Home-Based Education

An Introduction

By Sheila Behnke

Home education is rapidly re-emerging as the method of choice for a many families around the world. Exact numbers are difficult to quote since in many areas home educating families are not required to register with any central office or department. While home learning may not be everyone's choice, it is a viable option granted by the legislation of many countries. Families who select this path are exercising their legal freedom to choose this approach to education.

You will note the term "re-emerging" used above. While there seems to be a good deal of press coverage about the "new idea of homeschooling, " there is nothing new about home education. In Canada, until the last century, most education occurred at home. Nuclear families lived together and in close proximity to their extended families and worked together to support the family unit. Affluent families employed tutors to educate their children at home and children of working class families learned at home from hands-on experiences with relatives across the generations. With the advent of the industrialization of western society, this began to change.

The establishment of urban factories drew people from their supporting connections to emotionally and physically isolated situations in the cities. When factory owners were looking for labourers for the urban mills and shops, they began to lobby for government sponsored schools that would keep unattended children off the streets while the parents worked. Unsupervised children roaming the cities and disrupting parents' availability for work was seen as a threat to social order. Institutionalized schools that would keep children off the streets and also provide the factory owners with an unending source of labourers who could work to a schedule and follow directions unquestioningly were definitely an asset to the wealthy owners of business. Thus began the publicly sponsored and government controlled education system that is "the right" of every child in developed countries world-wide.

Legislation (in many parts of the world) rightly ensures the availability of a basic education for all children. However, in Canada and the United States the law does not mandate children receive their education through an institutional school. What is mandated is that children receive an appropriate and satisfactory education. The facilitation of this very important right, however, can often be best met outside the parameters of the standardized education system. In Canada, it is estimated that over 50,000 families are legally choosing to educate their children in the warmth and support of family learning.

Family learning goes by many names, the most traditional and easily recognized being "homeschooling." There is a long list of variations in name and only some are mentioned here.

• Home-based education
• Home learning
• Self-directed learning / Child-directed learning
• Independent learning
• Unschooling
• Deschooling

For ease of discussion this article will use the terms interchangeably although many people choose a specific label to help define their particular approach to homeschooling.

There are many reasons that parents elect to home educate their children. Ask twenty home educating families why they homeschool and you will probably get as many different answers. The common elements that do appear, however, in all parents' decisions to embark on the home learning experience, is a strong belief in the sanctity of the family unit and the family's legal right to educational choice and the flexibility that comes with it.

Parents who choose home-based education will say that having a child to raise is not only a great responsibility, it is also a great honour. In these families it is important that loving and understanding people be there to support their children in the life-learning experiences that shape us all. They want to share in their children's joy of discovery, their delight in pursuing trial and error and seeing mistakes as leading to new experimentation, new possibilities, exciting discoveries and meaningful accomplishments.

These parents don't want to learn of some of the most exciting and meaningful parts of their children's lives from a third party. As parents, their role is to nurture, guide and support their children in every aspect of development physical, intellectual, language, emotional, social and spiritual. One's view of the world, whether it be spirituality, Christianity, or another belief system, plays a major role in the decision to home educate as it gives parents the strength to follow a different path from the majority.

"Teaching children is best left to those who are the experts," is a commonly expressed sentiment from the established education system. What better experts than the people who love, cherish and live with those children and share their daily living experiences? Who really knows a child better, an outsider paid to guide a child for approximately twenty-five hours a week, nine months a year, or the person who spends twenty-four hours a day with the child year round, learning through daily living? Classrooms offer a very unnatural learning situation where the child is only allowed to 'socialize' with children her own age and only when the adult authority figure deems it appropriate. The family learning situation provides the opportunity for people of all ages to interact with each other in a mutually respectful environment, able to voice their opinions and enjoy the basic rights and freedoms granted by the constitution of the land.

At a time when public education seems in turmoil, parents are looking for solutions. You need only read the daily paper to gather a long list of what parents are seeking for their children in the way of "a good school."

• small class size
• individualized program plans
• curriculum development based on a child's interests and abilities
• the opportunity for children to move ahead to new material whenever ready
• the chance for children to spend as much time on a subject or project as needed or desired
• flexible schedule and hours
• developmentally appropriate activities
• social development guidance and activities in accordance with a child's family's beliefs
• teacher constancy, the chance for teacher and student to really know each other
• school within the neighbourhood
• parent involvement in the decisions and implementation of the school program
• learning experiences with people of all ages and cultures in a non-segregated setting
• opportunities to learn "in the real world"
• no risk of teachers' strikes or lockouts

While this may sound like nothing more than a wish list that could never be fulfilled; there does exist a school that meets all these demands. A school where each child's individual physical development is nurtured, where responsible social conscience is modelled in a respectful manner, where all types of intelligence are acknowledged and fostered, and where the right to freedom of thought and spiritual belief and expression are honoured is a school that is best able to provide a superior education.

Many families have already discovered the progressive, new, cutting-edge school where their children can get that kind of education that one gets when creativity, thinking, and exploration are developed unfettered by institutional agenda. This much desired school is still accepting students, has no waiting list and the tuition is reasonable. The name of that seemingly, too good to be true, new school?

Why, Home School of course! And it definitely is not new; it just has a very small P.R. budget.