Every few weeks Isabelle gets the kids to cook us some food. Cooking is an essential skill that schools don’t teach.
The kids grab raw ingredients and make some fantastic dishes. I’m always impressed. With all the crap they put in restaurant and ready-to-eat meals it’s a skill worth having.
There are a number of other things I can think of from the top of my head that most schools do not teach that every child really should know about:
- Current affairs
- Domestic skills including laundry and ironing
- A balanced diet and understanding food labels
- Personal finance including investing, debt and mortgages, whether to buy or rent, negotiation
- Some basic understanding of the law and their rights
I feel home school, if done right, prepares kids better for the real world. The fact that the kids have so much time with us, we pass a lot more of our knowledge and experience to them than if they went to school, and frankly no-one will do it with as much passion as us…
The Wonder Years 
Found this blog through quora. A couple things:
1) Clearly, you and your wife have high levels of natural intellect (which is highly heritable). Ceteris paribus, your children probably would have been high achieving in school anyway. See: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
2) The implication from 1) is that homeschooling may be a poor idea for the average family (you may have addressed this elsewhere in your blog). Most people don’t have the ability to teach themselves calculus or french, let alone their children.
3) In that respect, the right way to think about the effect of home schooling is a) accelerated learning: your children will reach academic and intellectual maturity much more quickly. And b) efficiency/risk mitigation: your children will not get caught up in shenanigans at school or waste time sitting in a history class plodding along at a slow pace with unmotivated students.
What your children give up is the typical social upbringing. They will not have stories from secondary school to share with their peers as an adult. They may not learn how to properly manage a social environment, make/manage friendships, how to ask a boy/girl out to the school dance, etc. This is not on the typical schooling curriculum, but with the typical path they at least have the opportunity.
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I totally agree. While I haven’t started homeschooling yet, -soon I will-, I noticed as a home chef, teach my children about cooking, ingredients, local produce and backing benefits them a lot. Schools don’t offer that. Now they are abke to appreciate and understanding the difference between fresh home cooking from eating out.
Also watch documentaries about food, health, cooking with them and discuss it as well have them solid knowledge they haven’t got from school. Beside that, they were able to present few talk about food and health with content beyond what they learned at school.
After one talk, one teacher approached my 10 years old girl, and admitted he learned a lot from her talk and he grateful for her effort.
So yes, School lacks teaching many important aspects of children’s life.
Salam,
Ahmed
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Asim, apologies for the side question, is it better to buy or rent? Do you have any useful reads or links on the topic?
I’m loving your blogs and they’re so inspiring, thank you so much!
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