I was working on a September collection of international articles about homeschooling, but this article from Israel deserves a blog post of its own. 

Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem, Israel, 31 August 2006, Learning without lessons

Most homeschoolers in Israel follow the less structured “un-schooling” model which does not provide a set curriculum but rather tailors itself to children’s individual needs (see box).

…

Prof. Roni Aviram, chair of the Center for Futurism in Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, encourages homeschooling as an alternative to what he believes is the failure of the school system in the Western world, and especially in Israel.

…

According to Zinigrad, families from across the socioeconomic, political and religious spectrum are members of the homeschooling flock.

“Anyone who says it’s something elitist or like a cult is wrong.” While in the past, homeschoolers might have been isolated, there are now homeschooling groups all over the country, including one that meets bimonthly at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, and there are several Web sites and email lists.

There is no typical homeschooling family. While many families in the Jerusalem area are Anglos, in other areas of the country this is not the case.

“We are not an example of a homeschooling family. We are an example of our family that happens to homeschool,” says Dina.

…

“It takes a [certain] type of personality… [the parent] has to give up a lot if she [or he] chooses to take care of them at home… She doesn’t have a life. Others would say a mother who chooses to do that, that is her life.”

Trachtman takes the latter statement one step further.

“Have there been days when I’ve wanted to run off to Antarctica? Sure. But even on those days I have reflected on the fact that I wouldn’t have traded a single moment of my life with another person on this planet.”

BP News, Nashville, Tennessee, 5 September 2006, Seminary’s home school children touch N.O. with compassion

NEW ORLEANS (BP)–Their message was simple and their gifts were small, but a group of home school children from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary ministered to their neighborhood in their own special way to mark the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina Aug. 29.

Paula Stringer, professor of childhood education at New Orleans Seminary, led a group of more than 20 children and adults from the seminary’s home school network down nearby Gentilly Boulevard to pray and give bottles of cold water in Jesus’ name.

She’s not news, and the homeschooling of their children ended some time ago, but while I was working on the previous post, I ‘spontaneously’ thought about Penny Barker while mulling over the time that has passed since the signing of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.  Penny was one of the first Home Education Magazine columnists who influenced me.

Just for a lark, I searched for her name, and voila.

The Country School Farm

An Ohio Resident Farm Summer Camp for Children Who Love Animals

Britt, the oldest Barker offspring, from the beginning took a lead in every aspect of the life of the farm. While the horses were her special interest, her knowledge of all things domestic made her Penny’s valued colleague in the kitchen and garden. Britt’s vocations, when not at the farm, are writing, painting and piano performance. She is married to Shaun, who apprenticed at the farm for four years.

Maggie has a lifetime of experience in working on the farm and with children. As a young child she began with a small flock of sheep. She trained Border Collies as sheepdogs which sparked an interest in dogsledding. During the ’90s she raced her Alaskan Huskies along the US-Canadian border. Simultaneously, she and her brothers became wilderness guides and for eight years ran canoe and mountaineering expeditions in the northern and western states. Maggie sold her kennel in 1998 and took up naturalist sculpting. She spent two years at the Florence Academy of Art and in Carrara, Italy studying marble sculpture. Her work with animals is currently with service and stock dogs. She and her husband, Fabricio, a chemist, currently reside at the farm.

Dan, at age nine, cared for the poultry, raising bantams and layers. Along the way he developed an interest in the cello and, ran dog teams and was a wilderness guide in the 90s. He is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has a Masters Degree in Cello Performance from Sacramento State University. When Dan is not assisting with the summer farm program, he lives in Sacramento, has a cello studio in Davis, and performs with various California and Nevada orchestras.

Jonah, the youngest Barker, is very much a child-of-the-summer-farm-experience and, in fact, was literally carried around by visitors as a baby. Jonah became skilled in every aspect of the farm and program. His technical know-how in the workshop as well as at the computer makes him the one to whom everyone turns for answers. When not at the farm, Jonah resides in Columbus.

What a beautiful picture at the web site.

