July 2024

What I find most surprising about other home educators is that they squander the opportunity. I expected weird, eclectic homes full of Lojban immersion or amateur submarining or something, but the questions in Facebook groups suggest homeschools that are more school than school: “what’s a good spelling program after level 7 of All About Spelling?” “How do I fix my 8yo’s stroke order? Handwriting Without Tears unfortunately wasn’t”, and so on.

At the same time, there are plenty of kids who attend ordinary schools but go on to do extraordinary things, often thanks to extracurricular interests. Ideally we could focus on what is actually worth learning, but do so uninterrupted by a school schedule.

My rough plan is to role play the history of science and technology, building everything we can along the way. A few people have asked if I have anything more than a rough plan, and frankly that’s not a bad idea, so here we are.This may be a good time to clarify that I am not a monster, will not coerce my kids into anything against their interest, and am willing to throw all of these “plans” out if say mainstream school looks to be a better fit for them.

We’re early in the process—our kids are currently 5 and 3—so I’ll update this doc as we figure things out. If you have any suggestions or if your interest is otherwise sparked, please reach out.

Socialization

It’s customary that when you meet a home educator, you immediately ask “what about socialization!?” ideally with wide eyes and a subtle shake of the head. This is a challenging question, because really it conceals two. The first asks how we intend to develop our children’s social skills, as if perhaps a playground throng of same aged peers might be a finely tuned training program for ideal social intercourse. The second question is more interesting: what social values will we instill, in the absence of the defaults provided by a government or church run school?

To me, the social value most worth imprinting is that society can be improved not only by other people but by those in our house. The heroes who rescued us from ignorance and poverty were not too different to ourseleves. With enough knowledge and skill, and by respecting progress as a goal to which we must work, we can in fact achieve it. This to me is aggressively pro-social, much more so than the socialization provided by mainstream schools.

I say all of this because it’s important, but also because it’s directive. We can use it to justify our priorities (science and mathematics in particular) and methods (mostly building things, and recapitulation).

Building things

A surprisingly effective educational hack is to just build things. Let’s say your kid is excited to build a go kart, or tree house, or home semiconductor fab. If done thoughtfully, it’s likely that they’ll also pick up some algebra and geometry to keep the tree house walls plumb, some physics to tubrocharge the go kart, perhaps some programming to do parametric CAD, some writing to blog about the project, and so on. I see my role here as supporting the projects, demonstrating how to learn our way through problems, and above all setting a high standard for the quality of the outcome, as this is what generates much of the learning stimulus.This is my own major lesson from a decade of teaching computer science to software engineers: asking them to solve a problem teaches them a little; asking them to do so at a higher standard teaches them a lot.

At opportune points, I’ll also encourage “book learning” that would help them with their projects. Conventional resources are great, once we have real motivation to learn those things that prior generations have worked so hard to distill. Our intellectual elders had their own motivating problems, whether engineering challenges or thought experiments, and assumed we’d pick up their expository text with as much enthusiasm as they originally had to build a reliable clock, say, or improve the efficiency of a steam engine. The primary motivation for seeking a solution is having a problem.

When running low on our own project ideas, we can also just borrow some from the history of science. If Robert Hooke could hack together his own microscopes in the 1660s, then surely we can too. But why stop there? Could we cobble together an electron microscope? What exactly is stopping us from hacking that into a cheap 100 KeV electron cryomicroscope?

Of course, the projects can be much more mundane. A child will learn a lot by building a picture frame. Some of our upcoming projects are likely to be a doll house and an off grid solar electricity system. It doesn’t matter that such things have been built a thousand times before, and we don’t need a clear set of learning objectives in advance: the projects just need to be fun, and real.This is not “Project-Based Learning”, it’s building stuff. The challenge faced by schools that practice “Project-Based Learning” is that they must steer each child away from their own unique promising distraction, and back to the shared, legible project. It’s much easier at home. That said, I’ve enjoyed reading accounts from such schools, particularly The Dewey School.

Hypercapability

I want my girls to develop the confidence that they can do almost anything. This would be irresponsible, though, if they’re not in fact able to do almost anything. So beyond just building those things with some tidy connection to a legible topic, I plan to also just teach them skills that few people have, or that one wouldn’t expect from a preteen girl: welding, chainsawing, assembly programming, and so on. The skills should be in the general realm of science and engineering, but more important is that they are the extreme end of whatever skill sequences interest them.

