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Why Homeschool?

LIKE most parents, I had always looked forward to the day when my children would finally enter school.  During those early years of infancy and toddlerhood, when mothering feels like such a full-time job, I would assure myself that I would have a glimpse of my old life back when my sons Jahan and Nirvan – now 5 and 2 – would be in school.

And then we decided to homeschool.

The decision came to us in a roundabout way. When Jahan was three, and I was pregnant with Nirvan, we enrolled Jahan in a small co-op preschool. But despite being there for over a year, he felt alone and adrift. He missed being home with my husband and me. He just wasn’t ready, and no amount of cajoling or pleading or reassuring on my part was going to change that. More than that, he came home angry and resentful, repeating words and mimicking behavior that astonished us – and not in a good way. I think the breaking point was when he pretended to stab my husband’s leg, yelling, “I’m going to kill you!”

It was around this time that we attended a homeschool conference in Woodland Hills, California. I had heard a fair bit about the practice, but always assumed that it was mostly adopted by religiously orthodox families who didn’t want to expose their children to beliefs outside their own, or that it was something done by families in the most rural parts of the country who would otherwise have to walk four miles to get to school.  Still, I went along with an open mind. We sat in on talks and picked up numerous books on the subject.  But the one thing to emerge for me was this: homeschooling could certainly prove a successful alternative for families who felt that the system, for whatever reason, and at whatever level, had failed them.  From preschool to high school, parents clearly wanted to take control of their children’s education.

That seems bourne out by the facts. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 1.1 million homeschooled students in the US in 2003, up from 850,000 in 1999. This figure extends to children aged 5 to 17 – or kindergarten grade 12.  The study defined homeschooled as “being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school for at least part of their education and if their part-time enrollment in public or private schools did not exceed 25 hours a week.”

Diane Flynn Keith, a noted columnist and author on homeschooling, who runs the www.homefires.com and www.carschooling.com websites, said that while it was difficult to ascertain the exact number of families choosing that path, the figure was on the rise; she estimates that the number today is closer to 2.2 million nationwide, with a projected increase of 7 to 15 per cent per year. 

“The real truth is that there is no such thing as a "reliable" or "accurate" account for the number of homeschoolers,” she says. “That's because homeschooling is legally done in a variety of ways that are not tracked by government. That's changing, but it will be years before there's any reliable source."

This is largely due to the fact that ‘homeschooling’ takes on so many different forms: some families do it through their school district, others through a public charter or private school program. Some families file paperwork with the state, others don’t. Some are teachers, some hire tutors.  Some simply ‘unschool’, which is essentially where children learn organically, through daily life, and don’t use any curriculum or work books.  There’s a dizzying maze of options, and a million ways to do it, and it’s always a matter of finding what’s right for your child.

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