In 2014, my child’s mother and I made a decision that drew a lot of head-shaking from family and friends: we took our child out of school and enrolled them in non-school experimental education, what most people would call homeschooling.
My child was still young when we made this call. The reactions around us were predictable: “Are you sure about this?” “What about college?” “Won’t they lose touch with society?”
Some people were diplomatic. Others were direct: “Aren’t you being too idealistic?”
I don’t blame them. In Taiwan’s social context, “leaving school” carries an inherently rebellious connotation, as though you are rejecting the path everyone else has walked.
My motivation, though, was practical. As an entrepreneur, I spent every day at the edge of industry disruption. I watched the environment redefine what work means, watched globalization reshape competitive landscapes, watched the half-life of knowledge shrink. Then I turned back to look at institutional education: of everything it spends twelve years teaching children, how much would still be useful a decade later?
The gap was too large to ignore.
The design and execution of this path fell mostly to me. My child’s mother supported and adapted throughout, giving me the room to try.
Stripping Off the Romantic Label
Let me be clear from the start: homeschooling is not a utopia.
Most of the narratives about homeschooling online are far too romantic. “Letting children freely discover their gifts.” “Learning in nature.” “Education that breaks the mold.” These sound beautiful. But if you actually step inside, you find the reality is full of gray, including real conflict with your child.
After several years on this road, I’ve arrived at a few honest observations. (Note: I originally wrote this in 2016.)
Homeschooling is companionship, not outsourcing. You cannot hand money to an institution or consultant and expect them to handle your child’s education. That is no different from sending them to school. Homeschooling demands deep parental involvement, not supervising homework, but thinking through together: “What do we learn today?” “Why this?” “What does this mean for their future?”
Homeschooling is not a college-admissions shortcut. If you still believe, at your core, in credentialism (good school, good degree, good job), then staying in the institutional system is the smarter choice. The rules of that game are designed for college admissions, and children inside the system will always have home-field advantage. Homeschooling offers many things, but “earning credentials efficiently” is not among them.
Homeschooling is a co-venture. This is the analogy I reach for most often. You and your child are “running” an education business together. The product is the curriculum; the user is your child. You do market research (understanding your child’s interests and abilities), develop the product (designing learning content), run user testing (observing responses and growth), and iterate continuously based on what you find.
And like any venture, the uncertainty is high. A law passing doesn’t mean a system works. A good homeschooling community exists today and may dissolve tomorrow. You think you’ve found a promising learning direction, and six months later your child’s interests have pivoted entirely.
After all these years on this unconventional path, I don’t want to sound too certain. The honest truth is that I often couldn’t see clearly what lay ahead. There was genuine disorientation, genuine worry: are we doing harm? But disorientation is different from wanting to quit. If anything, it produced a strange kind of conviction: precisely because the path was unclear, I felt no pull to turn back. When you choose a road without footprints, you accept the reality: no one can guarantee where it ends. You get lost and keep moving.
Choosing homeschooling is a critique of industrial civilization and how capital structures daily life. It is not a methodological choice; it is a philosophical one. You choose to believe that education is not simply about helping children “succeed” within existing systems, but about giving them the capacity to define success for themselves in a world that keeps changing.
Unqualified Adults
The hardest thing to handle on the homeschooling path wasn’t curriculum design or learning pace. It was people.
Specifically, unqualified educators.
Once, the children were working together on a learning project. Work they had invested significant time in was taken by the supervising teacher for commercial use, without asking us. We found out later, when we saw it on social media.
My child was furious. This was the first time they had encountered an authority figure doing something they recognized as wrong. Their response: “This is completely unfair!”
I agreed entirely. It was unfair.
But it was also an educational opportunity. One that institutional education rarely provides.
Gentle, Civil Resistance
I asked my child: you feel this is unfair, and you’re right to. Your anger makes sense. But what are you going to do about it?
You could stew in silence and curse that teacher a hundred times in your head. You could complain to friends and make sure everyone knows he’s terrible. You could pretend nothing happened and tell yourself “better to keep the peace.”
Or you could do something harder and more valuable: get your thoughts in order, then go tell him, calmly, respectfully, and firmly.
I encouraged the last option. We sat together and organized the facts, walked through possible conversations, thought through how to respond if he pushed back.
The process took several days. More time than any single academic assignment.
In the end, my child gathered the courage to approach the teacher. What came out was probably a third of what we had rehearsed. But it came out. In their own words. Expressing their own position.
At that moment, I felt this mattered more than any perfect score on any test.
The Muscle of Resistance
In my piece “Emotions Also Live in Relationships,” I wrote that emotional intelligence is not only built through individual practice; relational capacity requires group interaction too. The same is true of “resistance.” It is not instinctive. It is a muscle, and it needs training.
Many adults at thirty or forty still swallow their response to unfair treatment. Not because they think fairness is unimportant, but because they have never practiced expressing disagreement. From childhood onward, institutional education taught them: comply, cooperate, don’t clash with teachers, don’t disagree with managers.
In Taiwan’s culture, “harmony above all” is a virtue. But when the price of harmony is suppressing every dissenting view and tolerating every injustice, then harmony is not harmony. It is a synonym for subjugation.
What I want my child to learn is not “perpetual peace,” but “when resistance is called for, resist with civility.”
Calmly, because the goal is not to harm the other person but to express yourself. With respect, because dignity is reciprocal, even when the other party isn’t offering it to you. But firmly, because if you believe something is wrong, you have a responsibility to say so.
This capacity gets more room to develop in homeschooling, because the environment itself is full of uncertainty. You will encounter excellent teachers and poor ones. Supportive communities and unfair treatment. Every encounter is a chance to practice.
Education Without a Right Answer
After all these years on this path, the largest thing I have come to understand is this: education has no standard answer.
Institutional education has real strengths: clear structure, stable resources, broad social networks. Homeschooling has real value: flexibility, depth, and a learning orientation closer to “understanding” than to “passing tests.”
But whichever path you take, the core question is the same: what kind of person are you trying to raise?
If the answer is “someone who can perform well within existing systems,” institutional education is sufficient.
If the answer is “someone who, in an uncertain world, can judge for themselves, choose for themselves, and bear the consequences of their choices,” then whether you are inside or outside the system, you need to deliberately create opportunities for your child to encounter real friction.
Homeschooling 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 unqualified adults. Including the unfair treatment. Including the moments when someone needs to stand up and say no.
The muscle of resistance, like running, requires practice. And the best time to start practicing is not when they are grown. It is now.
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