Of course we need to work our way up to these. We started in the kitchen when they were toddlers, and gradually progressed to the workshop. Not long after their third and fifth birthdays, w built their first woodworking bench together.

Cooking and other household activities are very easy to accommodate to young kids, and there are communities like Montessori who are very thoughtful about these things. Working with paper and cardboard is also easy, and it’s not a particularly big leap to wood, with some thought given to accommodating little hands, such as using Japanese pull saws (easier to use both hands), holding nails with adjustable pliers, finding designs that use only hand tools, and so on.

When they are a little older, I would like them to be confident working wood and acrylic with power tools, laying brick and pouring concrete, and then also working with glass and metal.One project sequence I’m particularly excited to undertake is Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap, a kind of nand2tetris for metal. Broadly, if something can be described as a nand2tetris for X, I’m likely to want to do it! Luckily there is no shortage of jobs on our property that require all of these skills. They should learn any of these things that interest them, as soon as they have the physical capacity. I’d love to see them fabricating our tractor implements, and now that I mention it learning to drive on the tractor as soon as their feet reach the pedals. There are ample opportunities in the local community, too. We have an antique machinery club that restores stationary engines and heavy machinery, and our local volunteer fire fighting service welcomes junior members to help maintain the pumps and other equipment.

Electronics and programming fit here too. These are areas of knowledge but also skills to be developed. Schools tend to focus much more on the former, but I feel it’s the latter that’s most worth taking seriously.

Much of what we learn will be new to me too, so we will learn together. The meta lesson is that we can figure out what we don’t already know, sometimes directly from others, other times through adapting prior skills, occasionally by what feels like pure invention. All of this I think of as “hypercapability”: an improbable or unexpected amount of general ability. It is illegible, hard to form into a “curriculum”, and impossible in a typical school. But I believe it’ll be core to our homeschool culture.

History of science and technology

My confidence that the world is malleable stems from the thousands of clear accounts we have of how it was shaped in the past. If you hear only the folk story of how something came to be, it tends to feel like divine inspiration or rare genius, whereas when you learn the true history, it starts to resolve into a sequence of smaller, methodical steps, perhaps worth studying and emulating.As far as I know, there is no progress studies curriculum for children. Perhaps there should be!

This should encourage us to learn a lot of history, not so much of wars and emperors but of the titans of science and industry.I am not so sure about history more broadly. Most curricula I’ve encountered are uninteresting or untrustworthy, and most people survive with a negligible understanding of history overall. The history that is both taught in and retained from school tends to be for the purpose of socialization more than edification: a student in one country is likely to learn a very different set of histories to those in another. None of this is to say that it is not worthwhile, only that I have some cover, I believe, for treating history as something to be mostly integrated into our study of other topics, particularly science and mathematics. Of course we should learn it with our whole bodies, through recapitulation. The added benefit is that recapitulation can be a good default pedagogical style. It’s easy to get excited about a real historical problem, with vivid characters and conflict, and set ourselves the challenge of solving the same problem in our own way.

The book that I feel we’ll reach for most frequently in our homeschool library is The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell. The publishers suggest that this is “the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors” of a collapsed society. What better spine book for our entire educational experience?His further reading recommendations are also fantastic. Of course there is also more serious scholarship on the history of science and technology, in fact I have a bookshelf worth for when we’re curious about a detail that that’s not covered by Dartnell. But I think The Knowledge is a great starting point for us as much as anybody else following our general pattern. There are also some fantastic books on the topic written for kids, such as the Joy Hakim Story of Science books, and the truly wonderful “How Did We Find Out” series by Isaac Asimov. In it, Dartnell outlines the motivating context and key insights behind humanity’s most important innovations: in agriculture, food and textiles, chemicals, medicine, energy and communication. Whether we replay these discoveries in a historically faithful way, or take a few shortcuts, I’d like for us to rebuild a good subset of humanity’s greatest hits in science and technology.

