From Quinn Cummings in the Wall Street Journal:
Today in the U.S., some two million children are home schooled, growing at an annual rate of 7% to 15% for over a decade, according to the president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The term "home schooler" once implied "isolationist religious zealot" or "off-the-grid anarchist who makes her own yogurt." Today, it also means military parents who hate to see their kids keep changing schools; or the family with a future Olympian who ice skates five hours a day; or your cousin whose daughter is gifted but has a learning disability. The average home schooler is no longer a sideshow oddity.
UPDATE: Thanks to Melissa for reminding that Quinn Cummings in the Quinn Cummings from the Goodbye Girl. I worshiped her when I was in middle school. She was that tough urban chic that I admired so much. Now she's an expert on home schooling and has a cute blog. As Melissa said, "Damn her."
Apt. 11d 
I really like the idea of “roam schooling”, despite my comments below.
I am deeply uncomfortable with homeschooling as solution to education, even though I see it fits the bill for many individual families (and may one day my own). Mostly because my perception is that what is happening is that
a) this is more pressure on women (mainly) to subsume their intelligence, energy and drive into the family and remove them further from economic power; it also has the side benefit of removing from school politics the people most invested in their kids’ education. If one more person tells me the solution to a bad grade one teacher is homeschooling I am going to sentence them to 12 years’ unpaid work as a teacher to two children NOT biologically related to them and see how they like it.
b) I am an expert in raising my kid, but I am not an expert in all the school curriculum and I am not convinced I would find my own blind spots in time. I feel like the idea of expertise is disappearing from the stage and “the Internet can teach you” is just not, to my mind, the right answer.
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The issue I see with Quinn Cullen’s model of education (the mix of classes, chosen specifically for the child with parental management of the big picture) is the same as the “bowling alone” problem. It might optimize the education of individual children, if the goal is to optimize how much they learn. But it might undermine community.
My milieu is full of parents engaging in intensive cultivation of their children (last weekend was a long conversation with a parent of a competitive figure skater; my kid is commuting to drama rehearsals with a competitive dancer). In practice, this means each kid is finding the set of activities that’s best for them (tap dance + choir, or basketball + drama, or math + architecture class, . . . .). School is their common denominator. Without it, they’d have none. How children are effected (and how one specific child is affected) probably depends what they need to develop social relationships.
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“I feel like the idea of expertise is disappearing from the stage and “the Internet can teach you” is just not, to my mind, the right answer.”
Unfortunately, that’s a very influential idea in the public schools as well (you hear a lot about how kids don’t need “rote knowledge” because they can always google whatever they need to know). Years ago, my dad (an on and off math teacher with an MA in the subject as well as a school board member at the time) once talked to a home ec teacher (the principal’s wife). Mrs. B was sure that what with modern improvements in teaching materials you didn’t need to know much math to teach it. (Of course, as my dad said later, Mrs. B was a very formidable woman, and she might have been able to pull it off.)
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@AmyP – I agree it’s culturally pervasive, I am just hesitant to take it on by Googling _myself_ into a job as a primary/junior/senior/secondary school teacher. But I have to admit if the kind of teaching my kid had last year persists I might.
And I’m in media; we excel at the light touch. But at least we know we’re doing it!
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I would love to see numbers on kids who were themselves homeschooled, and whether they would choose it for their kids. My sense is that, regardless of the reasons behind it, the kids I know who are homeschooled chafe at the isolation.
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I have very forceful parents. My dad in particular has strong ideas and tends to take it personally if people disagree with him. I think it’s that background that makes me worry about a situation where a child only gets exposed to one set of ideas about a subject in a setting where they have very little power to disagree and where the teacher may take it personally if they do.
Although we are Evangelical Christians, my son who is 16 is pretty much a Libertarian. He thinks our family should be able to believe what we want but doesn’t like the idea that Christians (or anyone else) would feel that they have the right to impose their ideas, values or lifestyle on others — particularly through the auspices of government. The joke in our house is that our girls go a Christian school but our son doesn’t — because he’d probably get thrown out. But I hate to think that if I had homeschooled him and my daughters, I’d end up creating cookie cutter children with my same exact values and view of the world. In our Evangelical circles, we know a lot of these kids — and the danger for them is that either they will never figure out what they believe rather than what their parents believe OR they will have some real adjustment issues when they go to college.
But I really like Shandra’s point as well — and think she should attempt to publish something on the subject. I knew that I had felt some discomfort with the push to homeschool even though I felt qualified, but I hadn’t really thought about it as a feminist issue until she brought it up.
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It might optimize the education of individual children, if the goal is to optimize how much they learn. But it might undermine community.
I’m no fan of homeschooling, but is the fact of homeschooling more troubling to the “community” than pulling the kid out of the public school system to send her to private school? From a financial point of view, there’s more money to go around for the parents who need it if parents who want to (and can afford it) take their kids out.
The “Bowling Alone” analogy only works if it leads to the end of public education. But if it is just a small percent getting homeschooled — and if some of those are kids who might have gone to public school anyway — I think the rest of us in the public schools can still have a “community.”
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“I would love to see numbers on kids who were themselves homeschooled, and whether they would choose it for their kids. My sense is that, regardless of the reasons behind it, the kids I know who are homeschooled chafe at the isolation.”
I know some kids for whom I think this is not the case. But, they’re not traditionally homeschooled (if we think of home school as being in school at home). They’re kids who are being extreme roamed. Being out of school offers them the opportunity to take long classes in subjects that schools don’t spend much time on (drama, music, sports) with condensing of the other subject matter into fewer hours paced faster than in a school.
