I have been remiss in keeping our Home Education Magazine readers and supporters updated, but there is good news to share on several fronts.

Regarding the lawsuit which has created problems for us for many months now: We are awaiting the plaintiff’s signatures on the settlement agreement arrived at on October 13th. There has been some back-and-forth about wording, but we have no reason to believe the statement won’t be signed sometime during next week or so, and thus bring a long-awaited end to the lawsuit.

The Sept-Oct issue should have arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes by now; if you’re a subscriber and have not received your issue please give it another couple of days, but then don’t hesitate to contact me personally at helenhegener@homeedmag.com and let me know you haven’t received it. If you do write, please include your current mailing address so I can double-check our database, and include an email address or phone number, whichever you prefer, so we can contact you.

The November-December issue will, alas, be late, but we’re hoping to have it out before Thanksgiving. It will be a very special issue – you won’t want to miss this one!

Our digital edition is almost ready to release, and it’s beautiful! Just before I left Alaska (more on that later), I was surprised by one of my sons and his fiance, who presented me with a new iPad! The back is inscribed “We love you Mom!” and it brought tears to my eyes to know that these kids had done this for me, to make my work while traveling a little easier. It is a magical machine, and I take it everywhere with me! One of the most delightful things it does is download all my favorite reading material, and that has been a lifesaver! I can keep up with what I want and need to without lugging either a computer or issues of magazines and newspapers – it’s all right there in a little gadget I can hold in one hand, and the new digital HEM looks amazing on it!

About my travels: I’m back in Washington (state), where the HEM office was located for many years, with our oldest son, John, who’s helping me with chores, maintenance, and getting this place ready for the changes ahead. For those who haven’t followed our family over the years, or for those who haven’t kept track, a bit of backstory:

My parents built this home in north central Washington, and we bought it from them when they moved back to Alaska in the mid-1980′s. We raised our five kids here, all unschooled of course, and it was a delightful time filled with family and friends, horses, dogs, explorations, travels, and seemingly endless adventures. But like all good things, it did end. Our kids grew up, had kids of their own, and moved away. Our four sons moved to Alaska, our daughter moved to another part of this state. All are doing wonderfully, and we all remain close, even as the miles separate us.

But no one wants to live here any more. Alaska is our home now. My son John and I flew down from Alaska a week ago to move the last of the family’s things out of this place, and we’ve had help from my daughter and my sister, who both traveled here to help. It’s not a sad time, by any means, because so much love and so many good times happened here, and we know leaving here paves the way to building new memories, new adventures and new good times. We are grateful to have had this beautiful place to be, and we are equally grateful to be moving on with our lives.

We are also moving on with Home Education Magazine. The November-December issue will see some significant changes, but the heart and soul of the magazine are intact and as steady as ever. There have been some rough patches with this atrociously harassing lawsuit, to be sure, but that’s behind us now, and we see a bright future, and many more years of helping homeschooling families find joy and strength and peace in living and learning together.

To that end, I’d like to leave you with this excerpt from an editorial I wrote 21 years ago, which ran in our Nov-Dec, 1990 issue:

“Our great American public education system has raised a generation that is uncertain of itself, a generation in which those who have the heart to strike out confidently on their own are the exceptions to the rule: business entrepreneurs, home birthing families, breastfeeding mothers, owner homebuilders, and backyard gardeners. These people are not considered the mainstream of our society, rather they are those who’ve taken a different path, they’ve heard the beat of a different drummer, and they’ve answered the call. Of course they and their notions are gaining ground within the society-at-large. Plain old common sense always seems to win out in the end.

“But that sense of uncertainty, of ‘are we sure we’re doing the right thing,’ of wanting to ask the advice of the ‘experts,’ is a very pervasive thing. The conventional institutional wisdom plays on this uncertainty. They play it up. They point it out to those who have the audacity to try a few faltering steps on their own. It takes a strong conviction to go ahead on one’s own in our present society.

