A Peculiar Existence
About A Peculiar Existence
A Peculiar Existence is an independent publication about raising and educating children in a complicated world. We write about secular homeschooling, global and decolonizing education, books, family life, and the questions worth asking about what children learn.
Why "peculiar"?
Because our family has never fit particularly neatly into the boxes provided for us.
And eventually we stopped treating that as a problem to solve. A Peculiar Existence grew from home education, books, conversations around the table, and questions about what was missing from traditional curricula.
Over time, it became increasingly obvious that the education we wanted for our children would require us to build some of it ourselves.
About Gina
I’m Gina, the person writing most of what you’ll find here.
I’m a mother, homeschooler, entrepreneur, relentless curriculum tinkerer, and the founder of A Peculiar Existence.
I’m interested in the places where education gets complicated: whose history gets remembered, how geography shapes human lives, what books we give children, how evidence changes our understanding of the past, and how any of this is supposed to happen while running an actual household. I don’t have a perfect homeschool. I don’t particularly want one. I want an education that is thoughtful, rigorous, curious, humane, and large enough to contain a complicated world.
Peculiar School
Eventually those ideas became something larger.
Peculiar School is a homeschool curriculum developed by A Peculiar Existence. It’s where many of the educational ideas discussed in this publication become actual courses, lessons and learning experiences. A Peculiar Existence remains the place where we can keep asking questions. Peculiar School is where we build some of the answers.