As someone that was homeschooled (ages 11-17), I appreciated reading this. Thanks for sharing.
Education is a hard problem and, as my wife and I approach becoming parents, it's something we've talked about often, largely because of the conflicted relationship I have with my own experience. It afforded gifts that shaped me and that I'm incredibly grateful for: the space to explore my curiosities, instilling a lifelong love of learning.
But, looking back, I think education is more than just mastering subjects. Humans are social creatures and, without the sufficient context to explore those social dynamics (especially in high school), I found myself entering college feeling out of sync with my peers. It took years (well after I'd graduated college) to feel like I'd closed that gap. There are moments still when I feel that gap though– a sense that I missed out on formative social experiences, for better or worse. I am who I am because of that lack just as much as because of the gifts.
I suppose the main thing I'd do differently (as a parent) is maintain clearer lines of communication and deeper curiosity around my child's experience. I don't think I was ever asked, "What's working? What's missing? What could be improved?". If I was, it was from some unsaid understanding that homeschooling was a given and would continue. There was never a open conversation around alternatives.
I guess I had the sense that I had to choose one: the freedom to pursue my interests or the social connection I longed for. I hope for my own child a greater sense of agency and more choice, options that transcend the dilemma I felt.
Thanks for sharing such a personal perspective on homeschooling Henrik! We live in Canada, where homeschooling is quite wide-spread and it is easier to form learning collectives. We homeschooled our children all the way (our daughter entered university when she was 16 and our son just got his acceptance this week), and they have been expressed deep gratitude for the love of learning that seems absent in many of their peers. Over the years I organized various co-ops that offered specific academic classes (science, Latin, English, spelling bees, etc.) and offered a social setting and healthy competitive spirit for the students. I've shared a personal deep dive into our families experience with "Unconformed Education" here: https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/unconformed-education-a-personal
Thank you for writing this Henrik! I resonate with everything (as a gifted Swede myself…) and moved with my children to Belgium for us to be able to homeschool (my husband is French so it fell more natural with homeschooling in French). I struggle enormously with the huge pressure I have from family who think we’re ruining our kids…. Keeping them away from social life (mind you, my oldest is only 5 and she’s got social activities multiple times awake and we go out for things all the time… yet in the eyes of those at home we’re “isolated”…)
I will save your article and use it as inspiration for writing together something similar that I will potentially send to them for better understanding. Having lived in 8 countries across the globe I’ve never been in a more close minded place than Sweden; sadly.
Being a gifted child in an average school is tedious and awful and does a lot more harm than good. Group projects are hell. Education is not one size fits all.
As someone who was a gifted student in an average school I can corroborate this assessment, LOL. I remember having to rewrite pieces I wrote for group projects because none of my peers could understand them. I have boundless gratitude for the fact my parents chose to homeschool me relatively soon.
The positive side of this is that it teaches kids to expect other people to try to make them do more work without more reward, and that those other people will try to take the credit for it. Im sure its inspired many smart kids to go into business for themselves.
Homeschooling certainly makes sense given your goals (to provide an individualized and efficient education), and provided your lifestyle allows for it.
I imagine the difference is cultural, but my education goals are different. I live in a large US city, and plan to send my kids to public school. The reality is that very little in their lives will be individualized or efficient. If their lives look anything like mine, they will spend a lot of time riding public transportation, waiting in line, and meeting people where they are – i.e. finding common ground among the people they live, learn, and work with.
This requires drawing on reserves of patience and imagination and empathy that I believe (maybe self-flatteringly?) are built in environments like public school, where individualization cannot and should not be the goal. If my kids are precocious and show an early passion for marine biology, I will do my best to nurture that at home, get them into AP classes and private tutoring and whatever else.
To give you a few data points, it is not my impression that being allowed to work at a speed suitable to you + go deep on your projects tend to make people fragile in a way that makes it hard for them to interact with others and develop the type of patience needed to hold down a job or ride bus (I think the type of treatment that make people self-centered and fragile etc is orthogonal to the question homeschooling vs schooling, as I've seen that happen in both groups). But I endorse your decision. And I think there are geniune ways in which schools are superior to homeschooling—being less time intensive, being avaliable for all, doing a (small) amount of levelling of the playing field.
I am a homeschooling parent in Australia and came to this decision in some similar ways. I also have friends in Sweden who are struggling with some of this with their kids. It's appalling that it's not an option. I somehow stumbled on your article Childhoods of Exceptional People quite some time back and it resonated so strongly with me. I have exceptional children... Not in a biased way but because their minds crave and deserve unusual ways of learning. Unusual mostly in that they get to find their own paths and we help them with however they want to dive into things. Thank you for your writing, I really enjoy it.