After reading so many ‘thou shalt not’ admonitions in articles about homeschooling, just looking at the Barkers’ web site refreshes me.  I’ve ended my workday on a positive note.

Thanks again, Penny.

… made the column deadline, now back to treading water in the rising tide of Google alerts.

The following articles “about” homeschooling were published in August.

State Journal, Charleston, West Virginia, 3 August 2006, Schooled at Home: More families holding classes in kitchens

During the 2004-05 academic year, more than 5,500 children in West Virginia were educated at home. And if past trends are any indication, even more students will be home-schooled in years to come.

Topics that followed:
A Decision That Made Sense
A System of Support
Regulations For Home Educations

State Journal, Charleston, West Virginia, 3 August 2006, Decision to Home-School Kids Just Comes Naturally: Spending more time with your own children is an enriching experience

Tony, just 3, didn’t see learning as something only for his older siblings, or something that happened only from 9 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, or only from September to May. From that minute on, I wanted any children I was lucky enough to have someday to embrace a similar eagerness for learning.

That reminds me of a line my friend Patty uses. When people ask how long she’s been home-schooling her three children, she answers: “Since they were born.” She’s right — all parents are teachers; it really is the most natural thing in the world.

State Journal, Charleston, West Virginia, 3 August 2006, Teaching at Home Serves Some Well: Does home-schooling work? It certainly does for some families

America provides its citizens with many freedoms as long they exercise them responsibly. Home-schooling is one of those freedoms. It is a legitimate solution for many West Virginia families.

WALB-TV, Albany, Georgia, 10 August 2006, South Georgia students study from home

Adrianne says home schooling hasn’t affected her socially. If anything, she’s become more social from it. And she already has colleges knocking at her door. “Being home schooled doesn’t kick you out of going to colleges, colleges look for you because you are home schooled. I’ve had colleges trying to get me to go visit since 7th or 8th grade because they found out I was home schooled,” Adrianne says.

Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Huddersfield, England, 10 August 2006, The alternative to sending your kids to school

Schools do, of course, organise trips to museums and have special learning and themed days. But none can boast week-long pretend night-time air raids with gas masks, candles, blankets and ration books.

This experience was organised by members of the Huddersfield Home Educators Group during learning on the Second World War.

Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!

Kiplingers.com, Washington, D.C., 14 August 2006, Fun and Learning: Choosy parents often find that the best classroom is none at all.

The biggest cost of home schooling is often the forgone income of a parent who gives up employment. But few kids spend their whole childhood studying at home. The average is two years.

That statistic comes from Patricia Lines who wrote the the ERIC Clearinghouse book, Support for Home-based Education: Pioneering Partnerships Between Public Schools and Families Who Instruct Their Children at Home

Larry and Susan Kaseman critiqued the study, and the statistic, in their article, “Who Is Pat Lines and Why Is She Writing About Homeschooling?”

Athens Banner-Herald, Athens, Georgia, 15 August 2006, Parents tout benefits of teaching at home: Returning to school a whole different game for many students (use BugMeNot)

The money Courson spends on textbooks and computer tutoring programs still is cheaper than tuition at a private school, and it’s about the same as she spent when the children attended public school and she paid for gas to get them to school, lunches, school supplies and hip clothes, she said.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Alberta, Canada, 16 August 2006, Who home-educates?

Compulsory schooling, on the other hand, is not much older than 150 years old in North America. In Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, a child’s education was the responsibility of the family, not the state, until 1943. Seen in this perspective, mass institutionalized education — not home-education — might look more like the experiment.

[From one of the comments at the site]
The questions that we need to ask and answer are these: What do we mean by education? And if state education is the experiment, why did we change from centuries of home schooling to state run education systems?

Societies grow and change. Expectations change. Many parents demand that the state provide subsidized daycare for their children. Daycare is another form of state institutionalization.

The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee, 22 August 2006, Best schools at home for some

Watching a homeschooling family in California got Susan Quiroz of Collierville interested in it eight years ago.

