The end of the month produced a small flurry of generic ‘about homeschooling’ news articles across the country. 

• Norwin Star, Monroeville, Pennsylvania, 19 July 2006, This learning is child’s play    

  “I have a friend who counts the days of summer, so she can send her kids back to school. That is so alien to me as my homeschooling is to her,” Cantini says. “I want to be able to enjoy those ‘aha!’ moments when the gears actually click and something they’re learning is actually learned.”

 (the article is about the play group)

 

• Home Educator’s Family Times, Brunswick, Maine, Home is Where the Learning Is      

  I know I have come to appreciate the process of teaching my children what they need to know.  I have seen the benefits of homeschool in many families as well as my own.  We are closer together, we talk more and I can solve conflicts my children have before they get out of hand.  If I had to do it over again, I would still homeschool all of my children.

(book excerpt)

 

• Parents & Kids, Boston, Massachusetts, 25 July, 2006, The road increasingly traveled: Homeschooling    

  For one segment of the population, however, the balmy pre-autumn month carries a different set of images. Rather than shopping for back-to-school clothes and stocking the house with pre-packaged, lunch-friendly snacks, these families are more often leafing through curriculum catalogs and scheduling upcoming community field trips. They vary face-to-face, house-to-house, and run the gamut from PhDs to high school diplomas: we call them homeschoolers. These folks have opted-for the short- or long-term, for one, or for all of their children-to explore the alterative educational path of educating their sons and daughters independently

(three-page article, apparently the first of two, but the second isn’t yet at the site)

 

• Lakeland Ledger, Lakeland, Florida, 31 July 2006, Parents Are Taking Education Back Home    

  Home schooling is booming in Florida. More than 51,000 students were home-schooled in the state during the 2004-2005 school year. That’s up from fewer than 40,000 five years before.

This article has a lot of information about homeschooling in Florida, some of it not all that warm and fuzzy if you’re viewing it from a state with less regulation, but that’s something for Floridians to negotiate for themselves. 

The article presents homeschooling as something that families continue to do in concert with state education authorities, but I don’t know if that is how homeschooling is developing in Florida, or if it’s only the way the reporter has perceived the situation after speaking with state officials.

• A lot of people in Florida have a very independent spirit,” said Steven Adams, director of charter, virtual and home education with the Florida Department of Education.

Director of home education?

The article does spell out differences between the users of virtual schools, and homeschoolers.

• He said these days there are many ways parents can participate in educating their children at home. But not all are considered “home education.”  …  Another option for parents is the Florida Virtual School. This is a state-run online school for sixth-graders through high school seniors. Students take classes on their computers at home but the classes are considered public-school classes.

The compulsion to return to public school if progress isn’t adequate leads to the question of what happens to publicly schooled kids who also don’t make progress.  Where do they go?

• “If at the end of the first year they’re not showing progress, they’re put on probation for a year,” Weaver said. “You have another year to get that student to show progress. If after that second year they’re still not showing progress, then they can be compelled back into public schools.”

And then there are the (almost) humorous incidents.

• “I’ve had a number of phone calls saying, `I’m going to home school my kid, where can I pick up my curriculum?’ ” he said. “So there’s a lot of information that needs to be sent out. That’s done on a local level.”

All in all, the article is informative.

Why is it that every time homeschooling shows up in some form of pop culture the writer/artist/producer has to give it a backhanded slap?

• Marmaduke, 28 July 2006

I would guess that most homeschooling parents know there is plenty of funny comedy (as compared with schadenfreude comedy) in homeschooling.

Wiki websites are growing in popularity, and homeschooling entries on them are too.  The largest wiki (that I know about) is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, and it’s homeschooling entry is at: Homeschooling.

A newer wiki is KnowHomeschooling, which is homeschool-specific.

Do you have something to say about homeschooling?  Start a wiki account and start typing.

Ohio homeschoolers may find that their names have been distributed to commercial vendors without their consent.  Ohio veterans on the Stillwater Homeschool Alliance list are discussing strategies for notifying officials that they do not want their names and addresses distributed.

• Stillwater Homeschool Alliance:  Questions re FERPA and “Informational Purposes Only” 
  [joining list is necessary to read discussion] 

Some editors take identical information, but put a different spin on it via the headline.  For some, the idea of punitive school work seems to be ingrained into the concept of education. 

• The State, Columbia, South Carolina, 8 July 2006, For some students, school’s already in   
• Hilton Head Island Packet, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 10 July 2006, For most home-schoolers, summer is no vacation    

 

Years and years ago, when I started homeschooling my three younger children, my favorite Kindergarten teacher gave me a photocopy of a fable titled ”The Animal School,” the original of the photocopy having been written in a fine calligraphic hand.  The teacher, Flo, retired from teaching a few years later, so she was no neophyte to the teaching business.

Years ago, when I put together the Schools page on my website, I went looking for a version of fable and found one online.

• The Animal School    

  The Administration of the School Curriculum With Reference to Individual Differences

  By Dr. G.H. Reavis Assistant Superintendent Cincinnati Public Schools

  Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world.” So they organized a school.

  They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.  …

This fine fable inspired an update which is hosted at the Raising Small Souls website.  The updated version, a video, is also called “Animal School.”  It has a haunting melody as a soundtrack, which adds to the poignancy of the little story.

• Animal School

 

Were you an eagle, a squirrel, a zebra or a bee? 

Or maybe a duck — calm on the surface but paddling like the dickens underneath?

The Discovery Channel carried a documentary about Patrick Henry College in Loudoun county, Virginia, where a “Christian” worldview is taught (as if Christianity is comprised only of one specific viewpoint), but not all sections of the country get the same programming. When the program was first discussed on email lists, I checked our local listings but the program wasn’t broadcast here. It is lucky, then, that Google has the 48-minute program online (it ‘buffers’ as it plays).