Milieu of agency

I don’t love the particular norms instilled by mainstream schools, but I must admit they’re effective at instilling them. Kids invariably absorb the culture in which they are suspended. So, I’d like for our school environment to involve a kind of milieu of agency. I am not yet sure how to do this, but it is likely to involve a lot of time in the SF Bay Area, visits to industrial centers worldwide, summer camps with other high agency kids, and so on.Travel is also important for my children to appreciate the diversity of human experience. Like most parents, I would like my kids to not be entirely clueless about how different are other peoples’ experience of the world. This is in part so that they themselves can enjoy more of the richness of life, through being able to relate to more of it, and in part so that they can better understand themselves. I’m sure I will have more to say on this as I figure it out.

Knowing thyself

One awkward aspect of talking about “education” is that the more generally you speak, the more you are wrong.

We are all different: born with different genes to different parents, with aspects of our environment that resist change. Understanding one’s own preferences, along with one’s unique strengths and opportunities, are for therefore worthwhile.

It’s also the only sensible way to conclude that the world is malleable by individuals like us: we have our own levers to stick in some places, but not others. So I hope that by the end of their homeschooling journey, my kids are able to say that they have come to know themselves quite well, and that they weren’t left entirely to figure this out on their own in their twenties.

Unfortunately it would make little sense to have a curriculum for this. Instead we plan to weave opportunities for self understanding into other activities: travel, sports,I’ve personally seen how certain sports, practiced in certain ways, can be an ideal way to meet one’s ego face to face, to see the gap between one’s desires and one’s abilities, and to appreciate what it takes to bridge that gap. For me this is a frequent lesson in my practice of jiu jitsu, but I could see it occurring in many other sports too. creative pursuits,Drama and improvisational theater in particular seem to be fruitful way to explore one’s connection to others. It was a revelation for me to read Keith Johnstone’s Impro and understand all at once how we play status roles with one another throughout life, real productive work and business, and so on. There is no textbook An Introduction to Knowing Thyself, although it has been written about many times, most vividly for me in The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon.See this review by John Psmith in particular, for an elucidation of the major lesson in this context.

Reading

Mainstream schooling emerged largely to increase literacy rates, and this is the primary official measure of a country’s success at educating its population. Yet surprisingly, reading instruction remains underrated: we typically teach reading too late, too haphazardly, and with insufficient enthusiasm. To me, it is the most important gateway skill. The vast majority of articulated human knowledge is written.

We should strive to teach reading as early as possible, to maximize its compounding returns. We should also find ways to do it effectively: expeditiously, with joy, and in a way that the child’s excitement to read takes on a life of its own. I have written about early reading previously so won’t repeat myself. But in short, the ideal is a six month, intensive, phonetics based approach that has the child reading independently before reaching “school age” or shortly thereafter.

At this point, you are done! No need for additional effort to teach reading of advanced texts, or specific reading comprehension, or whatever else devoted to reading in “English language arts” curricula… this can just come naturally through your conversations with them about what they choose to read, and later through synthesizing their own thoughts in the context of writing.

Writing

While most people can write, surprisingly few people do write. However, those who think most clearly and contribute the most to our collective understanding of the world tend to be excellent writers. This suggests that writing is underrated, and that we should not only teach our children to write well, but to do so in a way that establishes it as a lifelong practice.

I don’t think this needs a curriculum, however. If anything, the curricula I’ve seen do more harm than good,One approach I do like is Bernard Nebel’s, articulated in Nebel’s Elementary Education as essentially “write a book for everything”. For younger kids, you can cut and fold a single page into a little 8 page booklet, in which they can write a story or about a topic of interest, perhaps with illustrations. These are great to share with grandparents and the like. Over time, the “books” should get longer, and the audiences broader, and the process of improving one’s writing should feel fun and natural. coercing students into a form of writing that they are unlikely to sustain for long. We should encourage our kids to write about whatever interests them, and as much as possible for real audiences, so that they directly experience the value of writing for themselves.

As with any major skill, the learner should also see how the same investment has yielded dividends for the teacher. Hi, kids!

Handwriting

Writing is done in the mind, though, not in the hands. It is baffling to me that some home educators spend hundreds of hours and an immeasurable amount of goodwill to teach handwriting. I can’t think of few worse programs than Handwriting Without Tears, an actual real life K-5 curriculum whose name I am not making up.

