US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT ON HOMESCHOOLING

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Science & Ideas 10/16/0

Home school comes of age This article, although not perfect, is more attuned with what has been my experience. The camp mentioned is the highlight of my kids' year, and has become the foundation and hub of what has become a very active social life.

As the movement matures, it expands to include a diverse array of families

By Carolyn Kleiner

MYRTLE POINT, ORE.–The kids are trying to achieve flight, testing the limits of physics and aerodynamics. Does a flat wing work better? A tapered one? Carving propeller toys out of pine, they brainstorm prototype after prototype until one finally catches wind and soars. Nearby, sitting in the middle of an open field surrounded by sky-high trees, a dozen teens are debating the merits of traveling on your own, peppering their arguments with references to geography, sociology, and gender issues. There's not a teacher or textbook in sight.

The more than 150 teens here at the fifth annual Not Back to School Camp are part of a small but fast-growing branch of the home-schooling movement. Known variously as unschooling, child-led learning, and relaxed home schooling, it is based on the idea that education should be a natural process. There is no structure and no set curriculum; parents simply allow their children to determine what they want to study and when, offering guidance only when necessary. "Children have an innate love of learning new things," explains Billy Greer, director of the Maryland-based Family Unschoolers Network, which has 3,000 member families. "We try to keep it fun rather than turning it into work, where it becomes something to avoid."

In recent decades, home schooling has come to be closely associated with religious conservatives and a Bible-based curriculum. This school-at-home approach allows families to avoid a secular take on subjects like evolution and to provide moral and ethical training according to their own religious values. However, the burgeoning home-schooling community includes an estimated 1.7 million children (about 2 percent of the school population) and is increasingly diverse. "Today's home-schoolers run the gamut of educational, economic, religious, ethnic, and geographic variations," says Linda Dobson of the National Home Education Network, an inclusive support group based in Long Beach, Calif. "We're everywhere, and we're all coming at this in a different way."

It's academic. In fact, the present-day home-schooling phenomenon dates back to the 1960s and '70s, when counterculture types–inspired by educational reformers like John Holt, the author of How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967)–pulled their kids out of school for pedagogical, not ideological, reasons. These parents were frustrated with the rigid structure and conservative nature of school at the time and were convinced they could do a better job educating their children. Now, after several decades of explosive growth due to religious considerations, more and more families–including a rising number of African-Americans and Hispanics–are once again choosing to home-school for academic reasons: They are concerned about the quality of public and private schools, as well as their kids' safety, and skeptical that reforms like charter schools and vouchers will make a timely difference.

Still, the religious right remains the loudest, most organized voice in the home-schooling movement. Take the Home School Legal Defense Association, a 70,000-family organization run by Christian fundamentalists allied with a lobbying group and a new college for home-schooled kids (box, Page 54). Critics contend the HSLDA supports a conservative political agenda as well and that the group has helped pass legislation that hurts more relaxed home-schoolers–like new regulations in New York that require standardized tests and official oversight. Many home-schooling families also say they feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in Christian support groups, which may require parents to sign a statement of faith. "People are being harassed . . . if they don't follow the party line," says Mark Hegener, publisher of Home Education Magazine. "When ideology becomes more important than supporting each other's right to educate our children at home, that's harmful." The result is a struggle for control of the movement, with inclusive groups springing up all across the country. Children often get caught in the middle. "We don't do a lot of socializing," says Jasmine Orr, 16, of Warsaw, Ind., who tells of being excluded from local home-schooling activities because she doesn't use a Christian curriculum.

Almost all the versions of learning that fit under the umbrella of home schooling take a more relaxed view of education than traditional school. Learning doesn't necessarily start in September and end in June, for one thing, and textbooks are easily discarded if they're not useful. It's this sort of flexibility–just not possible in public institutions–that's the key to success, says Susannah Sheffer, editorial adviser at Growing Without Schooling magazine. "People may start out using a curriculum, but they gradually see that education can be richer than that." For many home-schoolers, field trips, internships, and family vacations substitute for lectures and texts; local libraries and the Internet are vital resources.

