Why I Started TheHomeschoolingCompany

I begged my parents to let me homeschool halfway through tenth grade because I was bored as hell. I wasn't bored with ideas. I was bored by rote work that had almost nothing to do with what I wanted to understand. Leaving school was one of the best decisions I've made, because for the first time I could take my education seriously on terms that made sense to me.

Homeschooling did not hand me a perfect curriculum. A lot of the materials looked like the school courses I had left, which was a pretty strange discovery after finally escaping the place. I could move at my own pace and make cool projects, but the freedom to choose made the limitations of the available choices more obvious. Leaving the institution was one problem; finding the education I actually wanted was another.

I started making tools for the education I wanted. I wanted to build projects connected to things I cared about, instead of waiting for a standard course to make room for them. At some point it was obvious that other families might want the same thing. That is the beginning of this company, not a theory I came up with after the fact.

Take Roman military engineering. A course could ask how you build a bridge that carries an army, or what a siege engine needs to do. Now history is not just a sequence of names, and engineering is not a set of formulas with no purpose. The student has a problem to understand. What materials are available? What does the terrain make difficult? What knowledge would let the design work?

You can follow that question into the surrounding history too. Why did an army need the bridge? What did its movement make possible? How do the design and the political situation affect one another? A kid who wants to understand the machine now has a reason to read about the period, rather than receiving a detached history worksheet about it. The interest opens the door; the course should lead somewhere larger.

That does not mean the student gets to skip the hard parts because the topic is exciting. If they want to design a bridge, they will need mathematics, evidence, and an ability to explain why their choices make sense. Interest gives those demands a destination. The education is still serious because the student is trying to learn enough to answer a question that matters to them.

Roman military engineering crosses history, mathematics, and design. It was a course I wanted to pursue, rather than a new list of subjects I thought every child should study. Another child's course can begin somewhere entirely different.

I wanted something that did not exist in the form I needed, so I began making it. That is the origin of the company and also the kind of educational experience I want other kids to have: discovering that a serious interest can become work, that the work can become ability, and that the available menu need not decide the limits of either. Being bored as hell was a beginning. Building an answer was the useful part.