Apart from the fact that schools are often unsuitable for gifted children, there might also be a deeper cultural or societal issue at play: over time, the education system has left many parents feeling incapable of educating their own children due to their own negative experiences and limited education. Consequently, they prefer to transfer this responsibility to the school system, creating a vicious cycle that's extremely difficult to break.
Outstanding essay. It takes depth of mind to perceive depth of mind and educational potential in another, and it takes analytic insight to find a way to bring that potential to reality. In an apprenticeship and a mentoring relationship, it might happen, but in large egalitarian classrooms it cannot. We know when we are being deeply perceived, and it helps us recognize our capabilities as belonging to us. This is necessary for education. Many highly intelligent people are unsuccessful at school, to their detriment— and, I would add, to the detriment of a society as a whole. There is a contradiction between the desire for orderliness and invention.
Thank you Henrik for sharing these thoughts! I liked your point that "school" tends to be a bundle of things, and we may be able to make progress if we don't insist on bundling them.
A question I had: How do you think about getting your kids into recreational activities? For example, where I live in Canada, we bundle recreational sports and schools together (with some exceptions). Therefore, it would be hard for kids to play sports without being in school. Perhaps this is less of an issue in larger cities. Have you observed this issue with your own kids? Even if you personally want to "unbundle" an activity from school, there might not be the infrastructure for it.
How I wish I'd been homeschooled like this! Or even close. Instead, still "recovering" from a childhood spent waiting to not be in school — but without the parental support of curiosity and care outside of school. Ouch. Lucky, lucky Maud! And how truly marvelous to hear how you and Johana explore and explore.
Thank you for your posts; always engaging. Have you written anywhere about the logistics of home schooling? For example, have you or your wife left your job or scaled back, to create space for schooling? How many hours each day do you spend with your kids in a schooling context?
Thank you for this great column. I'm curious as to why historically the shift was made from capability or readiness-based schooling to age-based schooling, if you know...
What a pertinent piece! Thank you for putting down your experience so honestly and clearly.
The approach taken by you on homeschooling is one I felt very in tune with. The fact that your wife wanted to see the system from the inside and evolve it instead of rejecting it outright felt resonant. I really liked your critique of the history of education since it also reflects a child-focused yet systemic value system:
"Here is one thing you learn if you spend a year reading about 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."
The fact that you actually considered starting a school too reflects that you really do value collective education as well, which is what I find to be the baby that often gets thrown out with the bathwater of our existing formal educational structures. There's a need for individualised attention in guiding children and also the need for the collective learning experiences of a peer group. I was happy to find that the latter wasn't completely ruled out here, and in fact gets addressed in the notes.
Another observation I found interesting was this:
"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."
I felt palpable relief upon reading this because at last someone was acknowledging that our educational systems aren't flawed because of evil designs! 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'. It's been our incompetencies as thinkers and social leaders, while hoping for common good, that have led to this hellish system (even in Sweden, it appears). And the solution to incompetency is also education– self-education, first! In order to make any improvements, we must ask ourselves what we failed to understand that led to these problems. What did we overvalue, undervalue and misevaluate completely that then showed up as these formal structures oppressing teachers, students and parents alike?
You mention the need to understand how children actually learn. That's certainly an important one. I feel like one I'd like to note is also, 'what does a child really need?' The need for a peer group and the need to learn how to build and live in harmonious relationships and collaborative networks is something that I find gets crucially missed in homeschooling setups – despite the best of intentions.
I feel like the conversation on education often gets reduced to learning skills and building technical understanding. But the 'what' of education should really follow the 'why' of education. Which, I'm sure most would agree, is to help the next generation become better human beings capable of working with one another and the planet to form a harmonious society. That doesn't come from being a math whizz or an early reader or someone who can build their own robots. It requires an understanding of human nature, human relationships and humans as part of the existential ecosystem. This is the common understanding needed by each human child, regardless of our more particular interests. It would be great if this too could be considered more seriously in conversations on the how to work towards a better educational system, be it personally or socially.
I don’t know much about homeschooling, but I definitely agree with the central idea underpinning this piece; existing systems of education don’t provide the best environment for learning.
As someone that was homeschooled (ages 11-17), I appreciated reading this. Thanks for sharing.
Education is a hard problem and, as my wife and I approach becoming parents, it's something we've talked about often, largely because of the conflicted relationship I have with my own experience. It afforded gifts that shaped me and that I'm incredibly grateful for: the space to explore my curiosities, instilling a lifelong love of learning.
