My wife, Amy, and I didn’t originally set out to home-school our kids. But we were surprised at the opposition by our 5-year-old son’s principal to our planned three-week China trip.

“That’s too much time away from school. He’ll be considered truant. Don’t you care about his education?” she said.

In fact, we viewed the trip as a splendid educational opportunity. But it seemed this principal, and many people, viewed classrooms and books as being the only sources of real education, versus merely being tools of mass education.

So we tried a private school for a few months, but found the homework and testing to be excessive. Thus, like hikers diverted off their charted path by an unforeseen barrier, we veered away from classroom-based schooling and hesitantly embarked on a lesser-known approach – home-schooling.

Like most people, we had concerns. Will our son be properly socialized? Will he make good academic progress? Will we know how to teach him? Will home-schooling be too hard on Amy or strain the family? But like diverted hikers finding their new path delightful, we discovered home-schooling to be surprisingly effective and fun. Socialization opportunities were plentiful through sports teams, neighborhood kids, cousins, religious organization activities, family friends and more. Academic progress was great, mostly due to self-paced learning, subject choice and hands-on experiences. And home-schooling was a lot of fun – the same joy and bonding we experienced when helping our children first learn to walk or recognize letters would be repeated over and over again as we helped them learn about planets, animals, states, negative numbers and so on.

We adored the flexible lifestyle – we traveled when we wanted, slept in after late nights with friends or family, spent time with out-of-town relatives when they were here and worked extra hard during less-busy times. By the time our third child reached school age, we were solidly on the home-schooling path and we haven’t looked back.

And thus our kids became three of the 1 million American children – 2 percent of school-age kids – who are home-schooled today, an approach that was common before the compulsory schooling laws of the late 1800s were introduced (Benjamin Franklin was home-schooled, for example) and that is now being rediscovered by many.

Recent studies show home-schoolers tend to grow up well socialized, to attend and finish college, to hold good jobs and perhaps, most importantly, to be happy and content with their lives. Such studies, along with increasing resources and options, make the decision to home-school even easier for parents today than for us back in 1995.

In 2005, UCR started a home-school admissions program, making it the first of any California public university to do so (or top-50 public university to do so). It has attracted dozens of accomplished applicants who demonstrate enthusiasm, intellectual vitality and maturity, and who have achieved above-average UCR grades and are seemingly adapting to college life just fine.

There are many paths to raising a child. It is now clear that home-schooling is a valid one and sometimes even a great one. We have that principal from 12 years ago to thank for unintentionally helping us discover home-schooling, a path that has worked wonderfully for my wife, my kids and me – to put it succinctly, we are having a blast.

I look forward to others discovering that path, too, and to watching the home-school movement continuing to grow and evolve in the coming decades.

Frank Vahid is a professor of computer science. He and his wife recently authored the book “Homeschooling: A Path Rediscovered” to share the idea of home-schooling with parents, teachers, administrators and anyone else interested in the raising and education of children.