Homeschooling as a Viable Option

Despite California's attempt to outlaw homeschooling not long ago, most states in the US are quite accomodating to homeschooling families. And the homeschooling experience for children can be just as full and varied--with a far superior type of "socialisation"--than traditional schooling.

.....The secret of home-schooling, however, is that you don’t have to be a master teacher to do it well. Energy, dedication, and good materials are what you need. Your competition, meanwhile, is a system that by design and necessity seeks the median. Public (and many private) school students have to move along in all subjects at a similar pace, and in the same order. Outliers — the talkative, the energetic, the gifted, the struggling — are labeled and interventions (counseling, special classrooms, tutoring, medication) prescribed. The goal is not a full realization of the child’s potential, but rather the system’s smooth functioning.

Saying that we home-school sometimes elicits troubled responses. Though conditions have improved since the 1970s, when public school officials routinely sicced child welfare officers on parents teaching their children at home, home-schooling is still odd to most people. That’s just the price we radicals pay. Thanks to organizations like the [1] Home School Legal Defense Association, though state authorities and teacher’s unions don’t like what we’re up to, they mostly leave us alone. Power to the people, baby.

While it’s nice to imagine ourselves living a counter-cultural lifestyle, the reality is that in Wichita, Kansas, home-schooling is widespread. Home-schoolers have baseball teams and soccer leagues. Teaching support groups. There’s even a Boy-Scout troop. Local private schools, meanwhile, offer science and other equipment-intensive courses. Churches provide facilities for home-school association meetings, and even study halls so home-school parents can join Bible studies. If a home-schooling mother falls ill or dies, there is often another home-schooling family who takes on responsibility for teaching her children. _Source

Not for everybody, no, of course not. But a lot of the reasons people have for not considering homeschooling may not actually apply.

Assembly-line factory style teaching is absurd. We only consider it the norm because we have been drowning in it for so long. It really is long past time for the whole concept of education to be re-thought and more intelligently implemented.