Making magic. Many home-schooling parents recall their own formal education as a negative experience and want something else for their kids. That's the case with Shay Seaborne, who unschools her two daughters, Caitlín and Laurel Keller, 10 and 7, in Woodbridge, Va. Their education, she hopes, is tailored to their unique needs, without needless regimentation. Learning starts whenever the girls wake up and lasts as long as they're engaged. A trip to the grocery store serves as a lesson on percentages, and a raucous game of Harry Potter, complete with wand-making and composing magic charms on homemade parchment, is both art and English. There are no tests, no papers, no grades.

Still, studies show that home-schooled children do learn, often outperforming publicly and privately schooled peers on standardized exams. This year, for example, they scored 1100, on average, on the SAT–81 points higher than the national mean. A significant percentage also go on to college, including elite schools such as Harvard and Stanford. Specific data on unschoolers are scarce, but according to Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., there is no correlation between degree of structure and student achievement. If you look at unschoolers at any point in time, however, there will likely be gaps in their knowledge. A child may not read until age 10, for example, depending on his or her interests. More conventional school-at-home types, by contrast, use packaged curricula that follow prevailing notions of when kids should learn specific skills. "When I find a gap, I try to fill it," explains Erek Dyskant, a 14-year-old from Champaign, Ill., who hopes to obtain a Ph.D. in biology one day. "The main [problem] I've had recently is not having a full lab in my house." So he's spending the fall in San Francisco, working with animals and giving educational tours at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum.

Snowboarding. Still, critics worry about what home-schoolers miss out on–not only essential lessons but also interaction with other kids. Some of the more relaxed versions of home-schooling, they say, are tantamount to truancy. While home-based education is legal in all 50 states, some regulate it more strictly, requiring parents to plan curricula that cover the same subjects as public schools and evaluating children's progress with yearly standardized tests or portfolios. "Education should be more flexible and more engaging for kids, but learning needs some structure," says Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "If you have no sense of what you want kids to know or at least be able to do . . . then you really take a chance of their growing up in a fairly ignorant state." Indeed, a 15-year-old at the Not Back to School Camp, asked to describe his studies, says, "To be perfectly honest, I snowboard a lot."

In general, most of the young people here are intelligent and well-spoken, with broad interests. This session alone, teens are leading seminars on novel-writing, the Lindy hop, activism, astrology, and knitting berets, and nearly everyone totes around some badge of creative expression, from fiddles to video cameras. But they're clearly different from schooled peers, too: more mature and more comfortable around adults, perhaps, but also a bit sheltered–and obviously hungry for interaction with people their own age.

Only a few of these kids choose to "unlearn" all their lives. The majority go on to college, and while they may have to work harder to prove they're qualified–submitting a portfolio that details their educational experiences or taking extra SAT II: Subject Tests–for most, the social and intellectual transition is seamless. Still, unschoolers tend to have a different view of success from the typical college student. "I think I'm sincerely interested in finding out as much as I can about as many things as I can," explains Cassidy Vare, 21, a junior majoring in film and political science at Hunter College in New York, with a 3.9 GPA, "instead of simply attending classes and doing enough work to get an acceptable grade so that I can get a degree."

-- Earthmama (earthmama48@yahoo.com), February 25, 2001

Answers

I like the kid who says he snowboards alot. At least he doing something. Physical Education.

Sometimes I go with my friend to pick up public school kids and we ask, "what did you kids do today?" Kids mumble, "Nuthin'"

"So, what did you learn today?" "Nuthin"

"Can you tell me what's between your ears?" "Nu......HEY!"

-- Laura (gsend@hotmail.com), February 26, 2001.


My son has gone to "Not Back to School Camp" for the last few years, and this summer will be his last as a camper, as he will no longer be a teenager next year. It has been a wonderful experience for him, and he now has friends all over the country because of the people he has met at the camp.

Jim

-- Jim (Jiminwis@yahoo.com), February 26, 2001.


I truly appreciate the article on homeschooling. I homeschool my two yr. old son and I'm concerned about his lack of interaction with other children. One thing I've noticed is his acceptence of ANY children who do come over and their age doesn't matter. He is comfortable with everyone. He knows the alphabet, numbers to 20 and his shapes. He is working on colors and spelling 2 letter words. He also does chores like feeding the chickens and pouring grain for the milk cow. Watering is a little hard since he wants to play in the water rather than fill a bucket. norma

-- norma russell (russells@basinonline.com), February 28, 2001.

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