And so here we are. What began as a move of desperation now appears to me to be the only way to properly educate children. I understand that it’s not for everyone for a number of reasons.

1. It requires that there is only one, maybe one and a half, breadwinners in the family. With the current economic assault on everyone by The Rich, this is becoming more and more difficult to achieve. However, in areas where homeschooling is not such an oasis in the desert as it is here, there may be a way of cobbling together a co-op system with a group of parents with varying skills and experiences.
2. It requires a major throttling back of unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved in a given amount of time. (That, I believe, is where I went wrong with LD and I readily admit paying the price for my unreasonableness now.) Baby steps first….
3. It requires an immense sense of confidence, not only in yourself but in your children.
4. It requires constant adjustments and tweaking. No egos allowed here!

The fact that those reasons appear contradictory indicates the complexity of mindset and expectations required if you’re going to make homeschooling work.

Where does that leave the kids? One of the PUKS Masters disparagingly asked us what we were going to do with TW when we’d finished homeschooling him to Senior year/Form Six. “Tell him to go out and get a job, I suppose,” he said. It was only because, at that time, I was still holding hopes of having LD accepted there that I held the inevitable retort of calling him a pretentious, self-righteous, impolite wanker.

“No,” I replied instead. “During that time, I’ll be preparing him for pre-University exams. I believe those are independent of schools.”

I believe, if I have planned this right, that TW will be ready to take his pre-U exams when he’s 15. And, if so, it will mean that he would have spent no more than four and a half years in a formal school system.

As for LD…well, we’re waiting. There was something that sparked in TW and he blossomed. Could the same happen with her? I see flashes of it every now and then. TW is living proof of the plasticity of intelligence and we are hoping for something similar with our daughter. But, in case that doesn’t happen, we still have the flexible system that she’s currently schooling under and that we’re constantly adjusting. There’s no way a traditional school system can hope to match the nimbleness of our current framework and, at this stage, I’m not even willing to put her back there to try.

And so that’s the tale of the atheist homeschooler. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

We are now in the third quarter of 2011, by my retelling. Our overwhelming feeling is that our kids have been treated as nothing more than guinea pigs by people who had boasted to us about their years and experience in education. Years that we readily admitted we didn’t have. We fell for their spiel to “trust them”. And, by turns (with the one notable exception of Boon Lay), our children were ignored, assaulted, bullied, insulted and yelled out by people who were in positions of authority over them.

I don’t know if I can adequately explain the sense of burning rage I still feel as I type these words, and that anger has not diminished. But still, despite all that, we had hopes for Prestigious UK School (PUKS for short). We went along and had several meetings with them.

I pause now so I can give you some context. Our son? TW? The one who was “severely retarded”? He’s two years ahead of his age in English and at least one year ahead in Maths and Science. Putting him in a regular school, we thought, would actually stunt him at this stage. PUKS told us that school would begin at 8:30am and that kids would get home by 5:15pm. That was the equivalent of a full working day, plus homework on top of that. That would leave no time for TW to indulge in his other passions of movie-making, game design and learning graphics and computer animation (all of which he currently does outside homeschool hours).

LD was another issue. There’s an old adage that says you should treat your children equally. Bullshit. Children are individuals and that means tailoring your demands to their personalities. However I was teaching was working with TW but was causing major tissue avalanches with LD. After some enquiries, I discovered a tuition system that was Kumon-like and close by. Encouraging independent working, they would take LD through Maths and English twice a week. But was this enough? We enrolled LD for those twice-weekly classes while we considered PUKS.

Tbh, I considered PUKS the superior choice. I could work on TW at home and LD, a really sweet and caring kid, could do what was so important to her and develop relationships outside the family circle.

I so wanted PUKS to be the answer. And then they turned out to be like everyone else we’d encountered. We heard the same old statements we’d heard before. “We have values that all children must adhere to….” “Our years of experience in education….” “You understand that, during the Primary years, we won’t be concentrating on academic performance at all….” “We have an excellent Sports programme….”

There were two death knells. The first came when we couldn’t even get a provisional place for LD. Oh, they went on about what a wonderful child she is, based on a one-on-one interview they conducted with her, but they wouldn’t even give us a tentative answer as to whether she’d be accepted in PUKS. They would have to wait for a Psychologist’s Report and — and these are my words — how much work they would need to exert before they could give us their final decision. They had already told us that they were over-subscribed and so not every child would get in. And, once more, we felt we were being set up for a fall. (We’re still going through with the psychological assessment, but that will be for our own benefit.)

The second was when the Head told us quite baldly at the end of our last discussion that we couldn’t expect their system (even with a given that there going to be a Learning Support component added) to cater to LD.

And it was like a lightbulb exploding in my head. Hold on a sec, I thought. Right now, I do have a system that specifically caters to LD. To my surprise, she was really taking to the outside tuition classes and, in the alternate days when I was schooling her, I was seeing improvements in her attitude and the quality of her work. I was also working on other, multi-sensory methods to help her with Maths and, to a lesser extent because she doesn’t seem to need it so much, English. Add violin, Wushu, Dance, and UK-accredited Speech & Drama classes, and I was still spending less than RM6,000 a year and getting out of it (I thought) a pretty well-rounded child.

PUKS was telling me that they were unable to be all things to all children and expected us to shell out RM60,000 for that first year of schooling (almost twice the average annual wage). Plus uniforms plus food plus extra-curricular activities plus a four-figure non-refundable registration fee, and so on.

