Lots of p2p education in effect here, like learning from other parents who are also ‘cruisers’. Also traditional primary school teachers rely heavily on field trips to put their lessons into context.
Initially, they looked into popular homeschooling options like Calvert Education. But the program turned out to be wrong for them. The curriculum comes in a big box, one for each child, which they found burdensome on a small boat. And the lessons were too general, and didn’t seem to apply to the experiences they were having.
“We take advantage of all these cool places we’ve been. Our lifestyle is like a living field trip.” “There’s efficiency in having kids learning similar things even at different ages,” says Jamie, “but to take advantage of all these cool places we’ve been, that’s where great learning takes place. Our lifestyle is like a living field trip.”
So they dropped Calvert and developed their own curriculum using resources online and talking at length with other cruisers.
Over the first year or two, the family came to appreciate how much more valuable the real world can be as a classroom than the traditional four walls and a blackboard most of us grew up with.
On a reef in French Polynesia, where the couple spent weeks living and snorkeling, they brought scientists aboard (fellow cruisers with PhDs) who would school the children in marine biology. A book with pictures of a thriving reef, or a dying one, is no match for the real thing.
Sometimes a coral reef becomes a classroom.
“It’s a learning-rich environment,” says Jamie.
In every new country, the family tries to learn the language. They have picked up Spanish and a smattering of others. “We were in Indonesia for six months and they got pretty good at Indonesian,” Jamie says.
And something more of interest to Source Fellows, they sail around the world on $25,000 per year. It’s a lifestyle choice that doesn’t require being “independently wealthy.”