Truths

A non-school education doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but to the parents and children for whom it does, the benefits can be truly inspiring

Achild strolls along a Tasmanian beach with his parents and wonders why the tide is further out than it was at the same time the day before. He asks the question out loud, and before long that single query has shaped the entire next term of his education. That’s because this child comes from one of the 1036 Tasmanian families who have decided to ditch school and instead teach their kids at home. Some call it natural learning. Others call it unschooling. Whatever the description, this isn’t the traditional style of learning most of us experienced.

The woman in charge of these home education programs in Tasmania is Katherine O’Donnell. She estimates about 70 per cent of the state’s home educators follow an eclectic program borrowing from all different types of teaching and learning styles to adapt to suit what their children are most interested in. About 100 of the parents are qualified teachers.

“The really, really clever, engaged and amazing home educators can take a situation like this child on the beach questioning the tides and springboard a whole work pattern of everything covering geography, science, writing stories and reading books about the ocean, measuring the length of the tide from day-today and working out averages,” O’Donnell says. “It’s a really amazing thing to see.”

Home education requires parents to have patience, she says, something this former lawyer admits she doesn’t have enough of. Her two children both attend school. A few years ago her family went on a holiday to Europe for four months and O’Donnell tried to teach the children through an e-schooling program.

“And they told me in no uncertain terms that I’m never to home educate them because apparently I’m really bad it it,” she says. Her mistake: her approach was far too structured.

“I would sit down and say ‘OK we are going to do maths from 10am to 11am and then we are going to do history from 11am to 12pm’ and completely block it all out and the kids would be bored senseless and I’d go mad,” she says.

“It’s something we often see — parents who start off thinking that a structured approach is what they are going to do, then after about three weeks completely turn it upside down and re-