What Is Homeschooling?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 29, 2009 |
Articles |
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Find out what homeschooling is all about. A MUST READ for anyone considering homeschooling!
Welcome to the wonderful world of homeschooling! With homeschooling notching scorching trends in enrollment and results, I’m thrilled that you have started to seek out answers on your own to see what all the hoopla is all about.
For those who don’t know our story, please read my article, "How We Got Started in Homeschooling". For others who want to go straight to the information, here we go.
Very Brief History of Homeschooling
From the beginning of the 1600’s to the 1850’s, virtually all education taught was done with family resources, a tough proposition given the difficult lifestyle faced by the all but the wealthiest families. So for more than 150 years, schooling actually was homeschooling, available mainly to the privileged.
In the late 1700’s, as the forefathers of the United States determined that education was a key factor to the long term success of the country, the idea of providing free public education was born. This idea evolved to the modern state-driven compulsory education system we know today as the public school system.
After the states instituted compulsory education systems starting in the mid 19th century, it took about 120 years for people to come back to homeschooling as a viable method for educating their children. And although homeschooling was always (and still is) protected by the U.S. constitution (remember, that there was no compulsory school system before the states imposed such standards), the legal protections of this “new” form of education wasn’t on the forefront of the minds of the states or the public educators. Therefore, in the late 1970’s to early 80’s, parents had to literally hide their children from the law, if at least to avoid unnecessary harassment and threats by state child custody agencies and local school officials who didn’t know any better.
Since the “hide-your-kid” homeschool approach in the late 70’s, there are more than 2 million children being homeschooled today which supports a multi-billion dollar industry to supply homeschool families with curriculum and materials for their education. In short, thanks to the courageous actions of a few in the 70’s, you couldn’t have picked a better time to consider homeschooling as a method to educate your children.
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