Home schooling

Economist.com | Home-schooling

This article on home schooling is from the 26 Feb issue of The Economist. I read it in the print edition but it is available online. A companion article requires a subscription.

I've just posted on Craig Barrett's WSJ editorial on education reform (scroll down). Home schooling is one of the ways that Americans are taking control over their children's education away from the government education monopoly. I had been generally aware of home-schooling, but until reading this article I was not aware of the numbers of people who have converted to home-schooling.

The sub-titles on the article are:

George Bush's secret army

and

A revolution is happening in American education. As it grows in size, it should frighten teachers everywhere

It opens with...

JUST how bad are American schools? And how deeply do conservative Americans distrust their government? One answer to both these questions is provided by the growth of home-schooling. As many as 2m American students—one in 25—may now be being taught at home.

This is a trend that I'm ambivalent about. As the article points out, mass public education has been one of the hallmarks of modern, advanced societies. Throwing our hands up in the air over the poor quality of the public schools and teaching children at home is simply not an option for the vast majority of people. So this is not a fix for our education system. In fact, I wonder if having all of these people opting out of the public schools is actually decreasing pressure to fix the schools. But, I can't argue with the right of people to do home-schooling if they choose - in fact, you have to admire their willingness to make such large personal investments in their children.

My son was educated in public schools in three different cities so I wasn't aware of the background on home-schooling. For example...

Home-schooling is a fairly recent phenomenon. When Ronald Reagan came to power, in 1981, it was illegal for parents to teach their own children in most states. Today it is a legal right in all 50 states. Twenty-eight states require home-schooled children to undergo some kind of official evaluation, either by taking standardised tests or submitting a portfolio of work. Thirteen states simply require parents to inform officials that they are going to teach their children at home. In Texas, a parent doesn't have to tell anyone anything.

The main reason why legal restrictions on home-schooling have been swept away across so much of America is the power of the Christian right. Not all home-schoolers, of course, are religious conservatives. One of the first advocates of home-schooling, John Holt, was a left-winger who regarded schools as instruments of the bureaucratic-industrial complex. A lively subdivision of the home-school movement, called “unschooling”, argues that children should more or less be left to educate themselves. And the number of black home-schoolers is growing rapidly

So there is certainly an ideological edge to many home-schoolers. But do not be misled. First, this is a bottom-up movement with parents of whatever political stripe making individual decisions to withdraw their children (rather than following orders from higher up). Second, the movement has a utilitarian edge. Home-schoolers simply believe that they can offer their children better education at home.

One-to-one tuition, goes the argument, enables children to go at their own pace, rather than at a pace set for the convenience of teaching unions. And children can be taught “proper” subjects based on the Judeo-Christian tradition of learning, rather than politically correct flimflam. Some home-schoolers favour the classical notion of the trivium, with its three stages of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric (which requires children to learn Greek and Latin).

This sounds backward-looking, but home-schoolers claim that technology is on their side. The internet is making it ever easier to teach people at home, ever more teaching materials are available, and virtual communities now exist that allow home-schoolers to swap information.

So, among other things, home-schooling is an example of a distruptive innovation enabled by new technologies like the Internet. And the article goes on to discuss that home-schooled children don't seem to be suffering in terms of the quality of the education they receive (although it is mostly anecdotal or indirect evidence).

Again, I found this interesting. I don't believe that home-schooling is the fix to our education system. In a broad sense it may even be a distraction from fixing the system for mainstream children or children from disadvantaged circumstances (children of single parents for example). But it does somehow seem very American for people to take control away from government when government, in this case the public schools, fails to meet their needs.