From Linda Dobson at Parent at the Helm (PATH):

“I can’t say for certain that I possess the entire collection, but this is an Historic Homeschooling Magazine Giveaway of an insanely large number of issues of none other than America’s oldest and most trusted homeschooling magazine you know and love as Home Education Magazine (HEM for short, of course). As you may be aware, I have written for Home Education Magazine and served as columns editor since Truman was President (What? I know, but it’s only a small exaggeration!), and I wouldn’t have been there forever if I didn’t believe it’s the best product available out there – both yesterday and today. Think about what a GREAT gift these would make for someone just beginning to homeschool!”

Here’s the deal.

It is never certain if an article headlined as homeschooling really is about homeschooling. All to frequently they are about mis-labeled public or private school programs, is more about an editor’s bias than homeschooling, or the reporter never breaks free from a schoolish headset.

This piece is about homeschooling. The reporter starts out well by capturing the flavor of homeschooling:

When 7-year-old Annabelle Kirkpatrick studies fractions and converting pints to quarts, she and her mom go into their kitchen and start cooking.

For a lesson on caterpillars, they browse around their backyard flower garden for a look at the little critters firsthand. After all, Annabelle is homeschooled, which means her parents’ two-story house in Eustis is her classroom.

The article reports a 21% growth in the numbers in local Lake County alone. When asked for the reason a district official says, “There’s not any one single thing that I would identify.”

No one has studied the recent trend, which has hit school districts nationwide. Education leaders have said the trend is likely fueled by economics. In these tight financial times, a lot of parents can’t afford private schools anymore. But they don’t want their kids in public schools, so they’re homeschooling them.

For years, one of the main reasons parents chose to homeschool was a dissatisfaction with public schools – and that has not changed, said an official with the Florida Parent-Educators Association.

It is good to see this reason to homeschool make it into print. The writers next line puts that into perspective, “But also, homeschooling doesn’t seem so odd anymore.”

Then the writer highlights the parent-child bond which is often overlooked.

Homeschooling seemed like the perfect arrangement for the youngest Kirkpatrick, who sometimes seemed to get lost in all the activity.

“I never really felt like I got to know her, spend time with her,” explained Angela Kirkpatrick. “You can mold a homeschool program to fit your family.”

History does repeat. When we started working on our first issue of HEM in 1983 the unemployment rate was similar to todays numbers. In the mid to late 80′s we received report after report from communities across the nation where a private Christian schools closed its doors and the numbers of homeschoolers doubled overnight. It appears the same dynamic is at work in this recession:

Two of Florida’s biggest private-schools [Christian Home and Bible School and Liberty Christian Academy] associations have said enrollment has dropped an estimated 7 percent to 12 percent statewide.

This is a good article to start the week with.

The infomercial site that I (will admit) glibly awarded the Worst Headline of the Week carried a new piece “A Brief Look at the History of Homeschooling.” I can not glibly dismiss this article, infomercial or not.

Not until a little before mid 1800s did institutionalized schooling became the norm. Many of America’s founders were educated by mentors, family and apprenticeships without any state-run education system. This is some of the background information and basis for homeschooling catalyst John Caldwell Holt’s book How Children Fail, which came out in 1964.

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However, neither of his books addressed or proposed any alternative to education. Holt basically planted the seed for change and many other education dissenters started producing books and articles supporting the premise soon afterward. Author Harold Bennet had actually written a book that gave suggestions on how parents can keep their children out of school illegally.

Only after parents had written him regarding his teaching, stating they started teaching their kids at home, did Holt start producing literature on homeschooling. His last book Teach Your Own, published in 1980, contains his take on homeschooling.

(Oops, the author fails to acknowledge Holt’s Growing Without Schooling started in 1977.)

The piece goes on to talk about the work of Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore and then to state, “Studies have found that homeschooling parents are of the Christian faith in the U.S. — nearly 90 percent having been polled said as much.”

I sat with Raymond and Dorothy in both formal meetings and informal brain storming sessions discussing the dangers of dividing the movement along religious lines. We differed in strategy, but their words and deeds supported the diversity of the homeschooling movement and opposed the coming division.

Maybe this ‘brief history’ is innocent, maybe by design, or, the most likely, just good for selling Christian Curriculum. In any case, ignoring the history, which includes the diversity and the purposeful division along religious lines, continues to drive us apart and is not helpful for anyone’s freedom to homeschool.

For now, I will point you to the resource section of this post for more information.

Here is the infomercial.

Found an an interesting response to a column titled “Even Government Envious Of Homeschooling Success” on The Clarion Ledger website by former State Superintendent, Richard A. Boyd.