But, looking back, I think education is more than just mastering subjects. Humans are social creatures and, without the sufficient context to explore those social dynamics (especially in high school), I found myself entering college feeling out of sync with my peers. It took years (well after I'd graduated college) to feel like I'd closed that gap. There are moments still when I feel that gap though– a sense that I missed out on formative social experiences, for better or worse. I am who I am because of that lack just as much as because of the gifts.
I suppose the main thing I'd do differently (as a parent) is maintain clearer lines of communication and deeper curiosity around my child's experience. I don't think I was ever asked, "What's working? What's missing? What could be improved?". If I was, it was from some unsaid understanding that homeschooling was a given and would continue. There was never a open conversation around alternatives.
I guess I had the sense that I had to choose one: the freedom to pursue my interests or the social connection I longed for. I hope for my own child a greater sense of agency and more choice, options that transcend the dilemma I felt.
Thanks for sharing such a personal perspective on homeschooling Henrik! We live in Canada, where homeschooling is quite wide-spread and it is easier to form learning collectives. We homeschooled our children all the way (our daughter entered university when she was 16 and our son just got his acceptance this week), and they have been expressed deep gratitude for the love of learning that seems absent in many of their peers. Over the years I organized various co-ops that offered specific academic classes (science, Latin, English, spelling bees, etc.) and offered a social setting and healthy competitive spirit for the students. I've shared a personal deep dive into our families experience with "Unconformed Education" here: https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/unconformed-education-a-personal
All the best!
Thank you for writing this Henrik! I resonate with everything (as a gifted Swede myself…) and moved with my children to Belgium for us to be able to homeschool (my husband is French so it fell more natural with homeschooling in French). I struggle enormously with the huge pressure I have from family who think we’re ruining our kids…. Keeping them away from social life (mind you, my oldest is only 5 and she’s got social activities multiple times awake and we go out for things all the time… yet in the eyes of those at home we’re “isolated”…)
I will save your article and use it as inspiration for writing together something similar that I will potentially send to them for better understanding. Having lived in 8 countries across the globe I’ve never been in a more close minded place than Sweden; sadly.
Ha en fin dag!
Being a gifted child in an average school is tedious and awful and does a lot more harm than good. Group projects are hell. Education is not one size fits all.
As someone who was a gifted student in an average school I can corroborate this assessment, LOL. I remember having to rewrite pieces I wrote for group projects because none of my peers could understand them. I have boundless gratitude for the fact my parents chose to homeschool me relatively soon.
The positive side of this is that it teaches kids to expect other people to try to make them do more work without more reward, and that those other people will try to take the credit for it. Im sure its inspired many smart kids to go into business for themselves.
Homeschooling certainly makes sense given your goals (to provide an individualized and efficient education), and provided your lifestyle allows for it.
I imagine the difference is cultural, but my education goals are different. I live in a large US city, and plan to send my kids to public school. The reality is that very little in their lives will be individualized or efficient. If their lives look anything like mine, they will spend a lot of time riding public transportation, waiting in line, and meeting people where they are – i.e. finding common ground among the people they live, learn, and work with.
This requires drawing on reserves of patience and imagination and empathy that I believe (maybe self-flatteringly?) are built in environments like public school, where individualization cannot and should not be the goal. If my kids are precocious and show an early passion for marine biology, I will do my best to nurture that at home, get them into AP classes and private tutoring and whatever else.
That sounds like a good solution!
To give you a few data points, it is not my impression that being allowed to work at a speed suitable to you + go deep on your projects tend to make people fragile in a way that makes it hard for them to interact with others and develop the type of patience needed to hold down a job or ride bus (I think the type of treatment that make people self-centered and fragile etc is orthogonal to the question homeschooling vs schooling, as I've seen that happen in both groups). But I endorse your decision. And I think there are geniune ways in which schools are superior to homeschooling—being less time intensive, being avaliable for all, doing a (small) amount of levelling of the playing field.
Less time intensive for the parent. Much more time intensive for the children.
Important correction
I would love to hear what/how you end up structuring her days and what curriculum you find or come up with! Great story.
I am a homeschooling parent in Australia and came to this decision in some similar ways. I also have friends in Sweden who are struggling with some of this with their kids. It's appalling that it's not an option. I somehow stumbled on your article Childhoods of Exceptional People quite some time back and it resonated so strongly with me. I have exceptional children... Not in a biased way but because their minds crave and deserve unusual ways of learning. Unusual mostly in that they get to find their own paths and we help them with however they want to dive into things. Thank you for your writing, I really enjoy it.