• God’s Next Army, Google Video, 48 minutes

(for non-Mac-users on dial-up, the best strategy might be, at a time when the computer can be left to itself for some time, to right-click on the link, and then choose “save target as” and save the program to a file on the hard drive; with luck a savvy Mac-user will use the comments section to give instructions for other Mac-users)

Patrick Henry College has received attention, not only from the Discovery Channel, but also from others around the country, and around the world. What people are saying about the college may be of interest to homeschooling parents because of the emphasis placed on how the college is ‘for homeschoolers’, again as if homeschoolers, like Christians, were all-of-a-kind. In light of arguments made against the insular-appearing ‘pedagogy of homeschooling’ by academics such as Rob Reich and Michael Apple, the policies of Patrick Henry College seem almost designed to give ammunition to critics of homeschooling. Another area of ‘interest’ in light of the college’s aim to groom political leaders is the college’s program on Strategic Intelligence.

• The Independent (via Common Dreams), London, England, 21 April 2004, The Bible College That Leads to the White House

• The New Yorker, 20 June 2005, God and Country

• The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., 15 May 2006, Where Academic Freedom is the Freedom to Quit

• The Baptist Standard, Dallas, Texas, 27 June 2006, Loss of religious liberty ‘can happen here’ Shurden says

• Talk2Action blog:
  – Generation Joshua
  – An informative expose of a BattleCry event
  – The Money Changers (Leininger)
  – Taking action, Part 1, winning elections & the next generation
  – Taking action, Part 2, the judicial arena
  – Abstinence for Africa
  (use ‘Ctrl F’ to search for specific names/terms in the blog posts)

I understand that web sites such as the one that is linked in this post aren’t ‘hard news’ sites, and that the information contained on the site should be taken with a grain of salt.  Still, I imagine that these kind of bread-and-butter articles are responsible for many of the misconceptions people have about all sorts of subjects.  Writers with a little information pass on their quirks about the subject to readers who know less than they do about the topic of the article. 

The following article reminds me of innumerable newspaper reports that give the reader the ‘gist’ of subject from the writer’s viewpoint without displaying, to an informed reader, any deep understanding of the subject.

• Best Syndication, Pinon Hills, California, 22 June 2006, Home Schooling – The Pros and Cons to Teaching your Child at Home    

  Homeschool does not mean that you don’t teach your child, it means that you will be doing more teaching at home than you would if you sent your child to school.  The public school system can be helpful if you don’t have the time available to sit down and teach your child on a daily basis.

Point one:  the writer seems to have confused parts of unschooling with all of homeschooling.

Point two:  People who send their children to public school don’t often teach their children academic subjects at home, other than through help with homework.  Because of this, it is a foregone conclusion that a parent who chooses to homeschool would do “more teaching” than a parent who doesn’t homeschool.

Point three:  The help provided by “the public school system” brings the child back to public school.  That’s not homeschooling.

I’ll spare us all a complete fisking.

In line with the advice to order a restaurant’s specialty if you want the best meal available from that restaurant’s cooks, if you want homeschooling information, go to a homeschooling web site, not to the “Home and Leisure” section of a general site.  From reading articles such as this one, I’ve come to the conclusion that generic research into homeschooling doesn’t appear to give writers insight into daily homeschooling life that people who are looking for informed advice could use.

Amazon’s ad on the side has some interesting books, but clicking from the site just gives the site owners income from Amazon.  Is that enough of a service to justify the generic writing?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

My opinion of this kind of writing isn’t helped by my abhorrence of the phrase, “on a daily basis.”  Eschew verbosity.  Daily.

This article’s author also seems to have an interest in financial strategies, life insurance and motor vehicles.  Homeschooling seems to be a new interest.

While I was looking for a quick snip from Daryl about how “it’s not homeschooling” to use as a reply to this Canadian report, I found a link at Chris’s to a post Lioness made (the Mississippi one, not the Washington one) about the efficacy of individualized instruction.

I’ll give the public-school-at-home report a miss because Lioness’s blog post is much more interesting.

• We Have Always Lived in a Homeschool, 3 May 2006, The Golden Quote    

  “In study after study, whenever tutoring is matched against some competing pedagogy, including technology, tutoring wins handily. In his own research (Benjamin) Bloom found that tutored students outdistance 98 percent of those taught in conventional groups settings.(7)”

Lioness has more at the link.

The way the public sees homeschooling seems to be ‘improving’ (if you’re a homeschool advocate).  I don’t know how institutions, or the people relying on jobs in the industry, will view the shift.

In one instance, homeschooling is included in a range of educational options (hat tip to Tammy).

• Rhea County Online, The Herald News, Dayton, Tennessee, 28 May 2006, Private, college-prep high school studied    

  Rhea County has a wide variety of educational opportunities for younger students: six public schools, at least four private, Christian schools and homeschooling, but for high school-age, college-bound students, their choices are public school, homeschool or leave the county.

In an article in a motor industry magazine, homeschooling is said to be favorably viewed by respondents to a Harris poll.

• Reliable Plant Magazine, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2 June 2006,  
  Few adults give high marks to quality of U.S. public schools
      
  Home schooling also fares better than public schools in this analysis, but charter schools are perceived as providing a similar quality of education as public schools in general.

  These are the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 2,435 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive between March 8 and 14, 2006.

Homeschooling often isn’t a matter of doing what is currently in vogue in the public eye, but the optimistic trend (from the homeschool viewpoint) may bring homeschoolers closer to being viewed as ‘normal’ by everyone else who knows they’re normal.