Who needs school when the sitting room does it?

School, to be honest, was for years, one of my least favourite places. It was a daily routine of succumbing to other people’s rules and ideas on what and who you should become.

I left school wondering what was so authentic about the whole, largely must-be-tolerated experience. Teachers stood at the gate to embrace us with wide open arms flashing a long cane, the homework was a killer, and lessons, for the most part, were uninspiring. But we knew school was an act of endurance.

Home was where we would rather be. It was the shortest of respites, where there was good food, cartoons, a moment away from everything including precious moments before the home burst into life in the evenings.

Fathers helping children to fail

For that reason alone, it is impossible to imagine why anyone would want home to be school, yet home schooling is increasingly becoming an option worldwide.

The number of pupils who walk out of primary school is double the figure of those who have to make way to secondary school. Parents hardly have time to sleep let alone help do homework. The result is most students go through school thinking this special knowledge they acquire is uniquely their preserve.

Parents don’t have time for it on it unless there is trouble. There are too many jokes about fathers helping their children with homework and helping them flunk. How then, does home schooling work? The advantage is that there will be no school fees in a country where education qualifies as a necessary luxury.

You eliminate uniforms, transport and book costs. But you cover all the costs by yourself as well and it means less income from one parent, usually the mother.

Interestingly enough, home schooling used the beginning of our education. Tutors attended to children born into wealth. Differences in social status meant there was a whole bunch of children with no hope of ever becoming educated.

Over time the formal education system as we now know it, grew enough to develop problems. This kind of learning is not at all possible here with our current syllabus. When a government takes up a billion-shilling debt to make something free, it will punish anyone who looks at a gift horse in the mouth.

When primary education became a reality parents who didn’t take their children to school were accused of neglect and even arrested.

And because a lot of people cannot imagine school uniforms are that unaffordable, it was not easy to understand. With pressure, the government allowed a mish mash of uniforms into classrooms.

Here, you not only must surely be very rich. Oddly enough the rest of the developed world is becoming more embroiled in school away from school.

In August, the state of California passed a law that allows parents with absolutely no teaching credentials to teach their children in school.

Home schooling, a court ruled, is the equivalent of private school. Here it only ever happens in pre-school where colourful homes painted with recognisable cartoons dot the landscape.

With the should we-or-should we-not-tutor debate waging in spurts every few years, and adults barely making enough time to sacrifice income and time, it is unlikely that Kenya will join England, Australia, Austria, France, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Slovenia or the US.

Our belief in the education system can only be rivalled by China’s. Studies have shown students who are home-schooled outperform their formally schooled peers. The reason could be because they have spent their most formative years with their parents.

They are, it is believed, moulded and shaped by lots of love, interact more with adults and as a result, acquire information in a different way.