The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [1]
Home education is not a bad choice. It’s fairly inclusive, covering all kinds of homeschooling styles without seeming to imply that any one is more proper than others. It’s a bit awkward, though, to adapt when you need to use a different part of speech, as with home educators, home educated, or home educating.
Home schooling, home-schooling, and homeschooling are actually all the same term, demonstrating differing levels of acceptance. The same thing happened with computer terminology a few years back. First there was micro computer, which gradually turned into micro-computer and, finally, microcomputer. (Of course, nobody talks about microcomputers much anymore, but that’s a different story.) Academic articles about homeschooling still frequently use the two-word version, although the compound is making headway. The hyphenated version is becoming rarer, although it’s still often seen in newspaper articles about homeschooling, often side by side with the other versions while copy editors waffle on the decision of which to use.
I adopted the compound version—homeschooling—years ago because it seemed less awkward than the others and was flexible enough to take on all the noun and verb and adjectival forms without too much trauma. Homeschoolers could homeschool their homeschooled children without an overabundance of hyphens or other confusion. As you can see, the meaning of the term varies: It can refer to the educational process itself, to the children who are the objects of that process, to the parents who choose that process for their children, and to the entire population of families who homeschool.
I also like the inference I can take from the compound version: Homeschooling somehow seems less formal and institutional a term than home schooling. It sounds more like its own meaning and less like a borrowed term than the others do.
Some homeschoolers, though, dislike the word and prefer something such as home learning or homelearning as more in line with their understanding of the concept. I’ve even heard of those who feel that home is too limiting and opt instead for world learning or some similar variant. Although such terms may be more in keeping with their users’ views, they tend to keep those users constantly explaining what on earth they are talking about.
As David Guterson explains in his book Family Matters, homeschooling is an odd word for what it describes, but it does have the distinct advantage of being readily understood by the general public. That’s a hard advantage to beat, and I won’t even try.
INTRODUCTION FMH
Announcement: “We’re homeschooling our kids.”
Response ten years ago: “You’re doing what? What’s that?”
Response today: “Oh, yeah? I know someone who does that. But I could never do it myself—it would be so much work!”
Homeschooling has definitely arrived. From a few decades ago, when the practice was so rare that the word hadn’t entered the language, homeschooling has become one of the fastest-growing educational movements in the country. Accurate estimates are hard to come by (some states make no counts of homeschoolers), but most experts agree that, as of 1995, at least half a million school-age children were getting their education from their parents, outside of schools. Some authorities put the number as high as a million and a half to two million. However they may dispute the total number of homeschoolers, those authorities agree that the homeschooling is growing rapidly, by as much as 20 percent annually in some regions.
On first encountering the idea of homeschooling, most parents find the whole concept peculiar at best and likely view it as something only a demented person would even consider. I know that I certainly thought homeschooling was a crazy idea when I first heard of it, before my children were even born. How could a parent possibly handle teaching all the things kids need to know by the time they graduate from high school?