“At first I thought it was a weird concept,” she admits, “but then I got to know their kids and really liked what I saw … . They gave their kids such a great all-around education that I decided it would be a great way to educate my own children one day.”

The Indiana legal climate for homeschooling is liberal, as reflected by that state’s laws governing homeschooling.  A member of the Advisory Editorial Board for an Indiana newspaper, the Courier & Press, wants that situation to be discussed and uses worst-case examples as the reason.

Evansville Courier & Press, Evansville, Indiana, 6 September 2006, Home schooling should be board election topic

Home schooling is a growing phenomenon in the Midwest and South. Many education professionals believe that if the home educator is not well qualified or fails to include a child in group activities outside the home, it can produce young adults who have insufficient social skills and, in the extreme, borderline xenophobia. Lack of socialization and life experiences can stifle a child’s maturation and his ability to mentally process disappointments and life changes.

David Ludwig, 18, and Kara Roth, 15, were Pennsylvania teenagers who met at an outing for home-schooled teens in Lititz, Pa. In November 2005, Ludwig shot and killed Kara’s parents when they banned him from seeing their daughter. The two fled to Indiana, where they were captured.

At the time of the Pennsylvania tragedy involving Ludwig and Roth, I looked at the additional links on the website containing the report I blogged.

HEM News and Commentary, 10 December 2005, Homeschooling tragedies

On one of the websites where I read a contemporaneous report of Ludwig’s crime, there were other stories about horrible events, yet those events have not been noticeably linked in subsequent articles to whichever population subgroup to which the parties belonged, but I’m not monitoring google alerts for them, either.

On the day I saved the site’s page, stories at the site were titled, “Student allegedly sexually attacks another student,” “Murder trial begins for mother of 3 girls killed in fire,” “Officers arrest couple after finding girl, 3, locked in garage.”  The other headlines at that site are different today, but still there are horrible headlines, such as, “Son, 14, charged with father’s murder.”

It is a feature of our news reporting culture that whatever is unusual — man bites dog – gets the most publicity.  Murder because of young love would be a dog-bites-man story, meaning it’s terrible, but not unheard of.  Murder because of young love between homeschooled kids, though, is of the man-bites-dog variety, perhaps because of the halo-effect some see around homeschooling.  Yes, in today’s world going the whole nine yards to raise your kids is sometimes seen as a denial of the full privileges of adulthood concerning the parent, and homeschooled kids are usually reported as being kind and thoughtful, but on the face of it, caring for your own flesh and blood, and having decent manners, should be seen as a normal things.

In either version of my unfortunately-not-entirely-fictional example of murder because of young love, a tragedy has occurred, but in the common dog-bites-man kind of tragedy, the family murder story disappears into the black-hole-of-stories going back as far as ancient Egypt, Tutankhamen, Cain and Abel, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Iphigeneia and Clytemnestra, Medea, and (almost) Abraham and Isaac.  And those were the biggies.  Reports of garden-variety murders that don’t have actual or symbolic significance are usually not enshrined in famous stories, and no one (unrelated to the people involved, or far away from them) is surprised at murder, much less murder concerning families.  Family murder is common enough to have  its own page at the United States Bureau of Justice website.

Using murder to justify homeschool oversight can’t be sustained because murder, to the sorrow of us all, is too common.

U.S. Department of Justice press release, 10 July 1994, Wives are the most frequent victims in family murders

The study, based on murder cases disposed of in 1988 in the 75 largest U.S. counties, determined that family murder victims were related to their assailants as follows:

Husband or wife of murderer  . .   40.9%
Offspring  . . . . . . . . . . .   20.9
Parent . . . . . . . . . . . . .   11.7
Sibling  . . . . . . . . . . . .    9.4
Other type of family member  . .   17.1

What do you think the breakdown would be, among those victims, as to method of schooling, either of perpetrator or victim?

 

Many homeschoolers have responded at the Courier & Press site about the other reasons the writer of the article gives for wanting stricter homeschooling oversight in Indiana.

