Q. On what issue could you announce a public meeting, have 1,000 advance reservations, and then have 2,000 people show up? A. Homeschooling — the fastest growing movement in the country today. (Yes, indeed, homeschool is one word and can be a verb.)
Most of the people who attend have never thought seriously about whether they are Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. They have never been activists or attended a political meeting.
They are young — in their twenties and thirties. Naturally, that’s the age group that has children. They are sincerely eager to give their children the best, at any cost of time, money, and personal commitment. They live by the Golden Rule and don’t interfere with anybody else’s rights.
They don’t understand why anybody wants to interfere with their rights. Yet, the National Education Association, some other educationist groups, and some of their allies in state government seem determined to treat homeschooling parents as criminals, send a few to jail, and harass and intimidate them until they give up and put their children in public schools.
Until the 20th century, homeschooling was the principal form of education. Most of the great men and women of history, including George Washington and our other Founding Fathers, were educated at home. Even in modern times, some of our most successful Americans received most of their early education at home, including General Douglas MacArthur and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Nobody is saying that we should not have public schools. Most parents are only too glad to have the public schools take the kids off their hands for hours every day and try to educate them. It will be the rare parent who has enough commitment and concern to embark on a homeschooling program.
It is unlikely that any significant percentage of parents would care enough to commit themselves to homeschooling. Estimates of the number of American children being homeschooled today range from a half million to one million — a drop in the bucket compared to the 44 million children in public and private schools.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the real reason for the animosity toward homeschooling is a paranoid fear — not of competition from any significant numbers of children being removed from the public schools, but of competition from the superior academic performance and social well-being of the children who are homeschooled.
Parents have a variety of different reasons for making the decision to homeschool their children. For some, it is that they don’t want their children to be in an atmosphere of drugs and lack of discipline. For others, it is a desire to give their children a religious, instead of an anti-religious, education. For still others, it is a desire to meet the special needs of a handicapped child.
For some, it is simply to give their children a superior academic education. That was my reason. I wanted my children to be skillful practitioners in reading and writing the English language; I wanted them to have the benefit of teaching by the phonics method in the first grade.
No school available to my children taught phonics in the first grade, so I taught them myself. The results in terms of later academic achievement by our six children were spectacular.
More and more research is coming out all the time which shows the academic and social superiority of homeschooling. Homeschoolers average about 30 percentile points higher on standardized achievement measures than do classroom students.
One study of achievement scores accepted in court on children of 30 homeschooling families who were being prosecuted or threatened showed that the children were in the 80.1 percentile of children who take standardized tests.
Unable to show that homeschooled children are inferior academically, the harassing educationists have shifted to claiming that children taught at home will be inferior in adjusting to “the group.” That’s exactly why many parents want to homeschool their children; they don’t want them to be subject to peer pressure on drugs, alcohol, sexual activity, depression, and disrespect for moral and parental authority.
That in itself is a perfectly valid reason for parents to homeschool their children.