Why would I give up a totally personalised, completely customised, eminently flexible, lightweight system that was working, for one that was rigid, inflexible, ponderous, with no guarantees, at TEN TIMES THE PRICE???

When I finally got my hands on the kids, and put them through their paces, I was appalled. We had been paying high school fees and I discovered that both kids had actually regressed. LD, at the age of eight, couldn’t even repeat the alphabet!

But we had an advantage. Being foreigners, we fell straight through the cracks of local federal regulations. Thus, if I wanted to, I could teach or not teach my children however I pleased.

J and I sat and discussed our options. There were a number of schools being built in our area. We would wait until one was open and enrol the kids there. In the meantime, I would homeschool. And that’s how it began. It was a move of desperation and we always thought that the time would come when we’d fold our children back into the traditional schooling mix.

The first six months were the worst, as I well admit. Per an old blog post:

Well, I had the kind of super-obsessive, “Asian tiger” parents that I detest but I have to admit they did a good job on brainwashing me. So I had to get rid of all that “it’s A’s or it’s nothing” shit (including the classic “you only got 99% for that exam; I refuse to talk to you for the entire day”) that made my own childhood such a misery. Forming new disciplinary pathways in my brain took months, to be honest. Months to relax into the kind of attitude that put comprehension, fostering an air of exploration, and questioning above 100-question drills on how to add mixed numbers. (Not that I don’t do that, but that’s usually at the end when the kids can do all that in their sleep!)

And when I started to relax, I branched out a bit, searching out resources on the Net. (There are no local homeschoolers to talk to.) LD looked like she was suffering from both dyslexia and dyscalculia, but there were also flashes of brilliance that made me catch my breath.

I totalled the amount of money that we had spent on school fees and told J that I was funnelling that amount into homeschooling. He readily agreed. I bought workbooks, reading books, learning systems and DVD courses. I set up a smartboard system to use at home. We bought the kids new laptops. We enrolled them in some external classes. And do you know what? With all that expense (and I spent money on whatever looked promising, figuring we’d assess its worth once we started using it) I still wasn’t spending a fifth of what we’d thrown down the drain at the local private school.

That made us think. What exactly were we paying for in a private school?

I would spend half a day teaching the kids, test them, and still give them enough remaining time for them to indulge in their own interests (which, increasingly, seem to encompass making their own movies and games). Given the choice, without any kind of persuasion on my part, our children would prefer to storyboard a short movie than sit down and watch TV.

But how could this be? Weren’t we told that the “best” system was the public/private schooling system? That homeschooling parents were somehow “cheating” their children out of much-needed social and cognitive development? Yet, when I watched our own kids, that wasn’t what I was seeing at all.

Something wasn’t gelling.

As these heretical thoughts swirled around in my brain, two things happened. One very prestigious UK-based school announced that it was opening a campus ten minutes away from us. And LD started to burst into tears the moment she tackled any difficult problem.

Let me get one thing straight before I begin. J and I loved school. (I may not have liked what went on around school, like the bullying and the name-calling, but school itself…brilliant!) We were very good students ourselves. And, until fairly recently, were gung-ho proponents  of yer basic, federally-supervised, school system.

Our story actually started back in Australia, when The Wast was at the beginning of his schooling career. Now, TW has always been a bit of a “different” child…shy, a bit obsessive and stubborn. But, as parents, we could always see the intelligence lurking under that shield of obstinate near-silence. In our ignorance, we expected teachers (i.e. people with actual degrees in Education) to be able to discern part of that too. They didn’t. What the teachers proved to us was that they were super-quick to jump to conclusions, even after admitting they had no training in pedagogy or child psychology, and we have the reports on our “severely retarded” and “highly autistic” son to prove it.

When we moved to Singapore, and TW joined an International School (a move I was dead against, btw, because I had attended an International School and saw them as nothing more than social clubs for children), things didn’t improve. Again, he was accused of being developmentally challenged. When we paid for tests and got the results that said that he was “normal” (whatever that means), the school still didn’t believe it.

With, we thought, nothing left to lose, we put TW in a publicly-funded Singaporean school. (Hi there, Boon Lay Garden Primary School!) And, for whatever reason, he thrived! He became one of the class monitors and started scoring straight As in his subjects. It was as if a light switch had been clicked on. We still don’t know what, why or how it happened.

When we moved to Malaysia, we reluctantly made the decision to school the kids locally, and here’s where I start the tale of our second child, Little Dinosaur.

Both children were emergency, premature births, but LD spent a month in the hospital’s Special Unit that TW didn’t. We were warned that her complicated birth would have ramifications, and the ramifications came home to roost while we were switching from Singapore to Malaysia.

We put the kids in the top private school in Johor state at that time. And then, over the space of two years, we started to notice a deterioration in both our children’s performance. TW was bored and LD was being ignored in classrooms of 36 and 37 students. If you add the Great Tuition Scam, then it was a travesty.

All the school seemed interested in was making as much money out of status-conscious parents as it could. But, if we wanted our children to be educated in English, it appeared we had no choice. We had to stick to private schools.

The breaking point finally came when a repeat offender younger boy stabbed my daughter in the thigh with a pencil. The school actually forced LD, in front of the principal, vice-principal, her class teacher and the boy’s teacher, to say she “forgave” him and the school considered the matter closed. To my mind, that was coercion of the worst kind (where do I begin?) and there was only one solution: pull the kids out of school.