The following are articles that include concern about the social lives of homeschooled kids.  Despite the amount of information about the ways in which homeschooled kids get out of the house, as indicated by accounts as varied as stories about successful homeschoolers, community activities, and sports, as well as online indicators such as the Carschooling site, the stereotypical image of ‘homeschooled as cloistered’ continues.

 

The homeschooling parent in the following article rebuts that allegation that homeschooled children “do not get socialization skills.”  Also of note is that the ability of parents in Virginia who have only a high school diploma to homeschool their children is not a new option, although there is now a different filing requirement.

WCAV television, Charlottesville, Virginia, 20 July 2006, Laws Make Home Schooling Easier    

and

WHSV television, Harrisonburg, Virginia, 23 July 2006, Laws Make Home Schooling Easier

However, some critics have blasted the idea of home schooling and the new laws. They feel the kids do not get the socialization skills they need to succeed in life.

 

The next article is about public-school-at-home, a form of education that shares the general venue of ‘home’ with homeschooling.  Critics of non-institutional education are often concerned about the loss of mass-school “culture,” but they rarely speak about the decrease in peer pressure, a category that gets numerous hits in an online search. 

It would be nice if there was an objective third-party cost-benefit analysis comparing the various forms of educational delivery systems by looking at longitudinal information, but so far we’re stuck with doing what humans have done for ages — playing it by ear.

The Acorn, Agoura Hills, CA, 20 July 2006, School without walls coming to LVUSD

On the downside

In theory the new school promises to open the doors to choice, but school officials said there will be some downsides.

When a student leaves a comprehensive high school, [Assistant Superintendent of Education Joe] Nardo said, they also lose out on the “culture,” which may mean a loss of friends and activities. He predicts that some students may have a difficult time with the transition.

 

Articles with general tips for back-to-school don’t neglect homeschoolers either.  I’m afraid that the advice for homeschoolers in this article from Miami, Florida merits only a Homer Simpsonish “Duh.” 

Modern parents who have weathered infancy, babyhood, toddlerhood, and the rambunctious years of threes, fours and fives, all with the help of books, magazines, newspapers websites, chatrooms, television programs, innumerable talk show hosts, and all the advice from helpful friends and relatives, probably caught on to the concept of ’playgroup.’

Miami Herald, Miami, Florida, 8 August 2006, Start smart: 10 tips for a healthy school year    

By home schooling, you don’t have to worry about heavy backpacks, bad lunches and separation anxiety. But the lack of social interactions could pose a problem. The solution: Meet with other home schoolers in your neighborhood and set up activities, [spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Ari] Brown advises.

 

But I think we’re way past worries about socialization.  It’s time for the mainstream, or at least the mainstream outside of Oregon, to catch up and enter the modern homeschool world.

The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 31 August 2006, Home schooling hits the road [printer version for full article on one page]

Two decades ago, when Oregon made home schooling legal, families sometimes struggled to find opportunities for social and academic interaction. Now activities and classes catering to home-schoolers are so plentiful that the challenge is how to choose among them.

“You could be gone every day of the week, and you’d never be home, schooling,” said Lynette Isaak of Colton, who started home schooling the first of her five children 21 years ago and now is a consultant to other families. “We really do have to be much wiser now to pick and choose.”     …

As more families decided to home-school, they pooled resources to start co-ops and parent groups, orchestras and sports teams. Support sprouted in communities, too, with libraries, schools, community centers and private instructors offering classes and activities at times when other children are in school.

“If you can’t find something for your kids, it’s because you aren’t looking hard enough or being resourceful enough,” said Tara Weinstein, who home-schools four sons, ages 5 to 10, in West Linn.     …

Some parents say home schooling leaves more time for their children to have outside activities, because their schedules are flexible and one-on-one instruction means no time is lost to classroom management.     …

Still, she said, “there’s so much out there, you have to know when to say no.”     …

“The image of home schooling is changing, and I think it’s because it’s growing and there are options to get your kids out there socializing,” Spitzer said. “It’s not just the geeky weirdos who are doing it.”

Choices were always there, they just weren’t the ones offered by schools. 

You pays your money, you takes your choice.