In honour of National Homeschooling Day in the Philippines, which is commemorated on March 3, I’m sharing an article about three former homeschoolers from Switzerland and the Philippines, who eventually pursued careers in the arts, sciences and engineering, and education.
I wrote it for a journalism class back in May 2021 – thus, the information here is relevant for that time (and I’m sharing a version with some minor edits for clarity). Yes, it’s from several years ago, but I’m sharing it again in hopes that the content will inspire fellow homeschooled people out there. I also hope it informs people who don’t know much about homeschooling and changes some of their preconceived notions on it. I’ve written a little reflection on this article below, from my standpoint in 2025 as well.
I hope you enjoy the read – and now, without further ado, here is the article…
Homeschoolers are stereotypically characterised as misfits secluded from the world – some as socially awkward, some as geniuses, but mostly as black sheep who don’t conform to more conventional ways of schooling. So what happens to them once they’re pushed off the deep end into the “real world” – the world after homeschool?
Three former homeschoolers, now working professionals, share their stories. Though their experiences vary, homeschooling led them to highly instrumental and deeply rewarding paths of self-discovery.
Aaron de Guzman, who was homeschooled from kindergarten in Parañaque, Philippines, until he entered college, graduated with an industrial engineering degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman – one of the top universities in the Philippines – amid the pandemic last year. He currently works for a U.S.-based company as a reports analyst.
Another former homeschooler, Stefan Bachmann, was homeschooled from kindergarten to sixth grade and intermittently throughout high school in Switzerland. At 16, he started writing a novel which was eventually published when he was 19. It has since been translated into eight languages. He then graduated from the Zürich Conservatory with degrees in music composition and theory. Currently, he works as a writer and composer.
Joyce Buen, studied at a conventional school in the Philippines till the fourth grade, when she switched to homeschooling and continued until her last year of high school. She actually skipped the final fourth year because she passed the standard government placement test. Then, she studied Art Management at Ateneo de Manila, another top Filipino university. She had taken jobs as an events host, English teacher and actor for theatre and voice throughout high school and college. Currently, she teaches and mentors teenagers who are homeschooled and unschooled – another form of non-traditional schooling in which the student chooses what they want to learn based on their interests – through the Abot Tala learning center.
While homeschooling is an unconventional choice in the Philippines and Switzerland, the former homeschoolers’ parents considered it the best way to teach their children. De Guzman’s and Buen’s parents both began homeschooling their children in tandem with other families who decided to try it out.
“Since the 90s or early 2000s, my mom has known about homeschooling because she would go to these different seminars,” said Buen. Her mother also had experience as a tutor and teacher, so she became hands-on teaching her two children.
Buen’s parents also wanted to make more time for their family. “My mom worked at our church full-time, and Dad was studying to be a pastor,” Buen said. She explained that in the evening, they would often visit and minister to church members. “We kind of never saw each other ’cause we’d be home at night, and they’re the other way around. So they said, ‘Why don’t we just homeschool them so that we have time to see them?’”
De Guzman’s parents first tried homeschooling with his older brother, their eldest child, when he was in kindergarten. They went on to homeschool De Guzman and his two younger siblings.
Bachmann’s American mother, who was also a teacher in the U.S., didn’t want her children to go to the school their Swiss grandparents picked out, so she homeschooled them. “She said, ‘I can teach my children as well as anyone else,’” he said. “She could do it better than the public school system could. I don’t think that’s always the case. Some parents – I don’t know if they can teach their kids.”
His grandparents didn’t take to it at first. “They were like, ‘You’re gonna ruin those children; they’re not gonna learn how to read or do math!’” he said. “And now we’re all – I would say – well-adjusted, more or less successful adults, and they came around. It took them a really long time, about a decade.”
As of 2019, there were around 1,000 homeschoolers in Switzerland and 12,000 homeschoolers in the Philippines. In both countries, students typically have to take tests from the department of education every school year or be enrolled in a government-accredited homeschool provider.
Bachmann’s family acquired their curriculum from Abeka, an American homeschool provider operating since the 1970s. At home in Zürich, he and his four siblings had a classroom where they would sit on a table with dividers for each person and be taught by their mother. It was like “normal school,” – but with fewer people. They also had tutors for French, German and Latin, and they attended extracurricular classes for music and sports at the conservatory and Swiss public schools.
De Guzman and Buen attended extracurricular activities offered by their Filipino homeschool provider, The Master’s Academy, in Manila. Buen discovered her love for musical theatre through these classes.
