At the time, our oldest daughter was six-and-a-half and had never been to school. We were leading a simple, relaxed, unschooled life. I was convinced that we would go on like that – enjoying the freedom of being outside the school system. But things turned out not to be that simple.

The year before, over the summer as the other kids started getting ready for their first school year, buying lunchboxes and schoolbags, and as the questions from friends and relatives got increasingly frequent and insisting, my daughter had also started asking about going to school. I had dismissed those demands at first, blaming them on the fact that virtually everybody else we knew was preparing to start school and thinking that her interest would wear off as the year would advance and things would quiet down again. It did, for a while, but she kept asking regularly about going to school “like the other kids.” I made a point of explaining to her how I was against the whole idea of compulsory schooling and forcing people to do this or that, how I would like for her to conserve her freedom. Oddly – or not so oddly –enough, it was that exact same reasoning that finally got me to “give in” and agree to let her go to school. One night, she came to me asking whether my keeping her out of school against her will wasn’t kind of the same thing as forcing someone to do something! . . .