Homeschooling Rocks

The ongoing, unthinking mantra prevailing in society is this:

Homeschool your child and they’ll become a freak.

The reason given is usually some variant of:

They won’t be socialised.

Leaving aside the merits of attempting to socialise your five-year-old by sticking them in a classroom with 30 other five-year-olds all shouting and screaming, let’s assume there probably is something to be gained from mixing your kid with other kids of the same age. Or, at the very least, find other families who share your values and are willing to educate your children jointly. Lowering your financial cost and giving the middle finger to the unthinking “they must be socialised by kids their own age” numptys.

The Stack

Build a simple website using Firebase, Sveltekit, and some Docker for deployment on AWS, Azure, or whatever. Manage login using Firebase Authentication and manage user data using Firestore. Easy and fast. Tailwind for the UI. Battabing battaboom.

The Features

1. The site must help families find like-minded matches. Like dating apps, but less fake. This is the only “must-have” feature.
2. The site should help families connect and provide a clean way to organise what they’d like their children to be taught.
3. The site should suggest course materials to make syllabus creation easier for families. This would also make it easier for families to agree on approach etc.
4. Where families can’t educate their children themselves (complexity or time), the site should make it easy to find tutors who can jointly educate their kids for a fee. It could even help with transactions, although this should be secondary, the primary purpose is better education.
5. Provide a dedicated hub for the families to stay in communication. This probably isn’t necessary initially. Tools like Teams, Slack, Discord, or even Facebook could be used for organisation.
6. Help parents find places to hire for educating their children. This would be useful when the parents have to go to work etc. and need a space for their kids to go.

The Approach

I’ll add to this section as I think about it. First we need an Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Stage 1 — MVP

This stage is about getting something out there, not being pretty or clever. So, what I want is the following:

1. A form that asks parents a series of questions: How old are your children? What books are you reading them? Where do you live? (this will only be stored as a rough value) What do you want to be the focus of their education? How much are you willing to pay a month in tutor fees? How much time do you have to teach your kids? What specific courses (if any) do you want them to follow? What activities outside education do your children do? What activities outside eduction do you do? How far are you willing to travel? Give a brief description of yourselves. Give a brief description of the education you want your child to have. Give a brief description of your ideal homeschooling day. Explain why you want to homeschool your children. Upload a picture of yourself.
2. Simple search functionality: Like Rightmove, select your area, add a radius, and be shown other families. The families will be ordered by their similarity to your answers. You’ll be able to select which answer you think is most important for the ranking. Then you can scroll through the options and find similar families.
3. Advertising functionality: Undoubtedly, this site will not gain traction immediately. It will be a slow growth. Therefore, when someone signs up and there are no good matches in their radius, there should be a button taking them to a separate page. On this page it should explain how to reach out to homeschooling groups in your local area, and how to get them on the site. It should also explain how to use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, whatever to push the site yourself in your local area. Paying to push the site is in the user’s interest, as it will be the fastest way figure out who in your area is interested.

Stage 2 — Expanding materials

Briefly, this stage would be about gathering course materials to make it easier for parents to agree on what they want to use. As well as making it easier for them to understand what’s out there.

At this point, could also let families build their own courses and share them with others. That way people could see what’s common, what gets good grades, etc.

Once the parents have access to all the materials and there’s an easy way to agree on approach and track results the next step is helping find great tutors.

Stage 3 — Tutoring portal

Set up an internal portal where tutors can offer their time by the hour, giving their credentials, previous results, maximum number of teachable kids, age range, etc. Then families can search for tutors together, settle on one, and split the cost.

Stage 4 — Homeschool hub

The final stage is the homeschool hub part of the site. Perhaps something like rota scheduling for where the kids are going, when the tutors are coming, and tracking of the kids current grades, what course content should come next, etc. This section needs to have specific features for homeschooling. Putting it above and beyond things like teams and slack for organising the schooling.

It’s likely tools like this already exist in the state teaching world. We could take the best ideas and copy them.

Final Word

That’s the rough idea. My first child is < 1 year old, so I don’t NEED this right now. But I will soon. This article is just one possible framework for building a website like this. If no one else does it, I will use my own Code Wizard skills for good and do it myself, but I’d prefer it just to ~exist~!

Reach out to me in the comments if you’re also interested in this.