I am an unschooler, now 22 and married to a wonderful man who happens to read Slashdot and keeps me informed about interesting conversation threads. I thought it might be useful (and, I hope, not intrusive) to post an essay that I wrote about homeschooling...
For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing.
"You can't learn anything outside of school."
"You won't have friends."
"You won't know math."
"You're overprotected by your parents."
"You're underprotected by your parents."
"You'll have to work at McDonalds."
"You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there."
"STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking.
But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me.
When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America.
As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had.
The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there?
It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour.
People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent.
My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience.
But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other.
As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility.
If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities.
Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own.
My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger.
L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.)
Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students.
So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?"
I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out.
In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared.
Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary.
Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over.
My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world.
Resources:
Books-
Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991)
John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles
David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988)
Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999)
David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992)
Herbert Kohl, The Question is College
Magazines-
Life Learning Magazine
Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/
Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/
Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org
Not Back to School Camp
http://www.nbtsc.org
i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12.
ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.
I am an unschooler, now 22 and married to a wonderful man who happens to read Slashdot and keeps me informed about interesting conversation threads. I thought it might be useful (and, I hope, not intrusive) to post an essay that I wrote about homeschooling...
For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing.
"You can't learn anything outside of school."
"You won't have friends."
"You won't know math."
"You're overprotected by your parents."
"You're underprotected by your parents."
"You'll have to work at McDonalds."
"You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there."
"STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking.
But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me.
When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America.
As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had.
The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there?
It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour.
People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent.
My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience.
But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other.
As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility.
If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities.
Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own.
My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger.
L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.)
Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students.
So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?"
I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out.
In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared.
Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary.
Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over.
My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world.
Resources:
Books-
Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991)
John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles
David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988)
Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999)
David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992)
Herbert Kohl, The Question is College
Magazines-
Life Learning Magazine
Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/
Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/
Websites-
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/index.html
Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org
Not Back to School Camp
http://www.nbtsc.org
i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12.
ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.
Slashdot Mirror
For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing.
"You can't learn anything outside of school."
"You won't have friends."
"You won't know math."
"You're overprotected by your parents."
"You're underprotected by your parents."
"You'll have to work at McDonalds."
"You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there."
"STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking.
But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me.
When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America.
As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had.
The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there? It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour.
People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent.
My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience.
But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other.
As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility.
If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities.
Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own.
My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger.
L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.)
Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students.
So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?"
I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out. In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared.
Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over.
My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world.
Resources:
Books-
Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991)
John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988)
Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999)
David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992)
Herbert Kohl, The Question is College
Magazines-
Life Learning Magazine
Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/
Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/
Websites-
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/index.html
Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org
Not Back to School Camp http://www.nbtsc.org
i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12.
ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.
I am an unschooler, now 22 and married to a wonderful man who happens to read Slashdot and keeps me informed about interesting conversation threads. I thought it might be useful (and, I hope, not intrusive) to post an essay that I wrote about homeschooling... For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing. "You can't learn anything outside of school." "You won't have friends." "You won't know math." "You're overprotected by your parents." "You're underprotected by your parents." "You'll have to work at McDonalds." "You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there." "STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking. But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me. When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America. As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had. The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there? It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour. People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent. My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience. But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other. As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility. If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities. Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own. My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger. L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.) Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students. So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?" I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out. In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared. Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over. My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world. Resources: Books- Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991) John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988) Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999) David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) Herbert Kohl, The Question is College Magazines- Life Learning Magazine Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/ Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/ Websites- Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/index.html Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org Not Back to School Camp http://www.nbtsc.org i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12. ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.