De Guzman said, “I was privileged to be in a homeschooler provider that offered so many social or extracurricular activities.” At the school venue, they would take classes and have monthly meetings with their groups. “There was no shortage of socialization,” he said. “I really had so many friends in homeschooling, and the great thing was they were from different grade levels.”
As he is an introvert, he explained that his social exposure helped him to be “adaptable to people, especially now in different areas of my life.” He volunteers at the youth music ministry of his church, where he says he has to act differently with the younger people as opposed to interfacing with his peers, seniors and professors in college. In homeschool, he spent a lot of time with older classmates, so he realized it taught him to be comfortable with anyone older than him. He said, “I can see them as a peer, someone I can just talk to or someone I don’t have to be shy over.”
In contrast to De Guzman’s experience, Bachmann only met with his homeschool group once a month in Switzerland. He described his transition to public school as a struggle while commenting about its similarity to his later experience as a conscript in the Swiss military. “I’m an introvert, so it was stressful. I was super anxious, and I was really, really quiet,” he says. “Homeschooling allowed me to ignore the fact I wasn’t super social. I wasn’t surrounded by people, but in public school you don’t have a choice; you can’t choose the people you deal with. It’s the same with the military; you’re thrust into an environment where you have to adapt. I didn’t have that from day one.”
Before being homeschooled, Buen attended conventional school. “When I was in regular school, I just kinda went with the flow,” she said. “I didn’t really have a personality; I was kind of shy too. And then, when I went homeschooling, I really got to discover myself more because I wasn’t distracted by what everybody else was doing. I didn’t have to worry about catching up to anybody. That’s when I realised what my interests were, and what my strengths were. I realised that, hey, I like musical theatre – hey, I like talking to people. And those are the things I would’ve never known about myself, now those are like- that’s my career. I wouldn’t have figured that out if I wasn’t homeschooled.”
Bachmann similarly said, “If you’re not constantly in a pressure cooker of other people’s opinions and inputs, you can discover who you are and who you want to be.” He was grateful his parents put effort into homeschooling because it allowed him to pursue his interests. He was actually doing a correspondence course carried out through distance learning while writing his first novel. “I wouldn’t have had the freedom to explore the things I wanted to in the public school system,” he explained. “I’ve seen it with my friends who did go to public school… their passions that were kind of crushed by the system because they had no time and resources and space for them to explore what they wanted to do.”
De Guzman discovered his first passion in music after following his older brother’s footsteps, taking violin lessons offered by their homeschool provider. His father also taught him piano, and he could later access the many music books they had at home.
Reading was a hobby De Guzman also loved. He raced to finish books with his brothers. Sometimes it took a whole day to finish one, and he said that homeschooling was flexible enough to allow him to do this because he could just readjust his schedule for the sake of reading a book uninterrupted. In college, he took a literature class where the professor assigned them the “Iliad” to read from front to back. While his classmates read the SparkNotes summaries, he would stay up late juggling his assignments, including reading the book, even though he had read his family’s copy of it already. He successfully read it all for the college class.
In high school, he found that his strengths lay in math and science, subjects that excited him. His curriculum was suitable for self-studying, which he became used to as his mother focused on homeschooling his two younger brothers, one who was nine years younger. He said, “Problem-solving is a fun thing for me ’cause you really get to exercise critical thinking and brainpower.” Although he loved music, he didn’t envision a career in it, but saw engineering as a better choice due to his love for math and science. He said he chose industrial engineering because, “It’s really all about continuous improvement, optimisation and systems thinking, which I very much believed in and subscribed to even beforehand.”
De Guzman and Buen both went into college fresh off the boat from homeschool. De Guzman said adjusting to exams and deadlines was difficult. After his first semester ended, he said, “I was so relieved. When we had our vacation, I was like, ‘Oh man, I don’t wanna go to second sem anymore, I just wanna go back- take me back to homeschooling!’” Even so, he graduated cum laude.
Buen compared her experience in college with her conventionally schooled peers. She explained that they struggled because they were “used to being in the same place with the same people for every class.” Yet she was used to different modes of learning – for example, with or without a group; asynchronous or synchronous – so in that sense, she didn’t have to adjust drastically in college.
Also, she was excited to be in classroom settings with professors again, while her classmates were tired of them. “I was super engaged in the classes, and my classmates were like, ‘Why is she answering?’” she said. “Well, I just really want to learn! I didn’t care about the grades. It made my college experience so much better. I wasn’t the best student. But I was there… Now I realise I should’ve taken notes because it would’ve given me better grades. But I was just listening for real and asking questions for real. My professors knew me for that.” Later on, her professors would contact her about job openings. At first she would be surprised as she wasn’t their best student, but later realised that they remembered her because of her work ethic and passion.
