First, when faced with an open-ended question, parents may not have recalled or responded with all of the reasons for homeschooling that were applicable to their situation. Second, parents were not specifically asked to report their primary reason for homeschooling.
Questionnaire items in the collection were designed to address these limitations. The survey presented parents with a series of questions asking them whether particular reasons for homeschooling applied to them table 4. Parents were then asked which of those applicable reasons was their most important reason for homeschooling. Home-schooling families are, however, breaking a pattern established since colonial times—education has been becoming increasingly institutionalized, formal, and removed from the family.
How important is the contemporary home-schooling movement and what does it portend for American public education? No one can say for sure. It is difficult even to estimate the numbers of children being schooled at home, and evidence about student learning and other outcomes is mostly anecdotal. Edited by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. Sawhill It is, however, possible to draw three conclusions about where home schooling is likely to go and how it will affect the broad public education enterprise—which for the purpose of this article includes charter schools and publicly funded voucher programs as well as conventional district-run public schools.
Home schooling is part of a broad movement in which private groups and individuals are learning how to provide services that were once left to public bureaucracies. As home-schooling families learn to rely on one another, many are likely to create new institutions that look something like schools. Although many home-schooling families are willing to accept help from public school systems, the families and the schools they create are far more likely to join the charter and voucher movements than to assimilate back into the conventional public school system.
Parents who decide to school their children at home commit time and energy to an activity that was once left to specialized professionals. Even in the states with the most permissive home-schooling laws, parents must learn what is normally taught to children of a given age, find materials and projects that teach specific skills, and learn how to use their own time and that of their children productively.
Home-schooling web sites continually post new ideas and materials for teaching subjects from math to drama. Parents can find advice about what kinds of programs are likely to work for their own children and can enter chat rooms with other parents struggling with the same issues.
Without making a quality judgment about these resources, it is clear that many serious people are putting in a great deal of effort. The materials available are not amateurish: They come from universities, research institutes, mutual assistance networks, school districts, and state education departments. People who contribute to home-schooling web sites and association meetings are also conducting serious research and development. Home schooling is a very large teacher training program, and many tens of thousands of people are learning how to teach, assess results, and continuously improve instruction.
It also must be one of the biggest parent-training programs in the country. Like charter schooling, home schooling depends on the creation of new human capital. People have to learn how, in new contexts and under new rules, to teach and motivate students, take advantage of complementary adult skills, find resources, and make effective use of scarce time and money.
Critics charge that much of this effort is wasted and that at best all the new human capital developed at such cost can only duplicate what already exists in conventional public and private schools. Although the new people will undoubtedly reinvent some wheels and some may go down blind alleys, these initiatives bring new blood and new ideas into a stagnant education sector that was previously dominated by civil service cartels and was thus rule-bound and risk-averse.
Home schoolers are not all recluses living in log cabins. Growing numbers of home-schooling families live in or near cities, are well educated, and hold down normal jobs. They are not all afraid of the modern world; many are inveterate users of the Internet, and large numbers of West Coast home-school parents work in the computer and software industries.
Although large numbers of home schoolers are Christian fundamentalists and Mormons, many other religions are represented as well.
There are active home-schooling organizations for Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews. Amelia would love to go horse riding. Ben would like to do more sports. There is criticism, too, from within the community. Her parents separated soon after she was born; she only occasionally sees her father. She started at her local primary when she was four and left when she was eight.
By then, her mother was horrified by the change in her. Her mother says Biggar was excruciatingly shy and the trauma of school went very deep.
She recalls her wetting herself most days. A decade on, Biggar is happy and confident. She is doing online A-levels in English literature, classical civilisation and philosophy, and a Scottish higher in drama through a local school.
She is passionate about theatre — performing, writing, directing. A lot of the rehearsals are during the day. There has been a price to pay. But it has enriched my life massively. Families in the UK have long welcomed the relaxed laws governing home-education. Under section seven of the Education Act of , parents have a duty to ensure their children are educated. They are not required to teach the national curriculum, have any specific qualifications, register with a local authority, allow inspectors into their homes, or get approval for the sort of education provided at home.
Welsh guidelines recommend the local authority contacts the family annually. But the government is now seeking to tighten and clarify rules surrounding home-education. Proposals include a mandatory register of home-educated children, along with increased monitoring and support from local authorities.
This is prompted in part by the steep rise in the number of children educated at home, and by concerns over child welfare in the wake of such high-profile cases as that of Jordan Burling, from Leeds, who died after severe neglect in Jordan, 18, had not attended school since he was 12, when his mother announced he was to be home-schooled.
He never took any exams or achieved any qualifications and was rarely seen outside the house. Secondly, we are Christians and concerned with false worldviews. All white men are dangerous. I was a single mother and my daughter went to daycare from the age of 12 weeks. Then when she was four, I got a job working from home. A couple of months later, I got mail from the public school saying it was time to register her for four-year-old pre-K.
I had just finally gotten the opportunity to stay home with her—there was no way I was going to send her off to school. Also, years before I ever had her, I had read a book about learning through play and it shaped my thinking about how education could be.
Homeschooling is a lifestyle, and one of our regrets is not having homeschooled our kids from the beginning. We noticed that his stress level decreased. His ADHD symptoms diminished considerably. He was just a happier kid. Ten minutes of reading a day one-on-one with me improved his reading by leaps and bounds! Now my daughter is always laughing and smiling. She loves the relaxed environment of homeschooling. Our relationship has been strengthened.
The obvious impact is the knowledge level. My children are either at or above their grade levels in comparison to their public-schooled peers. I loved having my daughter with me.
I know that her education was so much more well-rounded than what she could have anywhere else. I loved that she could wake up naturally every morning and start the day unhurried. I loved that she could go to the bathroom whenever she wanted. She never had to sit in class with her tummy growling, waiting for lunchtime.
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