18. Nir Eyal

This October, best-selling author and entrepreneur, Nir Eyal, answered some of our questions about homeschooling. Nir and his wife have been homeschooling their 14-year-old daughter since 1st grade. Today, at age 14, she’s a certified Python engineer, data engineer and trampoline expert with more friends than she knows what to do with.

What inspired you to start homeschooling?

We started homeschooling after kindergarten. My daughter had a decent experience in kindergarten, but I wouldn't say it was ideal. She came home day after day with envelopes filled with cut paper. When we asked her, “what are these about? Why do you keep bringing home cut paper?” She said “well, when I finished the assignment, the teacher told me to cut paper. And so that's what she did day after day. “'

So we eventually asked the teacher, “what's going on, why this is what are kid is doing? Couldn’t there be a better use of her time? She said, “What's the problem? We're a 10 out of 10 school. Your daughter finishes quickly, so I have her do something while the other kids are doing something else.”

We thought that was kind of sub-optimal! 

We thought, let's try homeschooling, just for a summer, and see how it goes. It was pretty low stakes. We didn't have to pull her out of school right away. Over the summer, we tried to facilitate a first-grade curriculum.

And she loved it. She did really well. We could pace it at whatever pace she wanted to go - as opposed to having 30 kids in a classroom, dealing with discipline issues and all that. 

Right away, we saw that we could save so much time. I think that was the biggest factor for us, just a very efficient use of time in homeschooling. So that was one of the biggest reasons. And our daughter really seemed to thrive.  So, we didn't enroll her in the first grade the next year. We have been homeschooling ever since.

Now she’s 14, and she still loves it. 

What might a typical day or week look like for your child?

We don't do anything homeschool related on the weekends. 

7-8 am Breakfast

During the weekm we have breakfast together at around seven and we finish by eight. At eight o'clock, she almost always has a tutor.

8-9:30 am Tutor

We’ve found some great folks on Wyzant. It’s platform we use all the time to find tutors in different subjects. She’s been working with one of them for almost four years now. He's a high school teacher in upstate New York. 

9:30-12pm Parent-led instruction

And then she'll do a follow-on-subject. Sometimes that will be taught by my wife. Sometimes, it will be with me. 

We don't really teach her anymore, because at 14, she's starting to outpace what we remember from our own education. So, we'll take a class with her. For example, I just finished a statistics class with her. So we're learning along with her, which I really like because I think it helps us really bond when she can see that struggling to learn a subject is common. It's part of the process. Everybody struggles to learn something new. 

For her to see that my wife and I also have to really think things through and sometimes struggle is a good precedent we're sending. 

12-1 pm Lunch as a family

 At lunch, we always eat together. 

1-2:30 pm Homework

A one o'clock she'll do an hour or so of homework.

2:30-8 pm Self-Directed Education

By 2-2:30 pm, she's off to play - and off she goes. We have a trampoline park that we live very close to. So, she'll be at the trampoline park for the rest of the evening. On most nights, she comes home at 8:30 pm . If she hasn't eaten already (sometimes she'll eat at the trampoline park), she'll have something to eat.

Wednesday is family time

And then on Wednesdays, we have family time. So she doesn't go to the trampoline on Wednesday afternoon. When my wife and I finish up with work around 5:30, we have the rest of the evening together and do something fun, go around the town, see a show, or something together as a family. 

So that's what our typical day and week looks like. 

How does your child make friends? 

This is always everybody's first question. So for us, we have a defined outlet. And we very much subscribe to the idea of free-range parenting. 

We wanted to give our daughter as much freedom as she is capable. From a very early age, she always surprised us - as I think most kids would if given the chance to be independent. My daughter is not escorted, she's not driven. We don't have to worry about any of that stuff. 

We also live in Singapore. So that's part of why this is possible. It's so safe here, and so we can we can give her the freedom that that she so craves. So, for the past three years we've lived here, we don't escort or chaperone her to anything.

If she wants to get somewhere, she needs to take the bus, subway system or walk. She mostly walks because she gets an allowance, Transportation comes out of her allowance. So it's up to her. 

So how does she make friends? She has a place that she really loves that's walking distance from us. We're fortunate that there's a trampoline park here where she’s made a lot of friends. Some of them are home schooled. Most of them are not. Most of them show up after school. 

She gets there around 2:30. Some days she has a class with an instructor, After the class her friends started arriving around 3-4pm when they're done with traditional school

She has more friends than she knows what to do with right now. Every weekend she's going to sleepovers and her whole day is jam-packed. Relationships are the least difficult thing about homeschooling for us!

Maybe it's worth reminding parents out there that everybody asks about socialization for a homeschooled kid, but for some reason we don't ask the same question of traditional school. 

I had a terrible experience at her age in middle school and early high school. I was bullied, I didn't feel like I had a group. It was very socially difficult for me, and I went to a traditional school. We have to compare apples to apples, not homeschooling to an ideal, but homeschooling to the reality of the fact that there can be many difficult social experiences in a school where you can't choose your friends very easily. 

When Jasmin goes to these trampoline parks she likes some kids, some she doesn't, but she's not forced to be in a class with a set number of kids that she has to be around even if she doesn't like them - or they don't like her. In the real world, you can pick your own friends. That's how the real world works. And so we wanted to let her pick her own friends. 

