The HEM Classics feature for the March/April issue of Home Education Magazine is Classic Editorials from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a time in which homeschooling was not only exploding on the American scene, but was struggling with power plays and a blatant usurpation of the political strength and savvy of homeschooling families.
Homeschool Unity (Sept-Oct/89), Dividing Homeschoolers (May-June 1990), and Freedoms at Risk (May-June 1991) combine to present a historical perspective to the source of the pushback the homeschooling community is feeling today from academics, legislators, media and the general public. Quick excerpts from each article:
Homeschool Unity: “When one group claims the right to speak for homeschoolers by their supposedly superior numbers they alienate those who choose not to be identified with that group…” Dividing Homeschoolers: “Homeschooling has become one of today’s most influential movements, not only in the area of education, but in related spheres of family and personal rights, right to privacy, freedom of belief, and other basic liberties.” Freedoms at Risk: “Because of their commitment to action, homeschooling families have been the target of skillfully crafted attempts to focus their energy and to appropriate their political potential.”
These editorials also tie in with the Publisher’s Note on page three, and with Kate Brunner’s article, “Undoing the Harms of Homeschooling: From Reaction to Prevention.”
Tags: history of homeschooling, Home Education Magazine, homeschooling, homeschooling and public school, homeschooling families, homeschooling freedoms, homeschooling's history, Kate Brunner, Larry and Susan Kaseman, Linda Dobson, Mark Hegener, pushback against homeschooling, reasons to homeschool
This Scouting Magazine article is a pleasant surprise.
Plug Into the NetworkIllustration by Dave Wheeler
Why hooking up with the homeschooled can boost your pack.
Homeschool families can make a great addition to many packs because they’re child-focused, contain involved parents, and often share many of Cub Scouting’s core values. How can you connect with homeschool families in your community? Read on.
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Homeschool groups’ curriculum fairs and back-to-school events create great opportunities to promote Scouting. “We set up a booth there, just like a regular pack would set up at a school during a join-Scouting night,” [Bill] Osuch says.Word of mouth also plays an important role, says White. His pack’s members mostly come through referrals from other families and through spring recruiting at the church where the pack meets.
White says homeschool families are usually tightly networked. “If you get a bad report from a homeschooling family, all the other ones will know about it and be on alert. If you get ‘Hey, this is really great,’ you will draw other homeschooled kids.”
Tags: child-focused, homeschool families, homeschooled kids, homeschooling and scounting, scout pack, Scouting Magazine
The March-April, 2010 issue of Home Education Magazine features Mary Nix interviewing her youngest son, Jake, home from college on his first year living away from home. Jake tells us homeschooling, and more specifically interest based learning, helped him to realize that his education was his own responsibility: “Following my own interests from a young age helped me develop independent study skills, critical thinking ability and helped me to develop a thirst for knowledge, not just the ability to learn something so I could pass a test.”
Jake talks about the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP), and shares the advice he’d give homeschooling parents from his own perspective as a homeschooled youngster.
Tags: curriculum, Home Education Magazine, homeschooled teens, homeschooling, homeschooling and college, homeschooling families, interest based learning, Jake Nix, Mary Nix, reasons to homeschool
In a blog post titled Children Teach Themselves to Read for the respected journal Psychology Today, author Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College who has published research in comparative, evolutionary, developmental, and educational psychology, explains the various approaches to teaching children to read. He revisits the age-old “reading wars” between phonics and whole-language camps, and then writes;
“In marked contrast to all this frenzy about teaching reading stands the view of people involved in the ‘unschooling’ movement and the Sudbury ‘non-school’ school movement, who claim that reading need not be taught at all! As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves. This is individualized learning, but it does not require brain imaging or cognitive scientists, and it requires little effort on the part of anyone other than the child who is learning. Each child knows exactly what his or her own learning style is, knows exactly what he or she is ready for, and will learn to read in his or her own unique way, at his or her unique schedule.”
Just so. Gray’s post is subtitled ‘Unschoolers’ accounts of how their children taught themselves to read,’ and it brings the whole unschooling approach to an academic audience which has largely pooh-poohed the idea for decades. Gray himself, however, is no stranger to the concept. Last fall he was exploring what he termed ‘trustful parenting,’ and his August 26 post was actually titled Trustful Parenting May Require an Alternative to Conventional Schooling, and subtitled: ‘Trustful parenting may be incompatible with conventional schooling.’ He noted:
“In recent decades, as schools have become increasingly intrusive in families’ lives, the number of families choosing homeschooling has risen sharply–to over a million in the United States today.”
Peter Gray’s articles are thoughtful and encouraging to parents, and in the title article for this post he shares what he learned when he asked unschooling parents to share their stories about their children learning to read without formal instruction; what seem to him to be seven principles that may cast some general understanding on the process of learning to read without schooling.
Tags: curricula, curriculum, homeschooling, learning to read, Peter Gray, reasons to homeschool, Sudbury model, Sudbury Valley School, teaching reading, trustful parenting, unschooling
July/August, 1998
“I have read and read until I am almost sick of reading, and I recently reached a point where it was time to thank the information, thank the dedicated authors and researchers, and just be still with it all. Because the bottom line, after all the information is ingested and sorted through, is who my child is – he knows more than anyone else who he needs to be.”
An excerpt from Susanna Wesley’s article, Homeschooling Re-Affirmation, in the July-August 1998 issue of Home Education Magazine
Tags: early academic education, Home Education Magazine, homeschooling, Homeschooling Re-Affirmation, Howard Gardner, Learning Disabled, learning styles, seven intelligences, Susanna Wesley, unschooling
HEM News & Commentary
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