“The very success of homeschooling is putting it in greater danger with each passing year. Knowing that today’s parents have lost their self-confidence and have been instilled with a need for official approval, it will be easy for the institutions to ‘lend a helping hand’ with homeschooling. The freedom and flexibility that we now enjoy, that ability to meet our childrens’ needs that the schools so envy, is going to be a prime target for the educational establishment. In order to maintain our autonomy we must first recognize the danger, and then act together in developing effective networks and alliances, both within and outside of the homeschooling movement.

“In their new book, ‘Taking Charge Through Homeschooling,’ Larry and Susan Kaseman also refer to Dr. Pat Montgomery’s writing: ‘When Pat Montgomery says, ‘I encourage homeschoolers to realize how what they’re doing fits in the broad scheme of resurrecting the family as a pillar of society,’ she is framing an issue, empowering homeschoolers, attracting the attention of potential allies, and giving life, energy, and focus to the homeschooling movement.’

“Homeschooling parents are now being hailed as having a good idea. We must find ways to share this good idea without compromising the very freedom that makes it possible.”

Thanks for reading, and thank you for your continuing support of Home Education Magazine. Here’s to a bright future for HEM, and more importantly, for homeschooling!

Helen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Helen Hegener, publisher
Home Education Magazine

The feature article writers and regularly scheduled columnists who’ve written for HEM over the years provide a very broad perspective on homeschooling issues, and they’ve tackled some tough subjects for our readers, such as the openly questioning article by Ruthe Matilsky titled On Unschooling and Life from our March/April, 2001 issue:

How unsettling it is sometimes when I think that we have scoffed at the script and now we have to take responsibility for how it all turns out. If we’d done what was expected of us, nothing would ever be our fault. Right? Of course my husband and I don’t believe that, but I can’t help worrying. The standard good-parent line is, “All I want is for my child to be happy.” That’s easy to say when the kids are little, but what about a twenty-one-year-old daughter who is not on the college track?

Then there was Dropping the Bombshell by LauraJean Downs in March-April, 1998:

Those of us who homeschool are the experts in in-law relationships, right? We simply get on the phone and say something like,”Hi Mom! I just wanted to let you know that we are going to homeschool all of the kids next year. Have a great day!” The relationship just continues as smoothly as it always did, right? Wrong!

Another complicated subject was tackled by M. S. Beltran in Homeschooled Teens Can Rest Easier from March/April, 2004:

My daughter’s late rising has brought about a great deal of eye rolling and gaping disbelief from those who cannot imagine life outside the pre-set hours of institutionalized education, even though they are aware our child is not a part of that institution. Is it stubborn adherence to tradition that keeps people holding the early bird in such high regard, while the night owl is chastised for being lazy?

And there was the delightful Reflections of a Homeschooled Homeschooler by Rebecca Bangs Amos, Nov/Dec, 1999:

When my parents shared their plans of moving to a 500-acre farm in Northern Vermont where they would educate their children themselves, their friends responded with, “Are you crazy?” My friends wondered how I could even consider having my mother and father for teachers.

Issue after issue, year after year, Home Education Magazine’s feature article writers captured the essence and the excitement of homeschooling, the concerns and the questions of homeschooling families. Visit the HEM archives – it’s all free – and learn why HEM is “More than just a magazine…”

“I’ve been reading about homeschooling, and especially unschooling, and it sounds so exciting! The more I learn about it the more I know this is what I want to do with my own children, but I still have so many questions needing answers. The one weighing heaviest on my mind is ‘What if I mess up?’ By that I mean what if my children don’t learn to read despite my best efforts, or what if their handwriting and spelling skills turn out to be only mediocre? What if they reach adulthood with no idea what the Magna Carta was, or who wrote Moby Dick, or how to multiply fractions? As you can see I have some grave doubts about my ability to be a good teacher, especially because even with two years of college under my belt I still don’t know what the Magna Carta was, I never read Moby Dick and have no desire to, and multiplying fractions is still a terrible mystery to me. I seem to be getting along just fine in life without these particular bits of knowledge, but who knows if my life might have been different, somehow richer, if I’d learned those things? How can I not want the very best for my children, and how can I not worry about the potential for doing them educational harm by taking them from school?”

