The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [2]
Somehow, though, the idea stuck with me. I found myself fascinated by the ways my daughters found to constantly learn new things and astonished by the enthusiasm and tenacity they brought to everything they did. As they approached school age, I began to wonder what would happen to that eagerness and energy in school—it was not an attitude I connected with much of what I remembered of my own school days. Homeschooling began to sound like a very sensible idea, and I began seriously looking into homeschooling as an educational option for my daughters.
Where Did Schools and Homeschooling Come From?
Homeschooling is actually nothing new. Minus the name, it’s been a commonplace part of rearing children for all but the last 150 years. Until well into the nineteenth century (and in some areas, even into the twentieth century), the family was the basis of social life. In a mainly agrarian society, the home was where children learned what was necessary to function in their community. This learning included everything from basic chores to enough reading and arithmetic to keep themselves from being cheated, how to grow and store their food, how to make a living, and even how to make their own dwellings and tools. Often, the local community supported a school for its children, but attendance was seldom mandatory. Family work—planting and harvesting on the farm, business and trade needs in urban areas—always took priority.
In the larger cities, schools were common enough that a majority of children attended some type of school, most often a private school that charged tuition (although many public schools also charged tuition). Such schools varied greatly, from the “dame schools” in which a few children were tutored in the teacher’s parlor, to the small “academies” with classical pretensions, to larger, more formal private schools intended to prepare students (usually male) for serious college education.
With immigration and industrialization came the “common school” movement. Reformers such as Horace Mann in Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut lamented that those who were most in need of education did not attend schools of any kind. They attributed the widespread poverty of the period not to the massive dislocations caused by the move from an agricultural to an industrial economy but, rather, to character flaws in the poor. With strong support from manufacturers and merchants, the reformers promised new public schools to produce workers who would be, as Mann said, “more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.” In 1852, Massachusetts established the first state compulsory school law, under which children who were not either working in factories or attending school could be convicted of the new crime of truancy. The school movement spread rapidly, despite protests from those who were unwilling to pay the new school taxes and those who found the heavily Protestant flavor of the new schools distasteful. (This period also saw the creation and rapid growth of the parochial school system, as Irish Catholic immigrants sought alternatives to the public schools whose overtly Protestant learnings clashed with their own beliefs.) By the end of the nineteenth century, compulsory school attendance was a given for most Americans.
The model for most of the public school systems created during the late nineteenth century was one we would easily recognize today. All students, rich or poor, attended the same schools, segregated into age-level groups to study a prescribed curriculum presented