During last year’s awards season, Emma Thompson kept bringing her teenage daughter Gaia as her date to various events. That’s why we have so many current-ish photos of Gaia. Gaia is currently 15 years old and she looks SO much like her mom. But I also see some of her dad, Greg Wise, in there too. Anyway, I always assumed that Gaia was and is as clever and cool as Emma, because how could she not be? Emma and Greg raised Gaia in England, and Gaia has been educated at private schools (or as the Brits call it, public schools). But no more. Greg announced a few days ago that they were taking Gaia out of private school and she’s going to be homeschooled from now on. Ruh roh.

Emma Thompson’s daughter has been withdrawn from her £6,000-a-term school so she can be taught in her back garden after deciding main-stream learning ‘wasn’t for her’. Fifteen-year-old Gaia is being educated at home, her father, the actor Greg Wise, revealed today. Wise said she made the decision just before she started her GCSEs, leading them to build a classroom in the garden of their West Hampstead home.

‘School isn’t for everyone,’ he told The Times Magazine. ‘She loves learning and she’s terribly focused and hardworking, but she didn’t like the sausage factory of formal education.’

Wise said he would not be teaching Gaia – but pointed out as many as 60 per cent of today’s youngsters would end up doing jobs which were yet to be invented.

‘So what are we teaching them?’ he wondered. ‘I think really we should just teach Latin and free-form dance.’

Thompson has previously revealed she hoped her daughter would do her A-levels at Camden School for Girls, the state secondary where she herself was taught.

[From The Daily Mail]

Do I think this is going to be the same kind of “homeschooling” that Kendall and Kylie Jenner received? Absolutely not. But it does make me nervous. I’m the daughter of a public school teacher, and I had a great public school education myself (I still can’t spell worth a damn, but that’s not my school’s fault). I believe that kids should go to a real school because I believe in the process. I think Gaia’s private homeschooling will probably be thorough and Greg and Emma can obviously afford it, but it bugs me. Every teenager is disaffected and distracted, and it feels like the answer of “Eh, they’ll grow out of it” doesn’t apply to some special snowflakes.

Photos courtesy of WENN.