Matt Friedeman’s column (“Even government envious of homeschooling success,” Aug. 30) praised the success of students who are homeschooled on academic tests, and went on to point out how much cheaper it is for parents to educate their children at home rather than in the public schools. Mr. Friedeman omitted some very important facts that destroy his arguments.

The headline was nonsensical. I have never known nor heard of any public school figure or other public official who was “envious” of homeschooling. At this time in our history, the attitude of nearly all of those officials is, “If that’s what they want to do, so be it.”

Mr. Boyd goes on to say, as Superintendent he was involved with homeschooling back in the day.

I am not an opponent of homeschooling. During the time that I was serving as state superintendent of education in Mississippi in the 1980s, I had meetings with representatives of the homeschooling association to discuss their concerns that they were going to be overregulated by the state. The Mississippi Legislature ended up passing a law universally recognized as among the least restrictive in this nation.

I would argue that “least restrictive” is in the eye of the beholder. Yet, we agree on his next point.

Mr. Friedeman bases his entire argument on research done by Dr. Brian Ray, whom he didn’t mention is affiliated with a national organization that promotes homeschooling.

The most outrageous claim that Mr. Friedeman makes is that “Government now wants to get its hands on the surest educational method in the nation (homeschooling).” He is taking a page right out of the current health care debate: trying to scare people by making untruthful claims about “government.”

I do not know where to start on this last paragraph. While there is a thread of truth in the quote, I do remember well the politics within the homeschool community in the which lead us to publish Homeschool Freedoms At Risk back in 1991.

In many ways the turmoil of our national politics today seems oh, so familiar. I would assume Mr. Boyd and I remember a much less heated time. What he describes today as “scare people by making untruthful claims”, by the early 90′s, I had come to describe as the politics of fear, hate and misunderstanding.

Interesting times indeed.

I thought this article below was interesting, in that it came from business media in Dubai.  But the piece covered a Maryland homeschooling family, and the usual (not necessarily accurate) rendition of  modern homeschool history.

Homeschooling goes from fringe to mainstream in US
Emirates Business 24/7 – June 25, 2009

At the height of the hippy culture in the 1960s, homeschooling enjoyed a renaissance as left-wingers seeking to buck the establishment taught their children themselves.

Christian conservatives were the next to embrace homeschooling, and “by 1990, 85 to 90 percent of all homeschoolers came from the ranks of the religious right,” Paul Petersen, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in Education Next, which he edits.

The number of home-schooled children soared by 29 percent between 1999 and 2003, from 850,000 to roughly 1.1 million, data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show.

85-90%?!  That ‘statistic’ certainly wouldn’t have been known in a few populous states like Texas, Illinois, etc; as there would likely not be records via registration or notification.  Let alone that they are from the “religious right”.

I’d want to hear some thoughts from a trusted long-time homeschooler who took a stroll down Memory Lane.

If homeschoolers are ‘going mainstream’, as I’ve seen in so many recent articles, then maybe the media/interested parties have a different connotation to the word “mainstream“.  Maybe mainstream means back to school, in one form or another.

Following the article’s trail, I saw that Mr. Petersen has a piece in Education Next called:

The Home-Schooling Special
Today’s choicest choice

If the baby was born in hippieville, the toddler was soon kidnapped by Christian social conservatives. By 1990, 85 to 90 percent of all home schoolers came from the ranks of the Religious Right. Even Holt could not resist a Libertarian cry:

Some may feel that the schools teach a dog-eat-dog competitiveness; others that they teach a mealy-mouth Socialism…. What is important is not that all readers…should agree on these questions, but that we should…work for…the right of all people to take their children out of schools.

John Holt seemed on the right learning track wanting to work for the “right of all people to take their children out of schools“, if parents believe that would be the best for their child(ren).

As appealing as it might sound, I don’t agree with Mr. Petersen’s hope for legislators:  “State legislatures are likely to become increasingly accommodating toward a movement that saves them money. The day may come when we hear the phrase, “We are all home schoolers now. John Locke would be pleased “.
It’s not just about the money, but seems to increasingly be about the control, as well.  Being from Illinois, while observing other states’ and national budget busts, I don’t see many legislators particularly concerned with saving money.  If the government was minimally, or not involved in the educational process, then I imagine Locke would be pleased.  That doesn’t seem to be the trend.  That control and/or hunger for more body counts in the schools certainly seems to come up in various state legislative sessions, along with the encroachment of federal “home-school” legislation via special interests. That query will have to be responded to again and again.

