What an interesting phenomenon the ‘home school’ movement has become!  It seems that more and more, we hear of parents that are going this route.  And not just in individual home schools, but in ‘home school associations’ as well.
I’ve never known exactly how I felt about home schools in general.  My views there are evolving endlessly, but I confess I still don’t know how I feel.  There are so many factors to digest, and so many pros and cons involved here, many of them with huge implications.
On the one hand, home schools really can provide a chance to do some valuable things that are no longer possible in public schools.  There is much more one-on-one work available, I assume, lessons can certainly be adapted to fit the learners and the situations, and valuable field trips can even be taken.  Time schedules can be better made to match the situations and temperaments of the learners, and usually there are not parent/teacher/student problems.  In the right situations, home-schooling can be extremely beneficial – sometimes life-saving – for some students.
On the other hand, there are all the obvious (and possibly dangerous) drawbacks.  SO MUCH, it would seem depends on the parents/adults who are guiding the learning.  Teaching is not an easy task (despite the apparent legions, especially in Washington, who mistakenly think otherwise), and it is surely made much harder by the incumbent demands of home-schooling for knowledge in all areas of the curriculum.  And this need gets amplified with each passing year in school.  Plus, there is also a certain ‘meta knowledge’ that good teachers have about teaching in general and working with students that parents may or may not have.
And even with the educational drawbacks, there are always the social sacrifices inherent in not learning (sometimes the hard way!) about interaction with peers.  These things are important, it seems to me, but we won’t follow that detour today.
And these pros and cons above just begin to scratch the surface!!
I find it fascinating to look back and see how this movement has caused education to come full circle over the past century or more.  In frontier America, what little ‘formal’ education that existed, was naturally done at home.  Then, as families (and/or small towns) grew in proximity, they began to hire a ‘teacher’ to work with ALL the children of the area.  The Little House on the Prairie model, if you will.  And things ‘progressed’ from there.
Until now, when we have returned to some parents choosing to leave public schools to go back into the home with their children, for any of a wide variety of motivations, some of which may or may not be suspect or valuable in the long run.
Perhaps the main take-away for today’s thoughts is this:  At the heart of these discussions we once again find ourselves encountering highly different and evolving views of ‘education’ among many constituents in our changing times.  One doesn’t leave an existing free public school set-up (do they?) unless one has begun to view the broad definition and even purpose of ‘education’ differently, whether it’s related to curriculum, values, or something else.
Next time, I plan to follow up on these thoughts with a rather radical story, and then try to tie it all together.  Stay tuned.