We Don’t Need No Ejukayshun

We are taking our 3 boys out of school (Grades 3, 1 and pre-R/pre-kindergarten) to do this trip for 3-6 months – a form of home-schooling only without the home bit as such. They’ll eventually be enrolled in school in Canada when we get there for the beginning of the year in September 2011 at the latest, leaving them without any institutionalized academic indoctrination or state-sponsored socialization for up to 9 months. What to do to ensure they’re not going to be wearing dunce caps in September?

Well, being the conscientious parents we are, we have developed a four point plan to take advantage of the more than 30 x 8-hour days of driving – probably a lot more.

Firstly, we are taking an Amazon Kindle, loaded up with kids books and thanks to that miraculous 3G wireless technology stuff, we can download more as we travel. Secondly, we have downloaded about 100 hours of radio podcasts from NPR, BBC, CBC and others covering a whole slew of topics: history, geography, kids, Shakespeare, Darwinism, music, cars, environmental affairs, etc. Thirdly, we have “borrowed” a number of kids audiobooks and ripped them onto an iPod. Fourthly, we’ve downloaded about 150 hours of iTunesU lectures from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale – and they’ll be rigorously subjected to a first year programme of anthropology, quantum physics, psychology, astrology, Beethoven, music, natural history, history, naked scientists and more.

So, we’ll either have some seriously brainy, annoying, maladjusted, geeky kids at the end of the trip or, much more likely, they’ll have opted instead to watch the same 3 DVDs 200 times, providing them with an enviable encyclopedic knowledge of Monsters Inc, Chicken Run and Shrek 3.

I know what I’d do…

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