In 2014, my child’s mother and I made a decision that drew a lot of head-shaking from family and friends: we pulled our child out of school and enrolled them in non-school experimental education, what most people simply call homeschooling.
When we made the decision, my child was still young. The reactions around us followed a predictable pattern: “Are you sure about this?” “What about university admissions later?” “Won’t they fall out of step with society?”
Some people were more diplomatic about it. Others said it plainly: “Aren’t you being too idealistic?”
I don’t hold it against them. In Taiwan’s social context, “leaving school” carries an almost inherently rebellious charge, as though you’re repudiating the path everyone else has walked.
But my motivation was genuinely practical. As an entrepreneur, I faced the frontiers of industry disruption every day. I watched the environment reshape the definition of work. I watched globalization redraw the competitive landscape. I watched the half-life of knowledge grow shorter and shorter. Then I turned back to look at conventional schooling: of everything it spends twelve years teaching children, what fraction will still be useful a decade from now?
The gap was too large to ignore.
The design and execution of this path was primarily my doing. My child’s mother supported it throughout, giving me the room to try.
Peeling Off the Romantic Label
I should say this clearly from the start: self-directed education is not a utopia.
Much of what you read online about homeschooling is too romantic. “Let children freely explore their gifts.” “Learning in nature.” “Innovation that breaks the mold.” These narratives sound beautiful. Walk into the reality, though, and you find it is full of grey, including real friction and conflict with your child.
After several years, I’ve distilled a few honest observations. (A note: this piece was originally written in 2016.)
Homeschooling is accompaniment, not outsourcing. You cannot hand money to an institution or consultant and expect them to sort out your child’s education. That’s no different, in essence, from sending the child to school. Self-directed education demands deep parental involvement, not the kind where you supervise homework, but the kind where you think together: What are we learning today? Why this? What does it mean for his future?
Homeschooling is not a shortcut to college. If you still believe at heart in academic credentialism, good school, good degree, good job, then staying in the conventional system is the smarter choice. The rules of that game were designed for university admission, and children inside the system will always hold the home-field advantage. Homeschooling offers a lot, but “efficiently obtaining a diploma” is not on the list.
Homeschooling is a co-venture. This is the analogy I reach for most often. You and your child are running an educational enterprise together. The product is the curriculum; the user is your child. You do market research (understand their interests and capacities), develop the product (design the learning content), run user testing (observe how the child responds and grows), and iterate continuously (adjust based on what you learn).
And like any venture, the uncertainty is extreme. A regulation passing doesn’t mean the system is ready. A good homeschool community exists today and may dissolve tomorrow. You think you’ve found a promising direction, and six months later your child’s interests have turned completely.
After so many years on this unconventional path, I’m reluctant to speak with too much certainty. Honestly, I often couldn’t see clearly what lay ahead. There was real confusion and doubt, even the fear that I might be harming my child. But confusion and commitment are not mutually exclusive. I never seriously considered turning back. It was more like a conviction that grew stronger precisely because the road ahead was unclear. Choosing a path with no footprints means accepting from the start that no one can guarantee the destination. You get lost, and you keep going.
Choosing self-directed education is a reckoning with industrial civilization and capitalist life. It is not a methodological choice, it is a philosophical one. You choose to believe that education is not only about helping a child “succeed” within existing systems, but about giving them the capacity to define success for themselves in a world that will not stop changing.
The Adults Who Fall Short
The hardest problems on the homeschool path aren’t curriculum design or learning pace. They are people.
Specifically: educators who are not up to the task.
Once, the children were participating together in a learning project. Work they had invested a great deal of time in was taken by the supervising teacher for commercial use, without asking us first. We found out later, when we saw it appear on social media.
My child was furious. It was the first time someone in a position of authority over him had done something he recognized as wrong. His response was immediate: “This is so unfair!”
I agreed completely. It was unfair.
But it was also an educational opportunity. One that almost never appears inside conventional schooling.
Gentle, Courteous Resistance
I asked my child: You feel this is unfair, good. Your anger makes sense. But what do you plan to do about it?
You could stew in silence and curse that teacher a hundred times in your head. You could vent to friends and make sure everyone knows how bad he is. You could pretend nothing happened and tell yourself “keeping the peace matters more.”
Or you could do something harder and more valuable: get clear on what you think, and then say it to him, gently, politely, but without backing down.
I encouraged the last option. We worked together to organize the facts, walked through possible versions of the conversation, and thought through how to respond if he pushed back.
The process took several days. More time than any academic assignment had ever required.
Eventually, my child found the courage to go and talk to that teacher. What came out was probably about a third as strong as what we had practiced. But he said it. In his own words, he stated his position.
That moment felt a hundred times more important than scoring full marks on any exam.
The Muscle of Resistance
In my piece “Emotions Live in Relationships Too”, I wrote about how emotional intelligence isn’t built through individual practice alone. The relational dimension of EQ requires actual interaction with other people. The same is true of “resistance.” It isn’t innate. It is a muscle, and it has to be trained.
Many adults reach their thirties or forties and still swallow unfair treatment without a word. Not because they don’t care about fairness, but because they have never practiced expressing disagreement. From childhood onward, conventional schooling taught them: be obedient, cooperate, don’t create conflict with teachers, don’t contradict your manager.
“Keeping the harmony” is a virtue in Taiwanese culture. But if harmony comes at the cost of suppressing every dissenting view and absorbing every injustice, then “harmony” is no longer harmony. It becomes a synonym for oppression.
What I want my child to learn is not “perpetual peace,” but “the ability to resist, gently and courteously, when resistance is called for.”
Gentle, because the goal is not to wound the other person but to express yourself. Courteous, because respect runs both ways, even when the other person hasn’t shown you any. And firm, because if you believe something is wrong, you have a responsibility to say so.
Self-directed education creates more opportunities to practice this. The environment itself is full of uncertainty: you will meet good educators and poor ones, communities that support you and situations that treat you unfairly. Every encounter is a chance to practice.
Education Without a Right Answer
After all these years, the clearest thing I’ve learned is this: there is no single right answer in education.
Conventional schooling has genuine advantages: clear structure, stable resources, broad social networks. Self-directed education has real value: flexibility, depth, and a learning orientation closer to “understanding” than to “passing tests.”
But whichever path you choose, the underlying question is the same: what kind of person are you trying to raise?
If the answer is “someone who can earn good grades within existing institutions,” conventional schooling is sufficient.
If the answer is “someone who can judge, choose, and bear the consequences of their choices in an uncertain world,” then whether you’re inside or outside the system, you need to deliberately create opportunities for your child to encounter real friction.
Self-directed education is one way to do that. What matters is not the form but whether, within that form, you are bringing the real world into your child’s learning.
Including the uncomfortable parts. Including the adults who fall short. Including the unfair treatment. Including the moments that require you to stand up and say no.
The muscle of resistance works like running: it requires practice. And the best time to practice is not after they’ve grown up. It’s now.
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