suffering insult. . . . My mother moves a little bit away from me and says faintly, ‘She learned it by herself, it’s not our fault.’

During breaks, I would sometimes hang out with Cecilia. We would walk the yard, talking about electricity or marine biology (which was what she wanted to do when she grew up).

Later, just after Maud was born, I met Cecilia’s father at a sushi place. He told me Cecilia was sad I had left; she felt she had not learned anything in the two years I’d been gone. I could see that the father thought I had been a good teacher. This made me uneasy—I knew how little I had done for his girl. 15 minutes a week, was it ever much more than that?

Imagine if she’d had stimulating lessons and conversations two hours a day.

4.
Our initial idea had been to start a new school, but given the legal constraints, it was not possible to do anything markedly better than the default. So we came around to homeschooling.²

The good thing about homeschooling is that it is easier to individualize the education—if you are curious about your children, it happens almost automatically. Having talked so much with Maud over these last seven years, and having reflected on these interactions with Johanna, I have an understanding of Maud’s mind that is way beyond how well I could ever understand my students. In a continual unfolding, Johanna and I adapt the context in which Maud and her little sister live to help them grow into competent versions of themselves.

I don’t think most people understand the true opportunity cost of schooling because they have never seen what is possible. When I gave the boys who fell behind what they needed, they outpaced their classmates, Bloom two sigma style. If we had given Cecilia suitable lessons, she wouldn’t just have moved three times faster than the default. It would also have compounded. She would not have reached the same destination faster; she would have been able to learn and do things that she will never get to experience now—that time is spent.

See also these three posts on the same theme:

Thank you Esha for help with the edits.

1. A potential narrative violation for American readers is that homeschooling was not outlawed by the Swedish left, but by the center-right.

2. I still don’t think that homeschooling is the full solution to the problem we were thinking about.

Homeschooling is not a workable solution for all families. Therefore, we still need to make progress on how to improve collective learning institutions. (For those interested in that problem, check out The Center for Educational Progress.) But homeschooling is, I think, crucial for that project.

The unbundling of education that homeschooling represents is an important part of how we make progress on that larger problem. When you take children out of schools, you can disaggregate several things that are lumped together in schools (child care, pedagogy, socialization, etc) and by doing that, you can make faster progress on solving the subcomponents and creating the rich diversity of solutions necessary to fit a highly diverse population. By opening up the design space, and allowing more decentralized experiments (collaborations between families, micro schools, creating markets for educational technology that isn’t hamstrung by having to fit the limitations of standard schooling) homeschooling helps map the wider design space of education.

But we still need to think more seriously about what the societal scale solution is, if we want to give a large share of the population the opportunity to use their capacity better to live richer lives and lift others with their work.