We should teach our kids to type, until even better input modalities arise,We use a game called Typing Land. It is great, but there are also many others. and remind them that the essence of writing is composition, not calligraphy.If they want to learn calligraphy, that’s great too! Learn it as an art, not as an aspect of writing. None of the important writing they do will be by hand, so we should simply not waste our energy on extensive handwriting instruction. Hopefully this paragraph has saved you a few hundred hours of labor, and some tears.

Spelling

It can be frustrating and time consuming to learn to spell English words precisely and without the aid of spellchecking tools. I initially worried about this, and explored what I feel are some of the better methods for spelling instruction such as Structured Word Inquiry. I’m also personally interested in etymology and the history of English orthography, so thought I might eventually incorporate some of this into homeschooling. However my current view is that none of this is likely to be of much value for most kids, relative to other things we could be doing, and that the natural feedback of spellcheck tools is sufficient and getting better all the time.

Other “English Language Arts”

I also see little value in direct instruction of grammar, or most of what seems to constitute curricula for the teaching of “English”. One exception is that it may be worthwhile to directly teach word roots, as a way to expedite the natural process of becoming familiar with the extremities of the English language, by systematically breaking longer or rarer words down to individually understood components. This is a commonly stated rationale for teaching Latin or Classical Greek, but it seems much easier to just teach the roots directly and skip the rest of these languages.

Overall I feel like there’s little value in teaching “English Language Arts” in a structured way, beyond a phonics based reading program. I do believe that there’s tremendous value in learning to write well, and to continually broaden one’s ability to use the language, but this is best done organically and by example, not through formal instruction.

Mathematics

Along with reading, arithmetic is one of the few areas that I feel are so valuable as to be non negotiable. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial here. I want my kids to be fluent enough in their numeracy that they can take a very concrete, quantitative approach to other topics without feeling held back by their ability to perform calculations in their head.

The areas of mathematics that enable science are also highly valuable and should be taken seriously: geometry, algebra, calculus, statistics and probability, perhaps a handful of related areas. I don’t think this needs to be a grueling decade long trek from “pre-algebra” through one preparatory topic to another to finally get to the prize of calculus at the end. I hope it’s a matter of identifying the right moment to introduce a new topic, ideally in the context of motivating science or engineering problems, then immersing ourselves in it.

Again I think there’s much to learn from the history of the development of these topics, as well as through construction projects. Consider for instance the curriculum I threw together covering arithmetic and basic computation the sequence of projects includes making:

• Cuneiform tablets
• A Roman tabula and/or Japanese Soroban
• A Vitruvian style odometer
• A mechanical counter
• Laser cut replica of a Pascaline
• 3D printed Curta replica
• Breadboard binary adder

There’s also a lot of great early math material and even curricula available commercially. So far we have primarily used Beast Academy for conceptual coverage, and Matific for additional practice. We also incorporate a large number of games, fun calculations, math themed story books and much more. The Kitchen Table Math books are a great starting point for this kind of thing, as they provide overviews of the skill sequences as well as specific suggestions for games and other resources. Everything we’ve tried from Math For Love has been great too.

Young kids love stories.The best articulation of this, that I’ve seen, is by Kieran Egan in The Educated Mind For those not yet interested in the power and use of mathematics, there’s a whole genre of kid’s books that introduce math concepts through stories instead. Ours particularly like the Mathstart books by Stuart Murphy, and the Sir Cumference series.

For mathematics that doesn’t yet or only tangentially finds application in science and engineering, I feel that it’s worth supporting any interest that happens to arise, but not being disappointed or too persistent if it doesn’t. I personally enjoy mathematics irrespective of the application, and could argue that its practice develops general skills in problem solving. But, so do many other topics, which may happen to be of more interest to my kids. We will see.

Physics

Much of classical physics is immensely interesting, fun and empowering. Most of the physical projects I have in mind for us have some amount of physics behind them, particularly classical mechanics and electromagnetism, but also thermodynamics. Thankfully we have random pumps and whatnot fail on the property all the time, so we will have motivating physics projects whether we’d like to or not!

