With over a million kids and growing at double-digit rates, homeschooling is no longer a fringe activity for the religious and rebellious. Increasingly it’s a sensible answer to chaotic and dysfunctional schools.
Homeschoolers reflect “the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising — we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we’ve found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed,” writes homeschooling father of six Gregory J. Millman in a compelling essay in the Washington Post. “Today, a well-established and widespread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family,” he says.
With six children, one income and priced out of the better school districts in New Jersey, to say nothing of private schooling, Millman turned to homeschooling rather than send his children to school in Plainfield, “an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence.”
