Bringing up Kids in Paradise, Home Schooling

Here at Phanganist we have been thinking about how many of our friends have been having children recently, maybe an age thing?! None of us are in this club (Probably for the best at the moment, haha) but it got us thinking about what it must be like to bring up children here on Koh Phangan.
We are going to speak with a varied range of parents who use different methods of education here on the Island, whether that be state school, international tutorial school, homeschooling or private tuition. Then we will all know the great possibilities available for bringing up children here on paradise island.

Firstly we spoke with our friend Yonotan who has chosen the Homeschooling option.

Yonatan has four children, the youngest is two and a half year old Michael, then another boy Hillel who is seven, next he has a nine and a half year old girl called Elli and the eldest is twelve year old Daniel.
All of the children were born in Israel and were home taught there, Yonatan and his wife already knew they would carry on the home schooling here in Phangan.

We asked Yonatan why they had decided on home schooling;

“Because we don’t really like the school system. We are free people and believe that children of that age should not be sat in a closed class with forty other kids, a tired teacher who teaches them irrelevant stuff and not what’s going on today”.

Yonatan and his wife, his wife mostly, do the home schooling themselves. We asked for a description of a typical day;

“The children will study for one to two hours a day, this is the basic stuff, maths and english etc, the rest of the day they play by themselves or research on the internet or they also learn from what we tell them from our own experience”.

Yonatan believes that one of the benefits of his homeschooling is that it teaches the children to study on their own, and that if they have an interest in something they should really pursue that topic with passion.

“We provide them anything we can to help them, we just direct them. They don’t have to learn about stuff they don’t have an interest in, only the things that they are drawn to. All of the kids do different things that they wouldn’t be able to do in conservative school”.

Yonatans children already have a wide range of hobbies including diving, books, movies, being on the beach and “beautiful women I hope”. He is not sure yet of what career path each child may take but is keen that they do whatever they wish, “We try to teach them that if they choose something they should do it the best they can”.