This letter struck a chord with me because I clearly remember worrying about the same concerns, and, truth be told, I still do. When one of my adult kids asks me how to spell a word I wonder, ever so briefly, if we shouldn’t have done a little more in the language arts department. When I watch my youngest son sounding out words to himself I have to resist the urge to ask him if he wants me to help him with reading skills; he’s told me many times that he doesn’t need any help. With over twenty years of unschooling under my belt I still worry about their learning, so I can easily understand this young mother’s concerns.

A similar question was brought up on one of our email discussion lists last week, and again, I’d like to share a paragraph:

“I’m currently having fears about how his ‘education’ will be perceived by others. This is totally about how it looks from the outside — something I normally try to not let be a decisive factor. If someone should talk to my son, they’d find that he still counts on his fingers to add and subtract, and gets a blank look on his face when the subject of multiplication comes up, has never “studied” history or grammar. Inside, I’m confident about what he knows and how he’s learning, but when I think about how it looks to other people… I get nervous. Anyone else ever experience that?”

I nodded to myself as I read those lines. Yes, I’ve felt that way many times. When our kids work out math problems, by which I don’t mean workbook problems but real life situations in which math is needed, I know they’re not using the standard schoolish approach to manipulating numbers. They each seem to be working with a different and individualized understanding of math which they worked out for themselves, an invented adaptation of the principles and procedures which works for them, and which is quite mysterious to me. They’ve all tried explaining their various approaches at one time or another, but my school-crippled math phobic mind just can’t see the connections they make.

I had doubts about this approach until my children grew up and went off to work at various jobs where math was a necessary skill. They all did just fine, and rose to positions of responsibility, even in fields in which traditional math was of primary importance. Either their freestyle math served them well or when they needed to learn a more traditional approach to math they simply did so.

I think having doubts about our abilities is, in part, what makes us compassionate and caring, by allowing us to relate to the doubts of others. I also think how we treat those doubts within ourselves makes us who we are. I acknowledge my concerns, and sometimes I discuss them with others, but I usually try to find a different way of viewing the situation, another perspective which helps me put things in focus.

For example, the young mother who wrote to me asked “How can I not want the very best for my children, and how can I not worry about the potential for doing them educational harm by taking them from school?” Her perspective is obviously that school offers a safe educational experience, and that not sending her children to school might somehow be educationally harmful to them, a concept clearly supported by the education bureaucracy, political leaders, big business and the neighbors down the street.

My perspective, on the other hand, would be to view school as the potentially harmful situation and removing children from it’s influences – not just the school building but the schoolish approaches and attitudes toward learning – as the safest approach to their education.

Doubts are normal, and doubts about doing the right thing for our children helps make us good parents. But the pervasive nature of schooling, coupled with its mandate to promote dependency on experts and credentials, fosters a reliance on institutional solutions at the cost of family or community based approaches. This is no coincidence. It is the stated reason for public schooling, and has been clearly and unequivocally documented.

Schools and schoolish approaches are a poor substitute for truly integrating the basics of reading, writing and mathematical skills into one’s life. When we perceive schools and schoolish ways as the aberration, and not the norm, everything changes.

Doubts? Yes, I’ve had them. Still do from time to time. But when I look at the results of the decisions I’ve made the doubts dissolve into perspective, replaced by a confident smile. © 2003 Helen Hegener

Google reveals many Not-Back-To-School activities coming up, including (among the first pages of hits) celebrations in Montreal, United Kingdom, Switzerland, New Zealand, Vancouver, Michigan, New England, California, Michigan, Alabama, Iowa, Chicago and beyond. Homeschoolers in small towns and large metropolitan areas–of varying races, religious beliefs and political persuasions–will gather for pizza, potlucks, campfires, or canoeing. They’ll make banners and craft projects; they’ll eat hot dogs and hummus; they’ll reflect on the past year and swap books and resources for the coming year.

