For those of you interested in home schooling whilst cruising, it may
interest you to know that we home schooled our now 13 year old son for
the past 5 years. When he commenced high school in February at the
start of the school year, after one week he was put up a class. We
originally had him on the New Zealand Correspondence schooling but
later set work outselves based on the Australian syllabus and computer
based learning systems from the USA and Britain. He has always had the
excellent "Magic Schoolbus" and "The Learning Company" software since
3 years old and in South East Asia we were able to pick up a lot of
very good pirated software that is incredible. I spent 4 years as a
science teacher when I graduated and I cannot praise it too much.

He also played strategy games such as "Age of Empires" and the like
which gave him a wonderful and deep understanding and appreciation of
the civilisations we passed through and the historical personalities
of such as Saladin.

The reason we have put him back in regular school is not that it
provides a better education, but that the need to socialise with other
kids is not adequately catered to by the cruising lifestyle. The few
boats we met with children have all bemoaned this fact. It is not so
bad when the kids are younger or if there are more than one. All have
said that the problem arises with the onset of puberty. Teenagers need
peers.

I should admit here that his main teacher was his mother who is not a
trained teacher nor university educated. I did have some specialist
input but he would have done just as well without it.

The amount of hours spent in studying varied, sometimes he would not
do any work for days but I considered that his strategy games were
part of the education process. We spent two years in Malaysia where I
worked for the Marine branch of Royal Malaysian Customs - in the area
covered by an early posting on piracy. My work was concerned with
anit-piracy and the suppression of drug, girl-child and goods
smuggling. As we lived aboard at Customs bases he had a wonderful time
and even now has many "Uncles" who took him home to their families. He
has even been on patrol with me so he has learned to see the person
behind the face from an early age and hopefully will continue not to
stereotype people from other cultures. When I flew back from Spain and
stopped over in Malysia for a few weeks to catch up with friends I
stayed at the home of one of the base commanders. Hedzir is very fond
of our son and gave me a new uniform cap and uniform polo shirts as
well as an expensive presentation pen set he was given when he visited
the MTU factory in Germany. It was stressed that they were not for me.
He even emailed Melanion to make sure he got them. He has kids the
same age and younger but he wanted his "nephew" to have them.

What I am trying to portray is the wonderful education that a child
can obtain by cruising. Those cruisers we have met who travel in
convoys of up to 20 boats like a caravan club excursion do not often
meet, nor do they seem to want to, locals. We feel that it is better
to cruise alone or with one other boat. We have always been treated
incredibly well in places such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives
and throughout the Red Sea and have only felt threatened once in
Indonesia and felt tense in sailing through the pirated zone between
Yemen and Somalia. My wife, who is not a Moslem - her mother is an
Anglican (Episcopalian) minister, states regularly that she has felt
safer in Moslem countries than she has felt in Europe or even Sydney.
She says that she appreciates the respect that Moslems have for the
family. We have a photo of a special forces soldier guarding the port
at Aden, Yemen showing Melanion (our son) how to tie his headscarf
(that another soldier had given him) whilst my son held his loaded
AK-47 for him.

If anyone wants the software we have, which would also be more than
useful for those kids attending school, I would ge glad to oblige.

Peter Hendra
N.Z. yacht Herodotus

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

onset of puberty. Teenagers need peers.


Hmm....when I was a teenager, we called it sex!

Larry W4CSC wrote:
Peter Hendra wrote in
:

onset of puberty. Teenagers need peers.


Hmm....when I was a teenager, we called it sex!

Larry, that would be only a part of the socailization process.
Learning how to interact and developing adult interpersonal
relationship abilities is what Peter is referring to.

Peter, a very interesting story. Thank you for sharing it.
Greg Luckett
St. Jo. Michigan, USA