The speaker and her husband adopted home-schooling for their daughter Cathy because they lived on a sailing boat.

I’ve never believed that the only way to get an education is to sit at a desk with four walls around you. The world is our classroom and our home, a 41-foot sailing boat, takes us there. My husband and I dreamed of sailing around the world before our daughters were even born. Their arrivals only increased our desire to live the cruising lifestyle, a way of life that has given us the opportunity for lots of quality and quantity family time. Educating our two daughters, while living afloat on our sailing boat, has added a wonderful new dimension to our lives.
    We started out years ago with a kindergarten correspondence course for our daughter Cathy. It’s what most cruising families use, but as Cathy zoomed through the entire year’s course in a matter of two months, we realize that a prepackaged school was not what she needed. Cathy’s gilled mind needed to be challenged, excited, sent into orbit. We devised our own curriculum fur the rest of the year.
    Choosing courses of study for Cathy was great fun. We looked at where we would be sailing to during the school year, or where we would be stopping to work, and all sorts of topics of interest presented themselves. For example, while cruising down the East Coast to Florida, we chose space exploration for a unit of study. Our studies included both fictional and non-fictional reading, experiments and writing assignments. The finale was watching a shuttle launch and visiting the Kennedy Space Center museums.
    We do miss out on a few things that most home-schooled children are able to take advantage of and which would perhaps make our academic life easier. Our home afloat is small. School is held on a small dining table and it’s difficult to leave artwork, science experiments or projects "until later". We also have limited room for school books and so those we have must be chosen carefully. Perhaps the thing we miss the most when traveling is not always having access to a library. We hope to upgrade our notebook computer to one with CD-ROM soon. Imagine having resources like encyclopedias and atlases all in a small enough format to fit on the boat.
    But the advantages of our floating school far outweigh any disadvantages. Part of the reason we cruise is for the wonderful opportunities to learn about the world around us. Hands-on learning experiences we get from hiking through a rain forest, snorkeling over a coral reef, visiting historic ruins, shopping in foreign markets or participating in local festivals are an important part of our schooling.