History of Home Education, Part III

Here's a detailed, 18-page report on home education, published in 2001 by the Fraser Institute of Canada. It includes two pages on the history of home schooling and about five pages on the growth of home schooling, focusing on both Canada and the U. S.

Interesting highlights:

Notable home schooled Americans include, for example, presidents George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Other successful products of American home schooling include inventor Thomas Edison, General Robert E. Lee, civil rights activist Booker T. Washington, writer Mark Twain, and industrialist Andrew Carnegie (p. 5).

Although the contemporary image of home schooling parents depicts a homogeneous,
deeply religious, socially conservative sub-group of the population, back in the 1960s and 1970s most home schooling parents were members of the counter-cultural Left, principally advocates of New Age philosophies, ex-hippies, and homesteaders.
By the mid-1980s, however, most home schooling parents could be accurately described as part of the Christian Right. Today, 75 percent of American home schoolers are practising Christians (Livni, 2000). However, in terms of religiosity,
home schooling is not proving to be the exclusive preserve of Christian groups. In fact, “growth in home schooling may be reaching a broader range of… families and values” (Bielick, Chandler, and Broughman, 2001, p. 4; McDowell, Sanchez, and Jones, 2000; Lines, 2000b; and Welner and Welner, 1999). Muslim Americans,
for example, are the fastest growing sub-group within the home schooling movement. The number of home schooled Muslim Americans is predicted
to double every year for the next eight years (Bielick, Chandler, and Broughman, 2001, p. 4; McDowell, Sanchez, and Jones, 2000; Lines, 2000b; and Welner and Welner, 1999) (p. 6).

What, then, are the specific comparative advantages of home schooling, at least as perceived by those who choose to educate their children in this manner? There are a variety of reasons provided by home schooling parents in both Canada and the United States and the most common to both countries may be summarized as follows:
• The opportunity to impart a particular set of values and beliefs.
• Higher academic performance through one-on-one instruction.
• The opportunity to develop closer and stronger parent-child relationships.
• The opportunity for the child to experience high-quality interaction with peers and adults.
• The lack of discipline in public schools.
• The opportunity to escape negative peer pressure (e.g., drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex) through controlled and positive peer social interactions.
• The unaffordability of private schools, and
• A physically safer environment in which to learn (p. 9)