Early physics is also ripe with fun project ideas, as far back as Archimedean machines or further, through Alhazen and then Newton’s simple optics experiments, Gilbert’s debunking of magnetism myths in De Magnete, Galilean experiments rolling cannonballs on rooftops, building our own telescopes, and really all manner of scientific instruments.

This all gets much harder with modern physics, but that is fine! I honestly think most modern physics can be omitted from our curriculum unless there is a particular interest. I would rather reach a solid undergraduate level understanding of classical physics than spend time on the kind of handwavy verbal treatment of modern physics that constituted much of the physics curriculum when I was in high school.

I also have a chip on my shoulder about Physics Olympiad, which I took an interest in but for which I received no support from my parents and teachers. I would be excited to see my kids develop that level of interest, as the practice of real problem solving in Physics (and as far as I know, other) Olympiads is highly worthwhile. Of course this is not something to be pushed, and again there are many paths to a similar goal.

Chemistry

When I talk to people a second or third time about homeschooling, they brace in preparation for me to scream “CAVEMAN CHEMISTRY!” like a maniac. It really is a fantastic book, like the nand2tetris of the physical world. You start by making fire, and soon you recrystalize potassium carbonate from the ashes,Aren’t you mad that nobody told you the word “potassium” comes from “potash”? Let alone, showed you how to make good use of fireplace ashes like this? which use later as flux while smelting bronze, in a crucible you make yourself, and so on through to glass and plastics and much more.

Like physics, so many of the projects we’d be excited to do will motivate some chemistry, and so many developments in the history of both industry and academic chemistry are worthy of recapitulation. Did you know that hydrogen is named so because it was originally a mystery gas that caused water vapor to form on glasswear when burnt? Did you realize that the apparatus that early chemists like Cavendish and Lavoisier used to show this is straightforward to make at home?

There are also piles of books on chemistry experiments, although a lot of them have been lobotomized over time due to “safety” concerns. There are a few like this one that keep most of the explosive fun of older chemistry books, or you could seek out classics.

Biology

For physics and chemistry, a lot of our home schooling will focus on what was established in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For biology, the last 100 years have brought incredible insight into how living things work. The genetic code wasn’t determined until the 1960s, and much of the cell is still mysterious.

I am not so sure how we are going to do biology justice. Natural history is easier, as we enjoy doing nature walks and paying attention to living things in general, and this leads to an ongoing effort to understand it better. We also grow some of our own food, which provides a little motivation to understand general biology at a functional level.

On the other hand, much of what is amazing about life is not only microscopic, but beyond the limits of an optical microscope. I’m not happy with the idea that we would learn the rest of science by building things and recapitulating history, while we learn molecular biology from textbooks.

Thankfully at least some of the equipment is easy to make or acquire cheaply, particularly if we are not so concerned about accuracy. PCR machines, centrifuges, and gel electrophoresis boxes for instance should all be straightforward. I know there are also providers of kits for genetic engineering experiments. But this still feels limited, and rather far from Freeman Dyson’s Biotech Future.

Did I mention it would be nice to hack together a cheap electron cryomicroscope?

Programming and computer science

People expect me to have a lot to say about programming and computer science, since I spent a decade teaching it to adults. Some expected me to give my girls the Laszlo Polgar treatment, which would have had me teaching them BASIC at age four or something. I do think there’s a tremendous amount of joy and power that comes from being able to understand computers, and to control them. Of course I’m excited to share my hobby and erstwhile profession with them, as soon as they develop the interest. But we are not yet really there yet, we are just playing around at the edges.

What we have done so far (mostly for our 5yo, with the 3yo playing along a little):

• Lightbot! This was high ROI and a lot of fun.
• Robot Turtles board game (quickly too easy for 5yo, could have played it earlier, probably not all that worthwhile either way)
• Code.org express course (a custom Scratch, not bad)
• Playing around with a vintage Rami from Quercetti … not very useful yet but I still have hopes
• Playing Human Resource Machine together: still a little hard but we’ll come back to it
• Pair programming OpenSCAD to make their own little 3D printed toys: a big hit but may be a year or two before I’m no longer doing 90% of the work
• Most of all, we take turns to “program” each other, where they or I act as robots, and we give each other clear instructions to e.g. eat an icecream or go up an elevator

I think we’ll keep just playing like this until the interest picks up a little more. I’m most optimistic about programming to actually build something they want, perhaps to 3D print, perhaps something more artistic like a Blot project.