Petersen points out intriguing thoughts from Locke (proponent of “natural rights“,  whose philosophy had a strong influence forming  the US Constitution) concerning socialization and schooling:

“what qualities are ordinarily to be got from…a troop of playfellows [at school]…usually assembled together from parents of all kinds.” Even if the teacher’s industry and skill “be ever so great, it can[not]…be expected that he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books.”

The Educational Writings of John Locke

In Locke’s home grounds, British homeschoolers now have to fend off potential legislation resulting from interested bureaucrats. As if homeschooling families didn’t have anything better to do.  Ironic, isn’t it?

From Roland Meighan’s Response to Graham Badman’s Review Report
(Meighan is Director of Educational Heretics Press )

(In contrast, the bad news about schools is located and reported almost daily, and a motive for some families is that home-based education provides a much safer environment than schools. The evidence supports them – exposure to knives, drugs, petty crime, alcohol, smoking, bullying etc., are school-based problems.) The forthcoming report by Professor Clive Harber on Toxic Schooling assembles some of the key evidence on this.

Families escape schools to avoid bullying, and the government agencies attempt to follow them into their homes to continue the emotional bullying.

Education Otherwise has other updates on their site about Badman’s Review:

Lord Lucas Asks for Comments

EO Rejects Calls for Monitoring and Registration

Yesterday Delyth Morgan, the Children’s Minister, said she accepted in full the “proportionate and reasonable” recommendations set out in Graham Badman’s Report.

However today Education Otherwise says that they reject the disproportionate and unreasonable recommendations as set out in the Review Report for compulsory registration and invasive monitoring.

Best wishes that this will ultimately benefit educational freedoms.  I bet John Locke would like that; educational heretic, mainstream, what have you.

Mental Floss is one of my favorite magazines and CNN pulled up one of last November’s articles below:

10 homeschooled celebrities – CNN.com April 23, 2009

Agatha Christie was a painfully shy girl, so her mom homeschooled her even though her two older siblings attended private school.

I think Thomas Edison would agree with that.  From the article:

If Thomas Edison were around today, he would probably be diagnosed with ADD — he left public school after only three months because his mind wouldn’t stop wandering.

His mom homeschooled him after that, and he credited her with the success of his education: “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”

“Thomas Edison homeschool” has an abundance of google links, as many homeschoolers relate to his “wandering mind”.

One of many US homeschooled Presidents was highlighted in the article:

Woodrow Wilson studied under his dad, one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS).

He didn’t learn to read until he was about 12. He took a few classes at a school in Augusta, Georgia, to supplement his father’s teachings, and ended up spending a year at Davidson College before transferring to Princeton.

Mental Floss’ blog. has the article in their Quick 10 section.  Comments are permitted and there are several already posted.

If you’re looking for resources for Inaguration Day check out the great posts by Kathy Kidd-Wuest at the HEM Networking discussion group. From Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech to the National Geographic’s photo gallery to live streaming sites, Kathy shares some terrific links and resources for this historic event!

From Susan, at Corn and Oil on the changes in the Washington, D.C. homeschooling law, and other laws in general:

What is the status quo for homeschooling freedom?

Homeschooling pioneer Nancy Wallace, author of Child’s Work: Taking Children’s Choices Seriously, and Better Than School: One Family’s Declaration of Independence died June 27th. 

Many homeschoolers of the 1980s and 1990s will remember reading about Vita and Ishmael, and wondering if our children would ever rise to that standard.

Our condolences to the family.

Home-schooled families enjoy their version of mainstream, 22 July 2008, Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona

Homeschooling in Arizona

1912: Original homeschool law requires children to attend school through grade 8 and be taught by a “competent” teacher.

1982: The first homeschool law rewrite comes when jurisdiction shifts to county school superintendents. In October, the first meeting of Arizona Families for Home Education is held.

1992: HB2075 proposed a revision to the homeschool law based on 1991 Legislative study committee recommendations. When debate stops, more than 200 homeschool advocates hold protests, widely covered by the media. Gov. Fife Symington vetoes the unfavorable homeschool bill.

1993: First AFHE statewide sponsored high school and junior high graduation. House bill 2262 sponsored by Gary Richardson is signed into law, requiring homeschool student testing every three years.

1995: Arizona proclaimed to have the “best” law in the nation, after a homeschool law revision requires parents only to file an affidavit of intent with the state. No tests.

1997: Homeschool students can join interscholastic sport competitions at public schools.

1999: The Bethany Lewis laws makes homeschoolers eligible for state university scholarships.

[balance of article is narrative about Arizona homeschooling]