Since Bachmann experienced public school before entering college, the transition wasn’t as hard. However, he said, “I didn’t enjoy the professors, the angle they tried to push me artistically… They all went to uni at the same time and had the same mindset…” According to him, they wanted to align the students to the musical trend at the time, which would eventually change in 20 to 30 years. “I didn’t like that they wanted to turn students into little copies of themselves – the reason I was not happy with it was because of homeschooling.” He joked, “‘Yeah, I’ll be a clone, it’s no problem!’… In art, you have to be open to whatever the person wants to express. Don’t force them to express what you want them to.” One can draw a parallel between the way Bachmann’s creativity was inhibited in college with how conventional school can force young minds into one mould, without room for individuality – much like Buen’s previously-mentioned experience not being able to discover her passions and going with the flow in conventional school.
Buen wished she had a mentor in high school to call out the best in her, based on her interests and talents. Today, she does just that for teenage homeschooled and unschooled students, teaching classes like cultural exchange, history, home economics, and even scriptwriting. Her students have become her best friends. “Not many people my age can say this, but I’m happy at my job,” she said. She turned down a job related to her college major so she could keep working with her students.
She suggests that future homeschoolers be familiar with their unique learning styles and ask for help with academics more. De Guzman says that students should go beyond their curriculum, not just answer their textbooks – and explore their subjects further to really learn. “We had this slogan in homeschool,” he says. “‘Our classroom is the world.’” Bachmann reflects, “If I were in my parents’ shoes, I would encourage more group stuff, confronting your kid with groups of people, learning to interact with a group and feeling comfortable.”
Nevertheless, he says, “I’m really happy I was homeschooled. Regardless who I was talking to I would tell them that, because I definitely don’t think I would be a writer and musician. I really don’t know what I would be.”
author’s notes from 2025:
I want to share some info about how I wrote this piece for homeschoolers out there wondering how it came to be (and those who are interested in journalism/writing in general). It was written for Intro to Journalism class, and I conducted my interviews online due to the pandemic. Looking back at this work (I haven’t written a journalistic article in years; I’m out of practice!), I’m amazed I got to write something like this as a second year student because it is a hard job:
- overcoming my anxiety to reach out to the interviewees (3 out of 4 people responded to my request; Stefan was actually my favourite author as a teenager with his “The Peculiar” steampunk novels, so I was super nervous, but he was kind enough to give me his time) and actually interview them,
- compiling themes from their answers,
- transcribing the parts I needed,
- writing drafts and revising them after my professor’s feedback, and so on.
I did something similar for my thesis project (a graphic novel about the Armenian diaspora), working with SEVEN interviews this time, and it took me longer to compile themes and decide which to use and to connect to each other narratively. I’m glad this article on homeschoolers served as a foundation for that (although I was still super nervous at the beginning of every interview for my thesis. Chalk it up to social anxiety.)
I also hope this gives my homeschooled readers an idea of how life after homeschool looks like. I specifically chose people from different fields – engineering, music and writing, and education – to show how varied you can go in your career choices. I especially thought that picking someone from engineering will dispel the myth that homeschoolers lack knowledge in math and science.
A lot of people in the Philippines switched to homeschooling during the pandemic; perhaps the same happened around the world (still have to do research on that), and now more people are aware of how it’s really like. I still meet people who think homeschoolers suck at socialising, which annoys me to no end. But I hope my article and my interviewees’ experiences will inform them about the nuances of homeschooling and its positive impact on a student’s self-esteem, sense of idea and, of course, social skills (and how to best foster social skills in a homeschool environment).
While rereading this, I wish I was able to share how a day in the life of homeschool looked like for Aaron and Joyce, because I only clearly shared about Stefan’s typical day and homeschool set-up. I think I included some parts about Aaron’s experience with his siblings in other sections of the article, but editorially, I wish I included it in that paragraph about Stefan, as well as to share something about Joyce’s side of the story. (From my interview notes, Joyce shared how home was a creative environment – “my dad is a painter” – and it felt like “one big school”.)
Well, guys, this is how you realise you’ve grown as a writer, ’cause you can see your past mistakes and how you can improve 😆
Anyways, I hope this gave you some food for thought, and I’d love to hear what you think of the article in the comments!
If you are a reader with no experience with homeschooling, what was the most fascinating thing you learned about it? Did it change any or some of your perspectives? And for the reader who’s experienced homeschooling (whether as a student or a parent), could you relate to any of the experiences my interviewees shared? Did you also have new realisations about homeschooling? Would you like for me to write more about homeschooling? 🙂