I also think it’ll be useful for them to see me writing code to solve problems in a way that look like magic. So far I’ve done this for little math problems and even that has come across as impressive. It’s easy to forget how exciting it can be to control a computer.

As they get older, assuming they’re interested in coding, it’d be great for them to fall in with a community like Hack Club, and/or to participate in something a little competitive like FIRST Robotics. I am not very familiar with the Informatics Olympiad but am generally in favor of olympiads and similar competitions, since they can provide a large body of practice problems, as well as a little community interaction and the fun of competing. The hazard of course is that it shouldn’t be taken as an important goal, so much as a game that might be fun to take seriously. We do occasionally do some Bebras problems occasionally, which both the girls find fun.

From what I’ve seen, the mainstream “learn to code” stuff is mostly joyless and soulless. So I’ll stick to an eclectic mix of gamelike programming and building stuff we actually care about.

Economics

Other than literacy as discussed above, I’m mostly suspending judgment on most areas of humanities education for now. I have a clear idea of how science, technology, engineering and mathematics education fits into our plans, and some confidence that we will pursue it effectively. I have less confidence in history, “geography” (effectively required, in our jurisdiction) and various forms of “social science” other than economics. That is not to say that I won’t support their study, only that I won’t focus on it.

Economics stands out as its claims can be unambiguously debated and often directly tested. It is also of high utility, particularly introductory microeconomics. I certainly want my kids to understand incentives, supply and demand, comparative advantage, and so on. I would also like them to have the skill of “solving for the equilibrium”, a practice most notable in social science among economists. I am not yet sure about specific curricula.

Business

My wife and I have both run businesses, including small bootstrapped businesses and larger venture backed companies. We’re both confident that running a business is a fantastic lens through which to see the world: how it is that wealth can be created rather that redistributed, how resources can be well utilized, how to identify and amplify a person’s talents, how to appreciate incentives, and much more. It should also motivate some aspects of economics, and potentially provide a way to start producing something substantial for the world rather than just learning about it.

It feels obvious that we should encourage our kids to start businesses: many of them, whether local or online, scalable or not, in any area that interests them. I haven’t thought much yet about how best to do this. I’m sure there are educational communities out there that do this well. My sense again is that it’s not about any kind of curriculum so much as providing a supportive environment for them to find joy in this activity.

Personal finance

I would also like to convey something about personal finance. I’m not sure how to teach this, only that some people tend to pick it up later than they ought to. I was fortunate to have been shown the major ideas, by a friend, when I had just started university. The important principles are straightforward and don’t need a class so much as opportune timing and good role models.

Sport and exercise

There are half a dozen good reasons to integrate sports into a homeschool structure: social, physical, even metacognitive. Any one of these seems sufficient to justify an hour or two of most days to be dedicated to sport of some kind. Consider that few of the other goals in this plan are so important as to sacrifice one’s health, and exercise is a good way to maintain it. Consider too that if one exercises with reasonable intensity, it rarely depletes energy needed for other things. All of this is to say I expected we will spend a good amount of time in the week being active.

A major piece of wisdom I wish I’d picked up earlier is that one ought to find the form of exercise that suits them: it should feel fun, perhaps even addictive. It is not important to find the “ideal” form of exercise, and in fact others’ suggestions to run or lift weights may be counterproductive, as you may try these things and find that them to be a chore, compared to a sport that provides 80% the health benefits but that you find 10x more enjoyable. So this suggests providing many opportunities to try different forms of exercise, and not to push any particular one.

But it would be great if they do jiu jitsu! As with much of this list, we plan to lead by example.

Metacognition and teaching

It seems fitting to end recursively. I think it’s valuable to learn how to learn, and a little about how to teach. Lifelong learners seem to be more fulfilled and more broadly successful. Those who can coach and mentor make an outsized contribution to society. As with all of the above, I don’t believe learning and teaching can be learnt incidentally, any more than tennis can be learnt from the stands. It’s not even enough to go and play tennis casually: it needs to be done thoughtfully, reflectively, and if serious, with some coaching. This I see as part of my job, too.