The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [3]
By the middle of this century, the idea that schools were a necessary condition for getting an education was firmly embedded in American society. Successive waves of school reformers questioned the content of the curriculum and whether schools should be educating for “good citizens” or “good workers” or even for outstanding intellectual accomplishment. New instructional techniques were explored, but the premise that schools were required for children to become competent adults was never seriously questioned.
There were always a few people who avoided compulsory schooling, however. Sometimes they were rural families, who lived too far from the nearest school to make regular attendance practical, or families whose livelihood required constant travel, or simply eccentrics who chose to teach their children themselves, despite whatever the local laws said. Somehow they managed to raise children who survived their lack of schooling, and some, such as Margaret Mead and Thomas Edison, did far better than merely survive.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a few of the then-current wave of reformers began to ask different questions. Ivan Illich questioned whether schools make us less competent by training us to depend on an outside authority to tell us what and how to learn. He asked how we could realistically expect authoritarian institutions such as schools to effectively teach democratic principles. Jonathan Kozol looked at both the structure and content of schools and argued that they effectively maintain racial and economic segregation. John Holt argued that children learn quite differently from the ways they are taught in school and that too much instruction actually hinders learning. Raymond Moore criticized the ever-earlier ages at which children begin school, arguing that formal academic work should not start until children are at least eight or ten years old.
Holt, after thinking and writing for years about ways to reform schools and teaching to make them more effective, ultimately decided that the task was impossible and began to advocate homeschooling as a solution. In 1977, he began publishing a magazine, Growing Without Schooling, to explain his ideas and found that he’d struck a nerve: By the tenth issue, he’d received more than ten thousand letters from parents looking for better ways to help their children learn.
During the 1980s, the homeschooling movement expanded in another direction with the closure (because of changes in tax regulations) of hundreds of small Christian schools. Parents who had turned to private church schools as refuge from the worldly orientation of public schools suddenly found homeschooling their only acceptable option (and dozens of curriculum companies who had served the Christian school market suddenly found they needed homeschool customers they’d previously scorned). This new wave of Christian homeschoolers was so large that the popular public image of homeschoolers became the caricature of the intensely religious family isolating their children from the world to protect them from the evils of evolution and sex education.
Over the last fifteen years, the number of homeschoolers has continued to grow rapidly. Homeschooling support groups report their memberships growing by 20 or 30 percent annually; some have actually doubled or tripled their membership from one year to the next. Once a rare and slightly oddball approach to education, homeschooling has become a widely known and accepted alternative.
Why Families Choose Homeschooling
Many families come to homeschooling the way I did, chancing on the idea from a book or a news article and finding it appealing enough that their kids never make it to school in the