While not specifically about homeschooling, an article by Brian Gresko, a stay-at-home dad and writer, explains his view that childhood is under attack by the very people who should be protecting it: parents. His article In Defense of Childhood: Let Kids Be Kids! explains:

Many of the most important skills are untestable — imagination, general optimism and lightness of heart, the capability to love another creature, to empathize and demonstrate compassion. These are things a child can’t bubble in on a Scantron sheet, and yet cultivating these attitudes matters more in determining how my son will exist in the world and what kind of contribution he’ll make with his time on Earth.

Read the entire article at the link above.

A Journey to Unschooling by Mary Hickcox appears in the current issue of the newsletter, Dissident Voice:

When I first heard about unschooling 8 years ago I thought it seemed crazy. I thought all the things that some of you are thinking right now. What about socialization, grades, college? My children need to go to school to be “on track” with everyone else. It seemed lazy and neglectful, and I couldn’t imagine going against the grain in such an “extreme” way.

Flash forward to today and you see a very different philosophy in my home. I have spent the past 6 years homeschooling my oldest son.

Continue reading Mary’s article at the link above.

Todayshow.com is featuring homeschooling in a weeklong web-only series of articles. The coverage has been showing different aspects of homeschooling, and portraying past stereotypes and stigmas as fading away as homeschooling goes increasingly mainstream.

Kevin Kelly’s Achieving Techno-Literacy appeared in the Sept. 16th issue of The New York Times:

One day our student would dissect and diagram the inside organs of flowers; the next he’d write short stories or poems and then revise them; and the next day we’d solve logic problems with algebra, then he’d work on plans for a chicken coop and maybe we’d do a field trip to a car factory. He also went through eighth-grade textbooks in history, grammar, geometry and the like. This type of home-schooling is really nothing special. Our son was merely one of more than a million students home-schooled in the United States last year.

The interesting part – and the reason for the title – is this comment, which Kelly explains:

Now that the year is done, I am struck that the fancy technology supposedly crucial to an up-to-the-minute education was not a major factor in its success. Of course, technology in the broadest sense was everywhere in our classroom. There was an inexpensive microscope on the kitchen table and an old digital camera to record experiments. There was a PC always on for research. Our son was also a big user of online tutorials.

Read the entire article at the link above.

In an article for the Austin, Texas newspaper, Austin-American Statesman, titled What Makes Home Schooling Work?, special contributors Dieter and Debra Schlaepfer, who live in Rohnert Park, California, write:

In general, government officials, education bureaucrats, and teacher’s union advocates do not know what makes home schooling work. Two of their most common misconceptions are that homeschooled children are disadvantaged regarding social adjustment, and that homeschooling produces inferior academic results due to lack of teacher training.

In reality, the exact opposite is true!

Read the entire article at the link above.

From Voice of America’s News USA, an article titled Education Begins at Home in Many US Households and subtitled Homeschooling has broadened to include parents of all faiths:

Before 1918, when Mississippi became the last U.S. state to require that school-age children attend public or private schools, many children were taught by their parents at home or by teachers informally hired by the community. Quite often in rural areas, kids of all ages were taught in the same one-room schoolhouse.

Decades later in the 1980s, homeschooling made a comeback when religiously conservative parents convinced states to approve and give full credit for the teaching of children at home. The homeschooling movement has since broadened to include parents of all faiths – or no faith at all.

Linda Dobson’s Parent at the Helm is featured in this quick overview of homeschooling.

Holly Craw, the Phoenix, Arizona Homeschooling Examiner, asks a question we’re hearing more and more often these days in her article Arizona loses out on Race to the Top Funds: Is this a new opportunity to strengthen homeschooling? A couple of excerpts:

The Arizona homeschool community may need to gear up for an increase in its ranks. When U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, announced yesterday the winners in the Race to the Top competition for billions of dollars in federal assistance for state education funding, Arizona had missed a $250 million windfall by 5.3 points.

This examiner predicts that there will be an upsurge in families deciding to homeschool because of the issues that are being exacerbated in the public schools.

If you are having second thoughts about your local public school, and the programs and staff that it no longer has, you may want to consider the pros and cons of homeschooling.

Huffington Post blogger Kate Fridkis writes about the New York Style Magazine article on upscale New York homeschool cooperatives:

The New York Times Style Magazine piece about the trendy Brooklyn homeschoolers, “School’s In,” both did and didn’t remind me of my own pre-college education. My family called it unschooling, because we didn’t have any classes. We were living in one of the parts of New Jersey that has a surprising number of farms, and our neo-Nazi neighbors harassed our black neighbors. We had “group,” which met every week or so–not for French lessons, but for random fun. The kids from group, local homeschoolers of different ages, went ice skating in the winter. We were the only ones on the rink, except for a foul-tempered skate guard with a bristling mustache. We went to parks in the summer. We built a raft out of recycling buckets and plywood and floated on the pond. We were not cool. Some of us ate processed cheese. No one had very much money.

Continue reading Kate’s outstanding article at “School’s In,”. But for those who won’t click the link, here is an important reminder about homeschooling (but we suggest skipping this and just reading Kate’s entire excellent article):

Both of my parents are very, very smart. They are both good at networking. They are both creative. But most importantly, in terms of my education, they both somehow were able to agree that I would turn out fine, even if I never sat in a classroom. They somehow trusted that children will always learn, as long as they are encouraged.

The Brooklyn homeschoolers’ world, as described, sounds so delicate to me. Which is funny, because people have always imagined my world to be constructed out of fragile materials and a rare brand of naïve idealism. This is a narrative about homeschooling that people repeat. It’s not “real.” It’s sort of a fantasy. It’s not gritty and down to earth and diverse. Maybe this is always at least partly true, but maybe it also just depends a lot on who is doing the homeschooling, or the unschooling. Because the truth is, school and home are never really perfectly balanced alternatives to one another. They aren’t opposites. School is controllable and uniform to an extent that unschool can’t possibly be.

In an article for the New York Style magazine, an article titled School’s In explores the trendsetting approaches to homeschooling being taken by Brooklyn hipster parents (including fashion photographers, a cinematographer, a dancer-choreographer and a sculptor among them) when the local schools didn’t quite pass muster.

…is this a school, or artists trying to render a New York City childhood in perfect brush strokes?

“It’s obviously gentrified more,” Trejo says of the new home-schoolers. “Definitely more from people who have a privileged background, with one parent who has the luxury of working from home, which is not an option for a lot of working-class families.”

Read the entire article at the link above.

From the Southtown Star, an edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, an article by Fran Eaton titled Homeschooling taught lessons for both children and parents:

Any day now, we’ll all be hearing those familiar sounds of school buses and young voices shouting out as the kids head back to school. That first day marks a fresh beginning in a child’s life.

I’ll never forget our daughter’s first day of kindergarten more than 20 years ago. Determined to be independent and on her own, the little blond 5-year-old went out the door with lunchbox in hand. I stood and watched as she walked down the sidewalk. Within minutes, she entered the front door of her school – back home, right where she started.

“I’m ready for school,” she said. And she was.

Homeschooling was our family’s choice. During the 1980s, a revival of home education hit the United States, and we, along with tens of thousands of other young couples, were swept into the tidal wave.

Continue reading Fran Eaton’s article at the link above.