Homeschoolers are often asked if they regret missing rites of passage connected to school. The askers haven’t realized that homeschoolers have well-anticipated traditions themselves–within their families, homeschool groups and communities.

There is a lot to love about the Not-Back-To-School season. Homeschoolers enjoy off-season vacation rates and diminished crowds at museums, libraries, parks, and carnivals. While we homeschooling parents have become accustomed to a daily life of connection to our children,  many of us continue to savor annual Not-Back-To-School events as acknowledgement that we are exceptions to society’s most prevalent approach to education. We are approaching education in an unusual way, we are doing it on purpose, and we like how it works for our families.

Some interesting notes from around the Internet:

Just Enough and Nothing More:
Is the Swine Flu Causing Mass Homeschooling?

With all the schools closing across the US, where are all these kids spending their day? And what happens to all those required school hours? And how to the kids keep up with test prep?

If enough schools close for long enough, sounds like the perfect formula for a nationwide homeschooling frenzy!

Hey, it happend in New Orleans on the relatively small scale. Why not nationally?

Examiner.com:
In case of swine flu school closures talk to homeschoolers

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are issuing advice for schools which may need to close due to the spreading swine flu virus.
YAHOO news reports that the Education Department stated more than 430 schools had closed in 18 states, affecting roughly 245,000 children.
How long can one expect the kids home should your school close?

Principled Discovery:
Homeschooling and the Great Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009

Now the Charter Schools Examiner over at Examiner.com is recommending “In case of swine flu school closures talk to homeschoolers” and I have mixed feelings about the advice. I’m all for talking to homeschoolers. In general, we are a pretty enthusiastic and helpful lot. If you’re stressing about what to do with your kids, a seasoned homeschooler will likely be able to calm you down and keep the situation in perspective while your children exchange germs in the backyard.

But whatever it is a public school family does during a flu-related school closing hardly constitutes homeschooling. I picture 60,000 students (OK, probably less than half that) fumbling awkwardly through a textbook while mom asks what the teacher normally does before she sends them off to read and answer the questions at the end of the chapter with the encouragement to “just do your best.” I picture the majority of these families walking away from the experience a little overwhelmed, relieved it’s over and reinforced in the opinion that “I could never homeschool my children.”

A2Z Homeschool
Homeschooling during the Swine Flu Pandemic

…There are probably some of you reading this who now are considering homeschooling, and this outbreak is just the final straw. First there was the bad economy, with the cuts in income and rising prices, including cuts in school programs. Now this! You may be wondering how your child can survive in more crowded and understaffed classrooms. You may be concerned that because of “complusory education” laws, sick kids have to try to make it through the school day, or be charged with truancy. Doesn’t make sense, does it?

When things quit making sense to people, they usually start looking for different approaches, and in the face of a fast-approaching pandemic increasing numbers of people are looking at homeschooling as a potential different approach to educating their children. At a time when people are being advised against gathering together in closed spaces, homeschooling suddenly makes sense even to the most stubborn nay-sayers.

If you’re one of those looking for information about homeschooling in these troubled times, welcome. We have a lot to offer, and plenty of it is free. Start with our Getting Started with Homeschooling section and progress to our HEM Back Issue Archives; after that you should be grounded enough to just poke around and see what might work for your family. Homeschooling isn’t difficult, doesn’t need to be expensive, and can open a whole new way of thinking about your children, your relationships, and your world. I think, in the coming weeks and months, we’re all going to be looking for different ways of looking at the world.

Just for perspective, and a little food for thought:

Does Homeschooling Research Help Homeschooling?
- Larry & Susan Kaseman

Excerpts:

When homeschoolers agree to participate in research, they are also agreeing that homeschooling can and should be measured by the categories and terms that researchers choose. In other words, homeschoolers who participate in research are agreeing that the important parts of homeschooling, or at least the criteria by which it should be judged, are things like number of hours spent “teaching” or “studying,” standardized test scores, etc.

