As public school standards become increasingly demanding, private school costs continue to rise, and special needs and safety are at the forefront of parents’ educational concerns, some families are turning to homeschooling.
This was the case for Lael Robertson, San Francisco county contact for the Homeschool Association of California. Lael says that she and her husband, Peter, knew from day one they would homeschool their son and twin daughters: Xander, sixteen, Celia and Oona, fourteen.
“It felt like in our society, everything was out of your house. Families were spread around and didn’t get much time together. We’ve always worked in the home. Our work life and home life are more combined. We wanted to be with our kids and weren’t interested in saying goodbye to our kids. It didn’t seem natural.”
Lael spent her time doing what seemed natural: relying on her instinct that her kids would receive more individual attention at home, rather than in a school. “If they want to look at bugs all day, they can. In our family, that was okay. It’s easier to be more of an individual. When needs aren’t met in a school, it’s not the fault of the teachers, it’s just too many kids in a classroom,” explains Lael.
She and Peter also felt passionately against homework. “We wanted [our kids] to play, to go to museums, to the beach, and to hike. There was lots of cooking and baking, sewing, and a huge art room with projects,” she explains.
On the Fence?
Parents considering their options often wonder how well homeschooled kids fare academically.
Parents who have specific goals in specific subjects may be frustrated with homeschooling, Lael explains. It takes a more flexible approach—one that lets children somewhat teach themselves.
“Xander taught himself to read. He was an insatiable question asker and he complained that he wasn’t learning when he was four and a half, so I bought him some early readers and he started to read,” Lael explains. For example, her daughters began writing letters and words on their own, so when they received books, they began reading.
“Kids want to do things automatically,” she says from her Potrero Hill home. “They learned math and patterns by using rocks on the beach. [Learning] comes naturally to humans, so you build on that. I started buying math books when they were eight or nine, and they wanted more. Your kids will tell you what they want [to learn], and then you go out and find things about that [subject].”
As for the subjects that were outside her realm, Lael enrolled other parents of homeschooled children to contribute to their children’s collective learning. One parent who was a musician taught music, a scientist taught science. They did this once a week for three years with a group of children relatively the same age. There wasn’t any homework and it wasn’t formal. If parents came up with an idea for a project, they were encouraged to run with it.
Experts say this approach, when done successfully, can pay off. Thomas Hatch, associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, calls homeschooling “unschooling,” and speaks highly of the experience. “The theory behind unschooling is that it builds on children’s natural abilities, which helps them develop intrinsic motivation.”
Abby Broughton is the embodiment of intrinsic motivation. In a rural mountain town in Idaho, Abby’s parents decided to homeschool her during a time in their life when it just made sense to do so.
“Academically, I didn’t miss a beat, and I often wondered how that could be so,” Abby says of her junior high years of homeschooling.
“In those two years, my peers had slaved over their desks, while I had tromped around mines digging up cool rocks, glued some wood together, and spent more time on skis than at home,” she says.
It may sound like it was all fun and games, but there was learning going on, albeit not through traditional books and assignments.
Abby explains one of her favorite homeschooling projects involved taking a week-long “rock and mineral jaunt” around the West. She stopped and camped at various geological sites with her parents where they searched for petrified wood, visited old ghost towns, panned for gold, dug up crystals, and went to dinosaur archaeological digs.
“Another thing I did was learn to make cutting boards and start my own little business with my dad. Most of my time I spent skiing and race training. Now that I think about it, having all that time and support to dedicate to pursuing an athletic goal at a young age may have set me up well for my rowing accomplishments this past summer.”
Abby, a recent graduate of Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, became the first rowing alum to make the US Women’s National Rowing Team and went on to compete in the 2006 World Rowing Championships in Eton, England last summer.
But Are Homeschooled Kids College Material?
When it comes down to it, many parents want to ensure their kids have a competitive edge and worry homeschooling just won’t give it to them. Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute joined the Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA) to research adults who had been homeschooled. The research, conducted in 2003, studied 7,300 adults—more than half of whom had been homeschooled at least seven years. The results? Seventy-four percent in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year age group had taken college-level courses compared with only forty-six percent of the US population that attended traditional school.
The HSLDA also showed that top-notch colleges were accepting homeschooled teens, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. In 2000, Virginia’s Patrick Henry College was the first university opened for homeschooled children. The National Center for Home Education estimates that one million homeschooled students will enroll in universities within the decade.
Can They Cope in College?
Tom Ehrlich, a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, California, says homeschooled kids may feel overwhelmed at large college campuses. Tom was the president of Indiana University (IU) (where I graduated from).
“Particularly at a big campus like IU, it is critically important to engage in a couple of small-group activities like the theater or a sports team or the school newspaper. These make a large campus small. Otherwise, students too often fall through the cracks,” he suggests.
Regarding the age-old question as to whether homeschooled kids are socialized enough, I asked both Abby and Lael whether she and Lael’s daughters felt socially challenged in the outside world. Lael says Celia and Oona socialize well with children of all ages and adults rather than just to kids their own age. “Most homeschooled [kids] did all the daily things with their parents, but mine dealt with all ages in the world. I have seen that there seems to be less of the petty, bickering and comparing to each other. [There is] less of that middle school cattiness among the girls.”
The child who is somewhat of a social butterfly may miss interacting with lots of peers, however.
“I think what finally got to me was the social aspect. Being from such a small town, there was only one other family that homeschooled their two boys, and we did a lot together. But I missed having friends around me all the time,” says Abby.
The pressure to fit in is harder on those who participate in somewhat traditional schools.
“I would go to middle school band class every day because I was playing percussion then, and I started feeling very different from my peers. I was still showing up in my polar bear printed fleece sweatpants and my Camp Birchwood sweatshirt while everyone else was discovering fitted jeans, The Gap, and hairspray. To a middle-schooler, it’s very hard to feel so different,” she remembers.
So what’s the solution? Every child is different and every county has drastically different schools and resources as well. Clearly, your options will become a big part of your decision, which experts say is best made with your child’s personality in mind.