Also in Australia and in a similar situation to you : )
Awesome! Hello 😍
Apart from the fact that schools are often unsuitable for gifted children, there might also be a deeper cultural or societal issue at play: over time, the education system has left many parents feeling incapable of educating their own children due to their own negative experiences and limited education. Consequently, they prefer to transfer this responsibility to the school system, creating a vicious cycle that's extremely difficult to break.
Outstanding essay. It takes depth of mind to perceive depth of mind and educational potential in another, and it takes analytic insight to find a way to bring that potential to reality. In an apprenticeship and a mentoring relationship, it might happen, but in large egalitarian classrooms it cannot. We know when we are being deeply perceived, and it helps us recognize our capabilities as belonging to us. This is necessary for education. Many highly intelligent people are unsuccessful at school, to their detriment— and, I would add, to the detriment of a society as a whole. There is a contradiction between the desire for orderliness and invention.
So sad to hear Cecila’s story. Such a waste!
Look at talent detection in China:
https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1902755457951039973
By 10 years of age, Test & Filter & Identify outstanding potential intelligence candidates
By 15 years of age, Ensure geniuses are surrounded by others only of similar caliber & accelerated curriculum & resources
By 20 years of age, Ensure geniuses are working in appropriate fields deserving of their ability, (sciences etc.)
Thank you Henrik for sharing these thoughts! I liked your point that "school" tends to be a bundle of things, and we may be able to make progress if we don't insist on bundling them.
A question I had: How do you think about getting your kids into recreational activities? For example, where I live in Canada, we bundle recreational sports and schools together (with some exceptions). Therefore, it would be hard for kids to play sports without being in school. Perhaps this is less of an issue in larger cities. Have you observed this issue with your own kids? Even if you personally want to "unbundle" an activity from school, there might not be the infrastructure for it.
How I wish I'd been homeschooled like this! Or even close. Instead, still "recovering" from a childhood spent waiting to not be in school — but without the parental support of curiosity and care outside of school. Ouch. Lucky, lucky Maud! And how truly marvelous to hear how you and Johana explore and explore.
Thank you for your posts; always engaging. Have you written anywhere about the logistics of home schooling? For example, have you or your wife left your job or scaled back, to create space for schooling? How many hours each day do you spend with your kids in a schooling context?
Thank you for this great column. I'm curious as to why historically the shift was made from capability or readiness-based schooling to age-based schooling, if you know...
What a pertinent piece! Thank you for putting down your experience so honestly and clearly.
The approach taken by you on homeschooling is one I felt very in tune with. The fact that your wife wanted to see the system from the inside and evolve it instead of rejecting it outright felt resonant. I really liked your critique of the history of education since it also reflects a child-focused yet systemic value system:
"Here is one thing you learn if you spend a year reading about 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."
The fact that you actually considered starting a school too reflects that you really do value collective education as well, which is what I find to be the baby that often gets thrown out with the bathwater of our existing formal educational structures. There's a need for individualised attention in guiding children and also the need for the collective learning experiences of a peer group. I was happy to find that the latter wasn't completely ruled out here, and in fact gets addressed in the notes.
Another observation I found interesting was this:
"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."
I felt palpable relief upon reading this because at last someone was acknowledging that our educational systems aren't flawed because of evil designs! 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'. It's been our incompetencies as thinkers and social leaders, while hoping for common good, that have led to this hellish system (even in Sweden, it appears). And the solution to incompetency is also education– self-education, first! In order to make any improvements, we must ask ourselves what we failed to understand that led to these problems. What did we overvalue, undervalue and misevaluate completely that then showed up as these formal structures oppressing teachers, students and parents alike?
You mention the need to understand how children actually learn. That's certainly an important one. I feel like one I'd like to note is also, 'what does a child really need?' The need for a peer group and the need to learn how to build and live in harmonious relationships and collaborative networks is something that I find gets crucially missed in homeschooling setups – despite the best of intentions.
I feel like the conversation on education often gets reduced to learning skills and building technical understanding. But the 'what' of education should really follow the 'why' of education. Which, I'm sure most would agree, is to help the next generation become better human beings capable of working with one another and the planet to form a harmonious society. That doesn't come from being a math whizz or an early reader or someone who can build their own robots. It requires an understanding of human nature, human relationships and humans as part of the existential ecosystem. This is the common understanding needed by each human child, regardless of our more particular interests. It would be great if this too could be considered more seriously in conversations on the how to work towards a better educational system, be it personally or socially.
I don’t know much about homeschooling, but I definitely agree with the central idea underpinning this piece; existing systems of education don’t provide the best environment for learning.