This is why we do it

We're expecting our fourth child in the next week or so, and I've taken a month off clinical work to be around with Marie.

One of the many benefits of locum doctor life is the flexibility to work around family commitments!

We've been busying ourselves getting the house, car and older kids ready for the new arrival, and thoroughly enjoying the uncharacteristically fabulous weather over the last couple of weeks.

Much of this time has been spent in the garden, on long walks and bike rides and generally just outside.

We've watched the school bus drive past our house as we slowly eat breakfast together and decide what we're going to do that day.

We've then watched it drive back again while playing in the garden, or heading out for a late afternoon walk.

But it was around six in the evening when we really felt that we'd made the right decision to do our kids' education in an unconventional way, while sat in a beautiful field behind our family friends' house, quietly watching the horses grazing in the evening sun.

"Max darling - time to come in and do your homework."

Max lives two doors down from the aforemention friends, and would often pop out to play with our group of kids whenever our schedules seemed to overlap. On this particularly delightful evening they'd been pottering around on their bikes and making up boisterous games involving planks of wood and some toy hammers.

But the time had come when Max's attention was needed elsewhere - sat at a desk, looking at a book or a screen that he most certainly did not want to be looking at - and I couldn't help thinking that he'd probably have been doing more useful learning out here, experimenting, communicating and playing.

The lack of evidence to support homework in the first place is one thing, but there are other hidden downsides to mandatory evening assignments:

• You're unlikely to be interested in doing it, if you have to do it at that specific time
• It's probably stopping you doing something else that you'd enjoy doing more
• It teaches you that even when you're not at work, your time is not your own
• It teaches you that getting the 'work done' is more important than following your own interests
• It encourages parents to help (on a scale of not much to 'done it for you') in order to boost arbitrary grades for arbitrary score sheets
• It stops you moving, which you've been stopped from doing all day
• It massively boosts stress levels, particularly in anxious kids

I'll stop there.

Learning through play

When we have our first child, we're bombarded with literature and advice telling us just how crucial it is that we get our babies playing.

We're told over and over again how it boosts their physical, cognitive and social abilities and how they need enough stimulation and activity to get the best out of the squishy supercomputer between their ears.

Does all of this just stop at age 5?

Do they suddenly no longer require exercise and movement and interest, and instead benefit most from sitting still (away from their parents) for extended periods of time?

I'm guessing not?

Maybe, just maybe, they learn just as much - if not more - by being allowed to move, to explore, to question and to experiment.

What would you pay for?

I give this example to people who don't understand why one would consider homeschooling to be a better education than traditional schooling.

I caveat by agreeing that of course it isn't automatically better - it's only better if you work really hard as a parent to make it better, and that's where a lot of people get caught up.

But assuming you're putting in the hours and the effort, then I ask them this:

"If you wanted to learn a new skill, a new subject or profession, then which of the following would you expect to be the most expensive?"

• A series of lectures, taught by someone with varying experience and qualifications in the subject
• A small-group seminar, taught by someone with a degree in their subject
• A one-to-one mentorship programme with unlimited access to an expert in their field who will only ever have four or five students in their entire career

Most people agree that the mentorship option would most likely be the costliest, and certainly the most effective way to get trained up.

"Option one is conventional schooling, option two is an exclusive private school and option three is what we're doing"

I'm not for a second claiming to be an expert at everying, but if 10,000 hours of practice makes an expert, I'm certainly an expert in life and living as a (moderately) functional adult - and that's what we're trying to teach them isn't it?

• How to cook
• How to earn money
• How to use a washing machine
• How to communicate
• How to find answers

We all said it in school - when am I ever going to need this information? - when presented with yet another differential equation or quizlet on Roman history.

We learned a lot of not-so-helpful stuff at school, and not a whole lot of 'here's how to function in life' goodness.

And before you ask - we definitely definitely want our kids to learn all of the Roman, equation, longshore drift and vocab stuff that they would learn in school - but we want it to be done out of genuine interest, rather than because the 'curriculum says so'.

Some examples:

• We talk about the Romans when we go to museums and English Heritage sites where the Romans actually did stuff
• We talk about equations in context - if you have this much money, and that jar of honey is twice as much as this one, how much of each could you get?
• We talk about longshore drift, tides, currents, erosion and conservation while sitting on an empty beach eating fish and chips watching the sun set on a Tuesday evening, knowing it doesn't matter what time they go to bed, because they don't have to be up in the morning.

It's a 7 to 7 Q&A

People ask us what curriculum we're using, or what structures we're applying to our kids' learning.

I say we run a vigorous twelve hour Q&A session, all day, every day, no days off.

This is entirely at the will of the children - they're the ones asking the questions.

It's incessant from the second they wake up to the moment they finally lose consciousness, and we're just doing our best to answer them, or help them look the answer up.

(I'm not bitter or anything but I was repeatedly told to stop asking questions and shut up at school...)

We don't have the time, energy or cognitive resilience to then try and add some rigid, standardised curriculum in on top of the already gargantuan volumes of information they extract from us on a daily basis - although they might.

And guess what - they're learning - they're remembering the answers because they're genuinely interested in finding the information out. It's why they asked the question in the first place.

So at the end of every day, we're all exhausted, exercised and we've learned new things together.

It's pretty darned special.