The most insidious outcome from this condition is that people no longer trust their own knowledge, experience, and judgment about themselves and their children. Homeschoolers become an illustration of some research study rather than the richer reality they really are.

The rights of parents to educate their own children have a solid foundation. By agreeing to research that will evaluate the “success” of homeschooling, homeschoolers are implicitly agreeing that they need to be judged and assessed. They are thereby surrendering important rights that do not need to be justified.

…research categorizes and labels homeschoolers and seeks out the differences among them. It divides them into lots of little subsets instead of emphasizing their common commitment to securing the best education for their children. It even divides homeschoolers by raising the question of whether to participate in research.

A grassroots organization is strong because a group of people realize that they can take responsibility for some aspect of their own lives, such as the education of their children, and carry it out. In opposition to this, research encourages people to turn over private thoughts and personal details to “experts” who will then put them into some form (which the people could not do themselves, according to the researchers) and present them to others, such as school officials and legislators who will then decide what is best for the people to do and require them to do it. This weakens people and encourages them to become dependent, to surrender their strengths and accept the requirements of others.

There’s one more excerpt I meant to include, and will post there now:

Many important parts of homeschooling (the look of joy on a child’s face as he or she discovers something, the recovered self-confidence of a child who had been labeled “learning disabled” by a conventional school) cannot be captured and recorded in quantitative or “scientific” studies. Therefore research gives a misleading picture of homeschooling when it claims to show the strengths of homeschooling but fails to study or report the most important ones.

Around this same time a whole new class of public school programs, often delivered directly into the home, gained acceptance and began increasingly targeting homeschooling families. These programs came under many descriptive terms such as charter schools, cyber schools, cyber-charters, eschools, Independent Study Programs (ISPs), dual enrollment programs, Blended Schools Programs (BSPs), Programs for Non-Public Students (PNPS), Public School Alternative Programs (PSAPs), virtual schools, community schools and various other names. But these public school programs also came with public school regulations, which imposed testing and accountability requirements in alignment with national education goals and standards.

While the public school programs have effectively served the needs of some families, it is unwise to allow the perception to grow that they are equivalent to homeschooling. The very construct of these public school programs runs counter to the ability of families to handcraft an education for their children. Homeschoolers have more than thirty years of experience in living and learning with children outside the public school parameters, and the important lessons they’ve learned in the process are in danger of being lost.

We, as homeschoolers, also have over thirty years of history affirming our freedom to assume the responsibility to educate our children. Many diverse ad hoc and formal organizations collectively discussed and argued the issues and then interacted with local officials. Countless families took countless trips to state capitols fighting for and against legislation that directly and indirectly affected homeschooling families. These homeschool pioneers voluntarily put themselves on the line to ensure each other’s right to assume responsibility to educate their own children, and this is something worth hanging onto and celebrating; it is democracy in action. When the perception arises that these public school programs are equivalent to homeschooling, we lose this important history and the untold benefits it accords us all.

The functioning of our government is something that we all need to be concerned with, and, as noted above, homeschoolers have engaged with the process and have thereby earned the credibility to speak to this situation. When these public school programs use government funds, regulations are inevitable, and homeschool advocates, concerned about the danger of blurring definitions between homeschooling and these public school programs, have long sought ways to raise awareness about the situation. Larry and Susan Kaseman of the Wisconsin Parents Association have been at the forefront of this effort, authoring articles such as “Homeschooling in Public Schools: A Dangerous Oxymoron,” “Let’s Not Let Cyber Charters Do In Homeschooling“, “Homeschoolers, Is Our Good Name for Sale?“, and “Risks Virtual Schools Pose to Homeschools.”

The most common – and tragic – misunderstandings related to the questioning of these public school programs have always spiraled around the underlying intentions of those concerned about homeschooling freedoms. Accusations and attacks have derailed many discussions of the issue, and have repeatedly stymied attempts to hold meaningful conversations on the topic. As a result, this widely recognized and very legitimate threat to the nature, language, and definition of homeschooling is relegated to controversial issue status and summarily avoided.

