FAMILY GO TO ENDS
SUNDAY MIRROR
AS the mad Monday morning scramble draws near, most parents will spend today badgering their kids to do their homework or find their PE kit.
But while other children grapple with spelling lists and reading books, the King boys, Winston and Henry, will be planning to hunt fossils in Canada or scale volcanos in Iceland.
For their parents, Paul and Caroline have opted for a controversial type of education called “global unschooling”.
Which amounts to NO school, ol, NO shouting and an awful lot off playing on beautiful beaches ass the family hops from one country y to the next.
The Kings looked at about 200 different schools for Winstonn – who they believe to be more e educationally advanced thann other six-year-olds – and rejected d them all.
Caroline, 35, said: “We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t n’t ethical for our children to be forced to go to school when theyey didn’t want to.”
So they sold their £ 280,000 00 house along with most of their eir possessions and set off to show ow their boys the world.
Nineteen months and 15 countries later, the Kings are still till convinced they are doing the rightih thing. And they have no plans to stop.
Paul, 39, said: “We’ll never force the boys to go to school or take an exam.
“We don’t believe in government interference in education.
“It’s too aggressive and not respectful to the child. We don’t raise our voices to the boys, so why should a teacher be allowed to?”
WONDERS
So rather than reading about the Pyramids, the brothers have been to the ancient wonders in Egypt. And rather than colouring in pictures of tropical fish they’ve seen the real thing in the Maldives and Bali.
Paul , from Cambridge, and Caroline were both bitten by the travel bug years before they had children.
They met on a hillside in Kashmir in 2003 when they were forced to take shelter from fire in a border skirmish between Indian and Pakistani forces.
They eventually settled in Gothenburg in Caroline’s native Sweden.
But having children, far from encouraging them to settle down, only made their feet itchier.
Caroline and Paul first looked into global unschooling when they realised Winston was bored at his nursery. In Sweden, the alphabet is traditionally taught to kids at seven – but Caroline said she started to teach her son to read when he was just one.
“We visited around 20 schools,” said Caroline, who still breastfeeds four-year-old Henry. “We asked each one what they would do for Winston. We didn’ t want our children to be forced to learn things they already knew – or didn’t want to learn.”
The pair were also unhappy with the limit on the number of days they could take the boys