I do think, though, that school provides a way for kids to separate from their parents (Louisa talks about this, and liberals always worry about Evangelicals providing an isolating environment for their kids, but I have no doubt that ideological isolation can occur in other environments, too).
Even without those worries, though, I know I craved independence as a young person, and school offered that independence. Most of my childhood memories involve celebrating independence, separation from my parents (for me, even at a young age). Homeschooling would have been awful for me, and my own kids largely share this personality trait.
Of course, the independence argument was why the Brits sent their little kids off to boarding school at a tender age (which I certainly can’t imagine doing) while the Italians seem to keep them around until they reproduce themselves (which I also can’t imagine doing). So there are cultural norms at play, too.
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I think the problem with any analysis on homeschooled kids is that it’ll look like the figures for economic growth in authoritarian countries.
You like authoritarianism and point to South Korea, China, Singapore. I don’t like authoritarianism, and point to North Korea and Zimbabwe.
Since in authoritarian countries (and homeschool class rooms) one person is in charge, you are going to end up with the best and worst performers, with the democracies (and public school kids) populating the broad middle.
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Well, my kids’ community is their private school. I think I’m seeing that as more communitarian than the alternative of homeschooling (potentially, given the cost of private school, with private tutors who are being paid 90K+ to tutor a few kids) as being less communitarian (though the impact on the public school might be similar, though I’d also argue that taking a kid out of a school to attend a specialized charter, or an entry based gifted program produces similar disruption).
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Whatever it is you think homeschoolers as a whole are doing, you are probably wrong. Homeschooling is a different paradigm of education, and many homeschooling parents simply give up on trying to explain their own take on it (which will differ from the next parent’s). There are not good data on homeschooled kids because their parents don’t agree on the metrics the researchers think measure success, and often opt out of any studies.
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I think a lot of people hop in and out of homeschooling, which is important to remember when figuring out what the social impact is. My kids’ private school was founded as a free homeschooling coop by a group of homeschooling mothers (primarily faculty wives with teaching credentials) who eventually became the core administrators and faculty of the school. It’s an interesting example of how the seemingly atomistic homeschool experience can be converted into social capital and community.
A lot of people do a year or two of homeschooling when things aren’t going well, or as a breather. There’s a book I read years ago (“The Dan Riley School for a Girl”) that’s about how a writer father took his 14-year-old daughter out of school for a year when she hit some academic bumps and got a book out of it. (They homeschooled for 8th grade, which is one of the good ones to skip, if you can.) I know a family from our school that did a term in Scotland (the dad was supervising an undergraduate study abroad group) and homeschooled in order to keep up with what their classmates in private school back in Texas were doing. Amy Welborn has taken her younger kids out of school for some on-the-road education. She’s had kids in school for decades now.
“My point was that I have been doing the – (deep breath) – school supplies – does your uniform fit? – your teacher wants what? we just bought all the school supplies – book covers? Why do we have to do bookcovers? – welcome to our SCHOOL FAMILY – parent/teacher meeting – beginning of the year orientation – parent/teacher conferences – giftwrap sales – please return these papers signed on Tuesdays – please return THESE papers signed on Mondays – I have to find an article for music class – but I get extra credit if you go to the PTO meeting! – make an adobe model out of sugar cubes – is your field trip shirt the green one or the blue one? – yes, I signed your planner – wait,don’t throw that away, we need the box tops – SCHOOL FAMILY – you need a check for what? – do you have hot lunch today or not? – candygrams – wait, is it a jeans day today – boosterthon? Try not to run too many laps, okay? – please send cupcakes/cookies/goldfish but NO PEANUTS – POSTERBOARD – SCHOOL FAMILY.
“- thing for twenty-five (25) years.
“God bless ‘em, the teachers and administrators. They do so much in a hostile culture and for so little compensation. It’s criminal, really. It’s not about them. But me? This chick, who comes from a school family? I need a break.
“From the SCHOOL FAMILY.”
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“My point was that I have been doing the – (deep breath) – school supplies – does your uniform fit? – your teacher wants what?. . .
I certainly sympathize with the ridiculous and extensive obligations put on parents by the school system.
I don’t sympathize, though, is with someone who thinks replacing PTO conferences and signed homework sheets with actually doing all of the teaching, constitutes a “break.” If actually teaching the kid isn’t at least twice as stressful as doing in the giftwrap sale, etc., I think you are doing it wrong.
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“I don’t sympathize, though, is with someone who thinks replacing PTO conferences and signed homework sheets with actually doing all of the teaching, constitutes a “break.” If actually teaching the kid isn’t at least twice as stressful as doing in the giftwrap sale, etc., I think you are doing it wrong.”
1. True story–I know two homeschooling families who were at least partly motivated by not wanting to get up early in the morning to get kids off to school. (One of the moms “forgot” to teach a number of her kids to read. Some other relatives eventually stepped in and taught the kids to read, fortunately. The other family is a college faculty family and is more academically ambitious.)
2. I wonder if “stressful” is the right angle to look at it. To put it differently, you might find it very unrewarding to be buried under various permission forms and other school clerical tasks, while finding it very gratifying to actually teach your kids something.
3. When somebody reports doing something effortlessly, it does provoke suspicion. There was a recent long comment thread over at Kitchen Table Math with a couple of unschoolers explaining how they just follow children’s interests, to general incredulity.
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2012/07/most-of-us-who-read-education-blogs-are.html
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More sleep through keeping your kids at home? That’s a winner of a plan.
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“More sleep through keeping your kids at home? That’s a winner of a plan.”
With a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old at home, we get a 30-60 minute morning bonus from it being summer break. On the other hand, our kids stay up later on summer nights by at least that much. But if you’re a night owl, it might be worth the price.
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