Very nice article, Lori.

If we'd had the money, we would have home-schooled our boys in St. Paul when we lived there. In Minnesota, the home-schooling parent has to be a university graduate - which meant me.

So I spent hours trying to figure out how I could quit my job and home-school the kids and live on my wife's income alone.

It wasn't going to happen.

l could spend several pages complaining about St. Paul's public school system. Instead, I did what I could. I joined the school governance committee, I pushed for uniforms in the schools, I voluntered some time to teach history...

If reality doesn't spin out of control, I'm afraid that you will see the kind of interference in home-schooling that you predict.

Thanks, Ruvy. Homeschooling definitely suits families better if they can survive on one income and one parent can stay home most if not all the time, particularly when the kids are younger. I'm sure families with two working parents do it, but I believe they're in the minority. Seems like it would be a lot more complicated. Single-parent families obviously would have the hardest time pulling it off.

I have to say that I don't understand the college degree requirement. Why do you need a college degree to help your kids get through the equivalent of high school?

And uniforms, Ruvy?! Say it ain't so!

Lori,

The college degree requirement in Minnesota is the product of a powerful teacher's union there. They are not sleeping on the job - of protecting their own turf.

As for school uniforms, the idea, at least as I see it, is to give kids a sense of going to an environment dressed to do business, not to prove how much mom and dad can spend at the mall.

It was a money saver, and not anywhere near as intrusive as it sounds. When I was a kid (boy, I must sound like an ancient geezer), I was expected to arrive in school in a shirt with a collar, a tie, and a decent pair of trousers. My hair was not to be excessively long and I was expected to comport myself in a reasonably serious way. This was a public school, not some fancy private institution for the rich and snooty.

The reason given for the dress code was identical as for the uniforms: to give kids a sense of going to an environment dressed to do business. At the time, there were no shopping malls.

Most laws restricting homeschooling in most states are the result of work by teacher's unions. As Ruvy says, they're not sleeping on the job!

Of course, some laws are because honest legislators want to protect children, but most, if not all, of those protections aren't unique to homeschooling.

Most of the home schooled kids i've met are social retards. The girls become sluts when they turn sixteen because they haven't been around boys and feel they need to catch up. No bullshit. Sure they can spell, but how well adjusted can they be if they never recieved a good beating??

I went to school in the UK, and in the primary and comprehensive schools I went to, they insisted on school uniforms (in high school at least for the younger years). It was a treat not to have to worry about the latest fashions, but just put on the uniform in the morning and forget about it until you got home in the evening. No teasing about how you dress, no worries about fashionable, expensive shoes or whatever getting nabbed. It was great.

I think I speak for all publicly educated kids when I say thank you to The Great Gazoo for so adeptly illustrating the values we all learned in public school.

As for homeschooling laws, I can see each state having a law that says parents are required to educate their children. But I really wish all states would say little to nothing else beyond that. If you want to take on the responsibility of homeschooling your kids, you should be able to do it any way you want.

Regarding school uniforms, I've heard all the arguments in favor of them. I think the one about leveling the socio-economic playing field has the most merit, but overall, but it's not necessarily a good thing to make everyone look and feel the same. Kids should learn that it's okay to be individuals while also being a part of the larger community.

I don't really buy the idea that school uniforms help prepare kids for schoolwork. (I also don't think school has to be "serious work" but that's another story for another day.) Clothing won't make kids focus better: interesting learning opportunities will. If they're doing stuff they're interested in, they'll stay focused on it.

You must be joking, Great Gazoo. It's hard to even take you seriously enough to bother responding. Are you really advocating bullying as a means of "teaching kids the real world"? Wow. Welcome to 1955.

How many homeschooled kids have you actually met? Because I have met many, and none of them present as you so ignorantly proclaim. Not only that, actual studies have shown that the "socialization" issue is a non-starter.

(An article on the Fraser study, and another.And for a list of scholarly articles, see here.)

I would like to point out to other commentators that the idea of having an outside-the-house income is growing less and less difficult, especially for that "creative class," but also for many others. With telecommuting as an increasing and even necessary possibility (what with gasoline prices and so forth), more and more parents are able to stay home and work and also manage their children's home education. There are an awful lot of people who commute to work physically who don't really need to, but for the controlling desires of their bosses. (And it could be said that the same goes for children.)

Thanks for the links, heidi.

The socialization issue really is a non-starter. Students certainly don't get much time to socialize in school. That's usually a punishable offense. "Johnny has detention because he was talking to his neighbor in class today."

So when critics of homeschooling talk about socialization, they really mean group/class management, not actually learning how to interact with other people.

Great article Lori.

I'm sending the following to my own blog:
(a link to your article)

What Lori has to say is true of Australia too, the creative class is highly represented in our home ed communities and the States are responsible for setting their Education Dept's regulations.

Each time there is a review of the various Education/Schools Acts it becomes harder to edcuate your children at home without government intervention and increasingly more onerous 'requirements'.

Victoria is going through a review right now and may well lose the least interefering recognition of Home Ed in all of our Education/Schools Acts.

WA is coming up for review.

'School at home' is unworkable as no families have 25+ kids to control and the whole point of home ed is individualised learning. Home Ed is about learning not mass education. Home Ed is about true socuialisation within the community not within the artificial world of an institution. Home Ed is about preparing children to take part in society not a factory. Home Ed is a symptom of the Information Age.

You know you don't have to register, and all these problems go away and there is no debate

It's funny... when we lived in the US, we didn't care about the homeschooling laws. Living in Indiana and Kentucky the laws were fairly lax, and the enforcement of these laws wasn't something that anyone was going to do as long as you didn't make waves.

The only real trouble that I've ever seen is where the child is in public school and the parents pull them out to homeschool them. If the teachers and administration have a poor opinion of the parents ("that woman couldn't possibly teach her children anything") they might be motivated to cause trouble. However, where the school system doesn't know that your children exist... you're off the radar.

We took the radical view that our children are our business and the State doesn't have a say in the matter. Now that we no longer live in the US, it's even easier. As far as the local government is concerned, we're just tourists and they don't care what we do.

The problem with most Americans is that they want to have the official sanction of the government in everything they do. Far more are of the "if it isn't specifically allowed it's forbidden" philosophy than the "if it isn't specifically forbidden it's allowed" category.

Lori,

You mis-read the chart from the NCES 2003 study on homeschooling. 85% cited it as a reason, but only 31% cited it as the "most important" reason.

//Originally posted at Lori's other site - reposted here because this is where all the other comments are//

Interesting article, but I think your fears of state regulation is unfounded. At the state level, few special interest groups are as effective as homeschoolers. Having worked to get HS'ing legal in all 50 states, it's going to be hell for the establishment to take that freedom back.

What is much more likely - and actually happening - is that the schools will co-opt home education by offering public school at home type programs - complete with govt provided computers, curriculum, and a teacher to oversee the process.

A lot of people will probably be quite happy with that set up. They'll get to claim that they are homeschoolers without the messy work of making actual decisions about their children's education.

I suspect the dramatic growth numbers will level off as the 2005 and beyond statistics get released. Which is fine with me. The bigger homeschooling gets, the bigger threat it becomes, and I think we are much better off staying under the radar.

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