Are there any noteworthy projects or accomplishments your daughter has done that you'd like to share? 

I'm super proud of jasmine, so I'll brag a little bit here. She recently finished her google data analysis certification. 

She took a six month course that google puts online, that is quite difficult. It was a very extensive course in data science. Now, she's actually certified by google as having passed this course. She was also recently certified as a python entry-level engineer. And she knows what she’s doing in python. 

At 14 years old, there's all kinds of jobs that she would be qualified for right now, without a college degree, without even a high school degree. She could start working for a company helping them with the data science project. So, I'm super proud of her for that.  And, of course, she's way ahead in terms of her educational achievement. She just finished a college- level of statistics course that we took together. She passed the class and got an A+.  All that - because I think she can pace herself. Sometimes I'm the limiting factor because a lot of this stuff is unfamiliar to me . I haven't touched it in a long time, so I had to relearn it. But she's she's really excelling and doing great. 

All that being said, the caveat that I have to say is that homeschooling is not for everyone.  One of the big reasons it's not for everyone is that we only have one child - so that makes it a lot easier.  I don't know where to start giving people advice if they have many kids.  That might be a different story. I can only talk about our own experience.  My wife and I both work from home, which makes things much much easier as well. 

Is there any advice you’d give to families considering homeschooling? 

My best advice would be to try it.

Summers are pretty much dead for most people. In the summer kids oftentimes regress in their education. So I would say try it. Try it over the summer when the stakes are pretty low.

My second piece of advice would be to define your values for homeschooling. Right? I think for a lot of people homeschooling is such a vague term that doesn't really encapsulate all the different types of homeschooling. There’s a type of homeschooling called unschooling, where you just let your kid do whatever they want and they'll teach themselves.  Then, there's the kind of people who want their kids to excel, and want them to home-school, so they’ll take all the AP tests and ey get into a great school. So it's really about the reason you're homeschooling. I think it's very, very important to consider before you start so that you know what you're getting out of it.  For my wife and I, we didn't want home schooling to be schooling at home.  That was where our values lay. We wanted it to be better than school - not just, “well let's create a classroom for one child.” That's not our version of homeschool.

Homeschool for us is what we actually call “hack schooling.” Hack schooling means that, that you get the best out of the system, that you can create your own education. That’s something you can't get in a traditional environment - the ability to go deeper into subjects that interest your child.  That to me a huge benefit -  that she can go really deep into a subject, if she so chooses, without the limitations of a preset curriculum. A lot of parents may homeschool for academic acceleration, Personally, it's not part of my value system to just check all the boxes so you can go to college. 

My key reason for homeschooling is to raise an autodidact!  Someone who can learn on their own. That to me is the most important macro skill that I want my daughter to have. I couldn’t care less about whether she memorizes and regurgitates something for a test. It's really about the ability to learn something that she is curious about that she wants to go further in on her own.  And That's something that I don't think traditional school can give you to the extent that homeschooling can. 

You're a tech entrepreneur and expert in product design. Are there any principles here that either influence your decision to homeschool or the way you homeschool? 

In terms of product design, there's this: the ability to choose right, the ability to be the customer in this case.  If you think about traditional school, we never ask the user how they like the product, right?  Isn't that crazy? Every other product out there, companies beg you to tell them what you think about the product. You get surveys sent to you all the time that say, “what do you think about our product rated from 1 to 10?”  One of the few products that somehow nobody cares whether the end user likes is education, right?  Children are never asked: “Please rate your experience on a scale of 1 to 10.”  That never happens for children- maybe when you get to college, right?  But not in traditional school. And even in college, you’re only asked maybe at the end of the of the semester, if you can rate your teacher.

What I really like and what I take away from my background in product design is consumer feedback. So with my daughter, every six months we sit down. We literally have a typeform survey that she has to go through to tell us what she thinks about this homeschool experience as a product. And we want to improve it based on her feedback. It's crazy to me that we don't ask every child, “How was your experience going?”

And, not until it's too late. Only when something bad happens, then we say, “oh, what, what happened, where was where was the mistake?”

I think that's very important to get customer feedback. And in this case, the user is the child. 

You're an investor. Do you see signs that homeschooling is the future of school?

I think there are a lot of barriers to home school becoming mainstream. I think the one of the silverlinings of the covid pandemic was that people gave it a shot for the first time. And I can't tell you how many friends who before Covid said: “You're crazy. I don't understand how you could do that. Home school is is a terrible idea. You're missing so much.” And then after Covid, after they were forced to home school, I've gotten so many calls from people saying, “wow, I had no idea how much time was wasted in traditional school. We finished with the standard curriculum by by 11 or 10 o'clock and then we have the whole day free. We need to find more things for our kids to do because we save so much time on the traditional education approach.”

So that's been really interesting to see. 

I think what's missing from a tech perspective is scaling, We're very fortunate that my wife and I both work from home and we only have one child. Both of us work, so we can't spend all day with our child.  We don't have to put in as much time as we did when she was younger. She does a lot by herself and that will continue. That ratio will continue to increase with more time.

But it's still not there yet for most people, for most people, homeschooling is a lot of work.

And I'm looking forward to more tools, more systems that help parents to take an active role,-  but also be able to offload some of the nuts and bolts of homeschooling as more people do it.