The inability to discuss the situation, to build an understanding and an awareness of the problem, is exacerbated by the expectation that the threat will show itself in a headline-making manner, and does not recognize the slow grinding process of wearing away at freedoms and responsibilities. Unless we can find a way to talk about this situation, we will find ourselves helpless observers as the word ‘homeschooling’ continues to lose its historically important meaning.

Valerie Moon made an observation in her July, 2007 post at the HEM News and Commentary, “Programs Co-opting Homeschooling?“:

I wonder about the fading of the independence that was inherent in the word ‘homeschooling’ when the choice first caught the national imagination. I hope that it won’t come to pass that the word ‘homeschooling’ will change so much that it will be commonly understood as ’school-at-home-with-oversight.’

By September, Valerie was sounding a little more resigned [edited for space]:

Fluidity of language: What is homeschooling?

I often read articles that use any style of the word ‘homeschooling’ to describe services offered by schools. When I look through the news alerts, I pause each time to think whether to blog these articles because of the gray area of ‘what is homeschooling.’ I must weigh each one; is it, or is it not ‘about homeschooling’ because this blog’s purpose is homeschooling, not cyber-schooling, not blended schooling, not ‘not more than 25-hours a week attendance’ at a school, (25 hrs. divided by 5 days = 5 hours per day), not a “home-schooling center” with a campus and a lunchroom. Just homeschooling.

In most cases of general usage, the language shifts do not matter except maybe to people who have something invested in a word.

Politically correct insistence that ‘homeschooling’ includes anything-goes ‘cafeteria-schooling’ may feel inclusively warm and fuzzy, but it sure doesn’t help the sense of the conversation.

posted by Valerie — sorting through longer and longer lists of ‘homeschooling’ articles

So here we are, many years later, with an increasingly ambiguous word and a body of families whose hard-earned descriptive terminology is being effectively usurped.

In the comments section of my Nov. 24 post, Mary Nix noted:

In my state of Ohio, the cybercharter enrollment grew by leaps and bounds the first couple of years. When looking at the cost of public education that had sharply risen in a senate finance committee meeting, the senators blamed those growing costs on homeschoolers. OHEC and others have had to continually listen, watch and contact the media and the legislature to let them know many home educators remain independent and are not the ones causing the increase.

Senators blaming homeschoolers for the rising cost of public education. Anyone seeing the problem yet?

A brief except from Gaither’s article:

After three decades of explosive growth, the rate of increase in home schooling has begun to slow somewhat, and home-schooling rates are even declining a bit in some states. In Pennsylvania, there were 24,415 reported home schoolers in 2002, the largest figure the state had ever seen. But in 2003 the number of registered home schoolers dropped to 24,076. In 2004 it declined again to 23,287, a decrease of 3.3 percent from the previous year.

Among the possible explanations for declines in home schooling is the increased use of home-based public charter schools, often called “cybercharters” because of their extensive use of online curricula, by families that had previously been home schooling independently. Home schooling is blending with other education movements to lead the way toward a 21st-century education matrix that is far more dynamic and adaptive than the schooling patterns of the past.

Today Spunky writes about an upcoming documentary and shares her thoughts about the message it portrays about the history – and the future – of the homeschool movement. She voices a concern I felt when I viewed the YouTube clip on her site: “The video production is professional but the build-up of suspense using music and courtrooms attempts to provoke a sense of urgency and fear that I’m not sure is warranted.”

I don’t want to copy all of Spunky’s post here, but I do want to share her valuable perspective, which I definitely share: “Secular and Christian homeschoolers are both part of homeschooling in America and its history. Each has made significant contributions to the liberties we now enjoy. I certainly hope that those that seek to tell the history allow all the facts to be known. We’ll see.”

She’s right, we’ll see. But in the meantime we should be aware of things that are happening around us in the name of homeschooling. I recommend reading her post in its entirety for a good perspective on some of what’s happening, and then read the comments to her post for some additional food for thought.