Jenkins on homeschooling

Henry Jenkins mentions a popular assessment of homeschooling in a recent post:

I know that I make some people nervous when I talk here about the values of home schooling. Many people assume that home schooling is mostly used today by the religious right to escape secular education.

We ran into this almost ten years ago, when we decided to homeschool Gwynneth.  Local school options were horrendous - public schools awful, no alternative schools, an academy priced way beyond my assistant professor's salary.  Homeschooling had large opportunity costs, but Gwynneth learned a lot.  Unschooling had enormous benefits for her, including not teaching her fear, er, undue respect for authority.  I remember her telling a local classicist about hoplites and the Roman empire - when she was six.

At the same time, we caught flack from many people, especially educators.  None offered a solution to the local school problem, but were quite happy to wonder why we were withdrawing from the community (despite our involvement through the homeschooling networks), or if we homeschooled for religious reasons (nope).  Fascinating to see how deeply the culture wars run, even trumping pedagogical considerations among educators.

I say "we", but it was Ceredwyn who really did the work.  Gwynneth and I owe her a lot!

Comments

[Andy Havens]

I've had more friends with kids in the last 10 years who have homeschooled for quality and social reasons than religious reasons. Unless you count not wanting their kids to be raised in a certain public school system to be a religious objection. In three cases of good friends of mine, these folks are very specifically non-relgious, or "small r-" religious, and are either involved in technology or academic fields and have very strong views about how children should be educated.

My own 7-year-old is now in public school first grade. It's a highly regarded school in the Columbus, OH system. He's having some good, some bad. Both my wife and I came out of public schools and did OK. I've got zero problems with homeschooling kids for any reason, but feel pretty strongly that if more and more of us abandon our public schools, we're in deep trouble.