01.09.2026
The book
I went to see the head of my sons’ school and told him they weren’t going to take homework home.
He looked at me. “But all the children have homework. It’s part of the curriculum.”
I told him I understood. That they could do all the work in class. That once they walked out of the school, their time was theirs.
He agreed. I think he thought I was mad.
I also told him not to worry about their marks, that marks don’t say whether a child is more or less clever, that they’re numbers on a piece of paper. That unsettled him more than the homework did.
And on Mondays they didn’t go. Ever. In Spain you can miss four days a month with a note from the parent, so every Monday I wrote one: “Absent for reasons beyond our control.”
Their classmates asked why they were always off on Mondays. They answered: “Because we can.”
It didn’t last long. They had seen both worlds and decided to leave. But they took something out of it: you can be inside the system without letting the system tell you who you are.
All of this comes from a book about those eighteen years. It’s called No Homework, No Marks.
I arrived in Spain from Australia a widower, with Arjuna aged ten and Nitai eight. Spanish was their first language, but after four years in Australia we were all speaking English at home and they had lost it. I had no teaching plan, no curriculum, and no idea what I was doing. I gave it back to them with coloured sticks hidden in my fist, to see who shouted the colour first. In three months they were speaking.
Eighteen years later, most of them outside school, they are two adults who think for themselves.
The book is those eighteen years told in scenes: what I did, when, and how it ended. With the mistakes in, and there were many. The legal part goes at the end, country by country, because that’s the question that stops most people before they start.
It’s in PDF and EPUB, four euros ninety-nine. The download starts as soon as you pay.
It isn’t a manual and it won’t tell you what to do. It tells you what I did, which is the only thing I can give you first hand.
If you don’t want it, nothing happens: the daily card stays free and is going to go on being free.
Tomorrow I’ll be here, as I am every day.
Juan Manuel Ferrera (Jagannatha Mishra Dasa)