Dear Big A,
You may not realise it, but you have just pulled off a quiet coup. You made the call first. Somewhere between a game of chess and one of your YouTube rabbit holes on Rucka Rucka Ali, you decided that you wanted school.
I spent weeks circling the idea like a nervous mom on trial for taking her kids out of the schooling system and then being asked to shape them back into what they are not, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I kept wondering if this was a detour from the unschooling road we have walked or simply the next stretch of the same journey. The thought resisted me at first, but slowly, like bread dough that begins to soften beneath my palms, the yeast waking in its own sweet time, I convince myself this isn’t a surrender but a sound move. I suppose different seasons ask for different tools.
For years, you have feasted on the internet. Khan Academy, YouTube, endless articles, arguments, the glorious chaos of ideas at the speed of Wi-Fi. You learned to follow curiosity wherever it led, and that kind of freedom is rare. But there is another kind of learning that happens when a pen drags across a page, wrestling with cursive, working through a problem line by line, when the mind has to stay with one difficult thing and processing it at the speed of ink. These are not quaint relics. I believe they are grounding mechanisms. They slow the mind just enough for true understanding to settle in. You have feasted on information. Now you need the digestion that comes from slower tools.
Then there’s the human experiment. Screens can beam lectures from Nobel laureates but you cannot download the experience of living among other boys your age, sharing space, competing, arguing, conspiring over nothing in particular. Teenage years are a free trial. Live it up before the subscription fee kicks in. You deserve the friction of real faces, the collisions that shape character and sand off ego.
In that environment, you will discover something every person must learn sooner or later, which is that there is always someone faster, stronger, wittier, or funnier. It is better to meet that truth early when the stakes are small, where losing a debate or missing a shot carries lessons more than its costs. Humility grows from these moments, and though it rarely feels pleasant at the time, it is a lifelong gift.
Although self-directed learning is rich in freedom, it is also light on friction. School introduces the steady pressure of deadlines, shared responsibilities, and the occasional hard-nosed teacher who will not accept half measures. It is a rehearsal for the real world where effort meets expectation and results are measured. The ability to meet a standard set by someone other than yourself is a transferable asset.
The world runs on systems—markets, universities, institutions, social norms that no one designed but you must learn to navigate. You do not have to love every rule to benefit from understanding them. School is one of the most efficient vantage points for observing how the game is played. Even if your path remains unconventional, seeing the machinery from the inside gives you optionality. You can choose to play, to exit, or to innovate with eyes wide open.
Finally, there’s the adventure of leaving home which may be the greatest education of all. Home is the first classroom, but it carries the invisible gravity of familiar habits and assumptions. Living away from it forces you to navigate unfamiliar cultures, new personalities and value systems. Each encounter expands the map of what is possible and will sharpen your senses. Boarding school will give you experiences that no textbook, no video, no perfectly designed curriculum can replicate because they happen in real time among real people and with consequences that cannot be paused or replayed.
So go, then. Treat this as one of your first real investments. Collect friends like undervalued stocks, spot the quiet compounders, lose a debate or two, smuggle midnight snacks, and let the school bells become your new soundtrack. Learn how influence works in a room full of boys who are all trying to figure themselves out at the same time. I will be here prepping two mugs of warm milk from Kali and realising you will be sipping yours from some other bovine. Your brother will miss your long limbs in that nightly bed-wrestle and the endless rants on Ow-Pow and ROK, and Dad will have one less partner for banter on geopolitics.
With love,
Mum
P.S. I suppose you will recognise this better than most: Mr Buffett is likely to say that the best investment you can ever make is in yourself. Read widely. Stay curious. Choose friends who make you a little better every day. Markets will rise and fall, plans will change, but knowledge and character compound in ways that rarely show up on a balance sheet. If you keep adding to those, patiently, year after year, the returns have a way of taking care of themselves.
