Cure for Mondays

Is Homeschooling Legal in the Philippines?

Oh well, it's legal, too.

I have been asked so many times if homeschooling is legal in the Philippines. The answer is a definitive “yes”, as stated in the 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines Article XIV:

Section 1. The State shall protect and promote the right of all citizens to quality education at all levels, and shall take appropriate steps to make such education accessible to all.

Section 2. The State shall:

(1) Establish, maintain, and support a complete, adequate, and integrated system of education relevant to the needs of the people and society;

(2) Establish and maintain a system of free public education in the elementary and high school levels. Without limiting the natural right of parents to rear their children, elementary education is compulsory for all children of school age...

It would help if you talked to experienced homeschooling families if you’re considering homeschooling your children. There are many ways to get affiliated and there are a lot of homeschooling providers who can give you detailed information about it.

I called up the Department of Education (DepEd) some time ago hoping to get valuable of information about homeschooling programs, how homeschooled students get to college, what kind of exams they take, etc. I spoke to five people referred to me by program coordinators of some schools and unfortunately, they could not answer me yet. They insisted on discussing about the Home Study Program and the Alternative Learning System (ALS), which is entirely different from homeschooling.

Based on my research, homeschooling families have had the same frustrating experience getting substantial information from DepEd. Anyone who wants to start homeschooling should do an extensive research on his or her own first.

The first two things thing that you might want to know is how to get back to regular school later on if you decide to; and what happens if your homeschooler is ready to fly high to college. Here's an article on that.

We have been homeschooling for a total of five years now and we unschooled during the first two years. Unschooling is a learning method which allows the learner to develop his interests without following a curriculum or a set of lesson plans. If say, your child is interested in skateboarding, you allow him to develop this interest and inject knowledge in science, math and vocabulary into this particular interest. How? If you look closely, the ollies and kickflips apply the basic principles of physics. Ask your learner to write an essay on what makes skateboarding so interesting for him or her and that’s English subject (theme writing and grammar) for you. So on and so forth.

This can be a challenge to your creativity as a teacher, but imagine the fun that goes into learning.

Now that our son is 14, we decided that getting him to a more structured learning would benefit him. We are independently homeschooling, which means we create our own curriculum.

How is homeschooling done?

"How on earth do you do that?!" Yes, we get that kind of reaction a lot. Deciding on what your children should learn for a homeschool year is not an out-of-this-world concept although it may sound that way since we have always relied on expert curriculum developers and teachers to design our curriculum and create lesson plans for our learners. One thing that makes homeschooling work is the fact that you can customize your lessons.

Lesson planning in homeschooling is based on what you think your child is ready to learn, how much information your learner can take in one homeschool day, the method of teaching that works for your learners and creating lessons that will also make way for their interests.

Homeschooling is an impossible task

Yet again, so many people tell us that they can never be homeschooling parents like us because “they can’t do the impossible like we do”. We’re not hiding wings inside our shirts and we don’t morph into superhumans when no one is looking. We simply are parents who know our children better, that is why we brought education home.

There are so many exciting things about homeschooling, and you just learned one of the most important information — that it is legal in the Philippines. Consider this a good beginning.

Note: This article has been updated on May 27, 2016