Our daughter is almost two years old, and we’re moving closer to her school age at a very fast rate. As teachers, my husband and I have been seriously studying our options for her schooling ever since I was pregnant. We know that sending her to big school is the much easier route and the status quo most especially here in the Philippines, but there’s a form of education on the rise that we strongly resonate with: homeschooling.

It appeals to us in more ways than one, and we believe it perfectly aligns with our life goals and family values.

Allow me to discuss that further.

Our daughter can already identify colors, sound out letters, recite numbers from one to ten, sing nursery rhymes, and echo the words we say. She learned these through playing, reading books, watching videos, and interacting with us here at home.

My husband and I understand that once we send her to regular school, these skills will be tested using pencil and paper very early on. Scores will be assigned, and high scores will be rewarded. Best performing kids in class will be recognized every quarter or term. The awarding of meritorious learners to mark end of quarters and school years will be ingrained in our child’s system, whether we like it or not. She may wrongly interpret it as the end goal for learning.

Tests, scores, achievements, and medals have their own merits, but we don’t believe in introducing them to our daughter at a very young age. For us, values and character formation are far more important to be instilled through play or practical daily tasks.

Life in regular school can be really fast paced. With a packed curriculum, learners are expected to acquire a range of knowledge and skills to meet the standards for their level. Unfortunately, many students advance to the next level without knowing how to read and comprehend simple texts – a heartbreak for teachers like my husband and I who firmly believe that reading is a fundamental skill for learning.

Through homeschooling, our daughter will be able to take things at a slower pace. We’ll make sure she’ll be given time to get lost in books and genuinely enjoy the words and worlds they create.

Having sky high numerical grades in school is not equivalent to knowing how to communicate well. As a language teacher, I also don’t believe that strengthening communication skills can be achieved with rigorous grammar drills and graded tests alone. They may help, but they may not directly address the learners’ deeper need to express themselves.

Communication skills are always relevant, even in a technologically-driven society. Reading fine print, exchanging messages through emails and chats, receiving instructions and feedback, and speaking one’s mind with respect to people and context are core skills we aim for our daughter to master as we homeschool her.

In school, the words “problem solving” are usually associated with Math. But most of the things in life require problem solving skills. I am reminded of this every time my daughter forces her long crayon inside her small-doored garage toy, to no avail. She gets frustrated, but she eventually figures out that her long crayon can go inside her garage if she puts it through the window instead.

We are excited to involve her in our everyday tasks here at home to see how she finds solutions using whatever she’s given.

It’s true that there will be no school bus rides nor lunch time with friends everyday when we homeschool, but I believe that’s how our daughter will learn how to value the time with people she interacts with. It can be just us most days, but it can be different in some days depending on the supplementary classes she’s going to take.

We are open to bringing her to different homes and places so she can learn how people move in different times and spaces. We also commit to expose her to people young and old, so she’s not missing on interacting with people from different age groups. Through homeschooling, we also aim to teach her that when it comes to relationships, the more isn’t always the merrier. The quality of her relationships with people matters more.

With a schedule in regular school that will eat up most of her day, there’s hardly ever a time for our child to pursue her passions, most especially if these passions do not fall under the major subjects. We will closely observe and intently listen to what she’s inclined with, so she can learn all about it sooner than later.

There are a lot of things I wish I learned in school, and most of them are things that support independence, such as saving, budgeting, scheduling, organizing, and prioritizing. We believe that there’s no “right” grade level to teach these skills, for if our daughter is ready to grasp the ideas, then we introduce them right away.

We can’t wait to turn banks, wet markets, groceries, malls, offices, event halls, and other places as her “classroom for the day.”

There’ll be plenty of time for her to be an adult, but only a limited time for her to be a child. It can be really stressful to be in school and perform well in school. By saying this, we don’t wish to shield her from stressors for life, and we don’t wish to cloister her from the harsh realities of the world. We just believe that there’s another way for her to learn her basics minus all the stress that a kid doesn’t deserve to experience just yet.

We’ll let her play, read, sing, dance, make a mess out of things and put them back together, win and lose, struggle and triumph, and learn and fail. With homeschooling, we’ll be right beside her to guide her through it all.