Haute Home Schools Designed to Give Kids a Bespoke Education
21st February 2016
Only five children go to this 12,000-square-foot school in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Here, on any given day, 12-year-old twins Logan and Garrett might solve math problems on their computers while their sisters, Sienna, 5, Reagan, 7, and Ava Rose, 10, have recess on the playground. Other times they all work together to memorize passages of Shakespeare or the names of the bones in the human body.
The kids live at the school as well—because it’s also their family’s home. Their mother, Karin Katherine Taylor, is also their teacher. She and her husband, a 59-year-old chief executive of an industrial-distribution firm, built the home six years ago with the intent of home schooling their children there.
If I had the money, and children, that’s what I’d do with it.
The family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom.
It was customer for the upper classes in Europe to have their children educated by tutors and governesses, the boys until it was time for them to go to ‘public’ school, the girls until they ‘came out’ and hit the marriage market. That may be coming back around on the guitar.