The question that I start by thinking about is -- Why do we want to hear about homeschool in a school? Why is it relevant to your life? And the reason that I come up with is this -- Be it homeschool or formal schooling, they are all pointing at the same place -- education. And though we may not all agree on what is education, we more or less think education is what we are going for right. Now we have to be very careful here -- be it homeschool or traditioanl schools, the concept of "schooling" is not the same as "education". Schools are supposed to provide education; they claim to do so. However, there are people arguing that school does not. As Mark Twain famously puts it, don't let school interfere with your educaton. Even more extremely, as John Taylor Gatto argues,Schooling and education are mutually exclusive terms, and that it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing. So once we clarified what is schooling and what is education, it makes it easier for us to understand the thinking that comes behind the idea of "homeschool" -- commonly put that way but actually is a much more naunced idea. --- As we've said, there are different ways to get education. The easiest and the "default" way is to send your kids to somewhere called a "school" -- where either the state or a private organization claims that they will provide your kids with education. Normally in a school, there will be a bunch of adults who claim that they have the knowledge and expertise to teach you knowledge and tell you what to do. Normally they teach according to something called a curriculum -- a list of what to learn and what to do made by an organization far far away never really seen, in our case the IBO. Normally there are classes and timetables, which requires you to be at certain place at certain times, and you will be punished, marked "absent", and get to talk with the government official if too many times. Notice how I use the wor "normally" here multiple times. The point is that all of the aforementioned are insitutional assumptioons that we all accept to be true and to be justified. There must be some reason behind all these design. However, we must be clear that they are all, at the fundamental level, assumptions. Do we really need teachers? Do teachers really know more than students? Does a curriclum help or restricts a student's learning? Does forcing people to show up actually helps learning? Does There are a myriad of studies and evidence that can argue that none of those statements are true, and most of what we did in traditional schools suppress instead of foster learning. As we ask more and more questions about how we run a school, we come at the terrifying questions -- do we even need a school for my education? And that's where the idea of homeschool come from -- Not every one needs to go to school to get their education. In fact there are so many different ways to get education, but we are making school becoming the dominant narrative, and they are becoming an unhealthy monopoly in our field of education. The result is that some people never imagined that there could be other ways to get education except school. Many think to go to school means to get education. Many who struggle in traditional schools for various reasons question themselves instead of the school, and develop depression and various mental problems. > "Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes." From the first principle it should be simple -- every one learns differently and every one requires a different education. Some enjoy learning alone and some learn in groups. Some learn by reading books and some learn by directly interacting with the world and doing stuff. Some learn to get a diploma or certicicate, some learn for a particular skill that they hope to apply. The fact that most of us trust an external institution to educate us doesn't mean that's the only way. And once that becomes clear, there is just a huge wide range of opportunities and possibilities opening up for you and your kid. Homeschool in the traidtional sense where a parent or both parents take charge of the education of the child is not the only possibility -- there might be online schools; there might be community learning centers where multiple families of the local community come together; there might be innovative and democratic schools, where there are no curriculm, no teachers, and no timetables; there might be teenagers who drop out of school and who say that they don't need schools for the succes of their lives. There are plenty of exemples whose names are the loudest in the history of humanity including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison. As we say, education is an empowering and enlargening force -- To see the possibilities is the first step -- of yourself and of your education. At the fundamental, this is what education should be all about -- enabling your to explore your own life paths and directe your own life. Homeschool is not for those with special needs, but for those who see past schools as the sole provider of education and have faith in their own ability to educate themselves.