Written by Kristina Göransson
Image credit: Taken by the author. A homeschooling cooperative in Singapore.
When speaking to parents of young children in East and Southeast Asia, a recurring theme is the tension between, on the one hand, the aspiration to achieve academic success and, on the other hand, the desire to nurture the child’s emotional well-being and happiness. These seemingly paradoxical desires, infused with anxieties and dilemmas, are entangled with shifting notions of parenting, care, childhood, and the relationship between family life and broader social trends. While education is generally understood as a moral imperative driven by intense competition for grades and school admissions, it is important to note that there has been a shift in education policy, in Taiwan and beyond, where two contrasting approaches coexist: the conventional one, driven by academic-centric notions of learning and standardised testing, and another that emphasises holistic and value-based learning. Both positions are reflected in the strategies of leading actors in global education governance, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UNESCO.
The different ways in which parents balance aspirations for academic achievement with concerns for emotional well-being reveal a complexity that fundamentally contradicts the stereotype of rigid, authoritarian “tiger parenting” often associated with Asia. In this context, it is particularly interesting to inspect parents who, in various ways, exit the mainstream education system, such as homeschoolers. Examining those who leave the system clarifies what is at stake for those who remain: the balancing of aspiration, well-being, and care under conditions of heightened competition. In this sense, marginal practices provide insight into broader patterns of parental negotiation and prioritisation regarding children’s education. Homeschooling parents’ responses to educational anxiety can be understood as efforts to reworld childhood through alternative educational paths, that is, to reconfigure what counts as desirable learning, care, and a meaningful childhood. They engage in forms of intensive parenting that extend beyond exam preparation and the meticulous scheduling of children’s daily routines to include the moral and affective labour of crafting alternative educational trajectories.
In my ethnographic research, I have explored such “opting out” practices among Singaporean families with young children who pursue alternative life visions and educational trajectories. One way was to homeschool children; another way was to move abroad to a presumably less stressful educational environment, such as Thailand or Malaysia. The notion of educational lifestyle exile is helpful here, as it captures both the privilege that allows some families to reshape their quality of life and the urgency that drives them to escape educational environments perceived as harmful. While transnational mobility, in which families relocate in search of less pressurised schooling, offers one clear expression of such exile, homeschooling can be understood as a parallel, locally grounded form. Parents who withdraw their children from mainstream schools often do so out of a compelling desire to escape the rigidities of exam-orientated education and to protect their children’s emotional well-being. In this sense, homeschooling becomes another mode of educational escape: a deliberate stepping away from institutionalised expectations in order to create alternative spaces of learning aligned with their visions of a more balanced and humane childhood.
Parents choose to homeschool their children for a variety of reasons. Often, they are motivated by either ideological reasons, such as the desire to provide a religious education, or pedagogical reasons, such as dissatisfaction with traditional schooling. The homeschooling parents I encountered in Singapore usually emphasised the desire to provide their children with a more meaningful, creative, and holistic learning experience, free from the cramming and competition of the formal education system. As one mother, who had homeschooled her three children, put it: “Children are so stressed [in the mainstream education system]. They spend so much time studying, and they sort of lose their childhood. They don’t have time to play”. She continued explaining that, “Along the way, more and more reasons [to homeschool] surfaced. Children in school go through so much stress; they are bullied, and they are actually not learning. They don’t enjoy learning, they have no sense of curiosity, and they don’t ask questions.” Her account points to reworlding as an everyday practice that reorganises pedagogy and sociality to sustain curiosity and play.
Homeschooling parents prioritise exploratory learning and a meaningful childhood. By doing so, they reframe risk, but their educational labour is no less demanding than that of parents in the mainstream system. Pursuing alternative educational pathways and striving for a happy childhood both require and perpetuate intensive parenting styles. These styles are marked by an understanding of children as vulnerable and a conviction that parents’ actions, or lack thereof, have a profound impact on their children’s lives.
Image credit: Taken by the author. Outside a row of private learning centres in Singapore on a Saturday morning.
Similar dynamics are evident in Taiwan, where homeschooling and experimental education have emerged as strategies for parents to balance aspirations for their children’s academic success with concerns about their emotional well-being. Homeschooling has been legal in Taiwan since 1999. It is governed by The Law for Non-School Mode of Experimental Education for Senior Secondary Education and Below (高級中等以下教育階段非學校型態實驗教育實施條例), which was promulgated on November 19, 2014. According to the Ministry of Education, the non-school-based experimental education “refers to education, other than school education, that is non-profit, adopts an experimental curriculum, and aims to develop holistic citizens with balanced teachings of morals, knowledge, physical strength, social skills, and aesthetics.” This may encompass individual homeschooling, small learning groups, and community-based institutions. While homeschooling in Singapore is increasingly regulated and monitored, in Taiwan, it forms part of a national strategy to diversify learning and promote educational innovation. Since 2014, the Taiwanese state has actively encouraged educational diversification, resulting in rapid growth in experimental programmes and school‑based innovations. In this landscape, homeschooling, whether through project‑based urban learning, outdoor education groups, or parent‑run co‑learning communities, is not an isolated deviation but part of a wider movement reimagining what counts as desirable learning and success in Taiwan today. Although Taiwan’s overall student population has declined by 273,000 since 2019 due to falling birth rates, participation in experimental education has grown rapidly. In 2024, a record 27,000 students were enrolled in these programmes, a 50 per cent increase over the past five years. School-based experimental education has grown especially quickly, with the number of approved schools nearly doubling.
As in Singapore, Taiwanese parents’ motivations for homeschooling appear to be mainly driven by dissatisfaction with mainstream schools and their excessive exam drilling, standardisation and inflexibility. Parents who choose homeschooling generally prioritise an education that adapts to the child, rather than forcing the child to adapt to the school. Concerns about children’s mental well-being or special needs are also recurring reasons to opt for homeschooling.
By stepping outside mainstream schooling, homeschooling parents craft different trajectories for their children that challenge dominant narratives of success. In this sense, homeschooling and other alternative educational trajectories do more than illustrate rejection of mainstream schooling. They reveal how parents reinterpret and rework ideals of parenting itself. Rather than simply pursuing academic advantage, these parents invest significant emotional, moral, and practical labour into shaping educational environments aligned with their visions of a good childhood. However, the ability to realise such visions of a good childhood is itself shaped by social class. Only certain families have the financial resources, cultural capital and flexible working conditions needed to opt out of mainstream education and create alternative learning environments. Consequently, these alternative approaches can challenge mainstream expectations while also creating new forms of hierarchy.
An ethnographic lens makes visible the complexities, contradictions, and aspirations that conventional images of Asian intensive parenting often obscure. By examining alternative educational trajectories, we gain insight into the broader moral landscapes of parenting, in which academic ambition, emotional well-being, and visions of a good childhood are continually renegotiated. Yet, despite the growing visibility of these alternative educational paths, there is remarkably little research on homeschooling in Asian contexts, including Taiwan, where experimental education is expanding rapidly. This gap calls for further ethnographic and comparative research to understand how families across the region navigate educational anxiety, reconfigure childhood, and actively carve out new learning opportunities beyond the mainstream.
Kristina Göransson is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on intergenerational relations, parenting, care and education in East and Southeast Asia. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore and led an international project on parents’ educational strategies in Singapore, South Korea and China. She is currently investigating how families in the region opt out of mainstream schooling to pursue alternative aspirations.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Plural Education within Taiwan and Beyond