Reflections: 12 Years of Homeschooling

Recorded as his eldest son sat his final exam, this talk is Shaykh Ismail Kamdar’s personal look back at twelve years of homeschooling. It’s less a lesson than a story: why his family chose this path, what went right and wrong, and what he’s learned.

His journey started with his own education. His mother took him out of school in grade eight to study Islam full-time, and he later finished high school from home and earned a university degree online, skipping two grades along the way. That made him question how much time traditional schooling really needs. He then worked as a teacher and administrator in Islamic schools and became disillusioned with what he saw: the quality of teaching, the role models, the Islamic content, and the negative peer influences in local high schools at the time.

He wasn’t immediately sold on homeschooling. The homeschooled people he had met were poor examples, including a classmate raised so sheltered that his parents never taught him about puberty. But after watching a homeschooling mother’s webinar, reading about it, and meeting a homeschooling father whose teenagers impressed him with their maturity, he took that father’s advice: try it for one year. It became twelve. He turned a bedroom into a classroom and eventually homeschooled five children, his four and his youngest brother. The years from 2016 to 2019, he says, were among the happiest of his life. His children also had a full social life, with soccer, martial arts, swimming, and Islamic events.

Not everything went smoothly. When his children reached high school, he wasn’t confident teaching advanced math and science, so they moved to an online Muslim school. The pandemic brought laptops and looser technology rules. During a couple of very difficult personal years, he admits he “dropped the ball” and left their education to the online school. In 2025 he refocused, and the family eventually moved abroad for a better environment, continuing to learn as they traveled. Homeschooling, he notes, made that move far easier than it would have been for children rooted in a school.

The benefits he sees: his children have a love of learning and can think critically and teach themselves; the family is unusually close, which he considers the greatest benefit of all; Islam is a lived worldview rather than an exam subject. Twice he enrolled them in outside Islamic classes and twice pulled them out, because Islam quickly became “just another subject to pass.” What worked best as they grew older was reading classical Islamic books written for adults together, one section at a time. He also prioritized adab: from ages four to seven, the main focus was character, following the early scholars’ practice of learning manners before knowledge. And each child has been free to follow their own path, whether university or starting a business young.

His concerns and lessons: He worries about young people who spent formative years in pandemic isolation; in his work with youth, he sees widespread anxiety, low confidence, and weak social skills, and he believes elders and communities need to help them rebuild. He also sees real harm from early, unrestricted internet access: attention problems, doubts about faith, social anxiety, and hostile attitudes between the sexes. Even with no personal phones until 16 and limited internet until about 12, he wishes he had been stricter. Technology should be introduced step by step, until trust is earned.

Most importantly, he asks why a family homeschools. If it comes purely from fear, as a shell against the world, it will only work for a few years, and children may be less prepared when they finally face that world. The goal should be preparing children to engage the world, introducing it to them gradually. He also stresses that homeschooling takes a village. It isn’t fair to leave one parent, usually the mother, to do everything alone; families need shared effort, tutors, relatives, and community teachers. Some mothers manage it alone, but they are the exception, not a standard to hold others to.

He closes with gratitude. One of the greatest gifts of homeschooling, he says, is that children see their parents as real people, watching how they work, handle paperwork, and overcome challenges, which teaches them how to live. Education of children is first the parents’ responsibility in Islam. Homeschooling isn’t for every family, and he has no issue with children attending school, but even then, he urges parents to remain their children’s primary teachers in matters of faith and the soul, for example through a weekly family halaqa.