I ran across another “mainstream” mention of home education yesterday. The column, from Wired.com, is meant for parents who find themselves doing “emergency homeschooling” thanks to school closings. The piece itself just asks a question: if your local school closes due to swine flu and you find yourself with a child who may be home for several weeks, should you try to keep on with classroom-style education or use the time to explore new subjects and interests?

As with the Salon.com piece I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I find this interesting not because of the content itself (I’m sympathetic to those of you who posted, below, that it would be useful to hear from parents who’ve been home schooling for more than six months) but because of the tone. It’s matter-of-fact: home schooling is an obvious educational alternative, not a weird and suspect activity. Goes towards my theory that home education is no longer, quite, a fringe movement–which is why I mentioned the Salon.com article in the first place.

At the same time, I’ve been tracking the comments on that Salon.com piece and marvelling over the vitriol directed towards home schoolers.

Quite a few of the nasty remarks are the kind that veteran home educators roll their eyes at. Really? Seriously? The whole “they won’t know how to relate to others” argument gets trotted out again? You really think that “I know a weird homeschooling family that’s not doing a great job” equals a solid refutation of the arguments for home education? (That’s the logical fallacy of insufficient statistics, by the way, also known as hasty generalization. I learned that at home.) “Most home schoolers are religious fanatics”? Oh, whatever.

But now that I’m finished with my satisfying eye-roll, let me suggest that we think, seriously, about why the topic of home education produces such extreme reactions from so many. Maybe we should start by examining ourselves.

The rhetoric of some home school organizations and many home school parents is aggravating the problem. As a whole, the homeschooling world has consciously and and consistently measured itself against “the school system” and found itself to be superior. This was natural when home education was still waaaayyy out on the fringes. We all had to be on the defensive, in the early days (I’m forty-one, by the way, and for those who don’t know, I was home educated myself. Back in the home schooling dark ages). We were told by almost everyone that because we were home educated, we wouldn’t be good enough. It was natural to retort with: We’re not just good enough. We’re better!

I submit that this has started to come back and smack us in the face. We’ve spent so much time defending our educational choice that we’ve gone on the attack. Home education organizations publish article after article about how superior home education is (and how disadvantaged all those classroom-educated kids are). Conferences tell parents that only home-schooled kids will adopt their family’s faith–all others are doomed to apostasy. Home schooled parents boast about the amazing education that their children are receiving–so unlike what their peers are subjected to.

No wonder we evoke such a strong reaction from the general public.

I think we’ve outgrown this phase. Of course we think home education is the best option for our children; otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. Shouldn’t we have the confidence to allow our choices to speak for themselves? If we’re truly confident in our choices, we can spend our energies educating our children, protecting our legal right to do so, and even rejoicing with other parents whose children are flourishing in the classroom.

Of course, that would require us to develop an entirely new attitude towards our local school systems–say, one of helpful friendliness.

Which is a topic for a future post.

Theodore Sizer, author of Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School and founder of the Essential Schools movement, died this week. (If you’re not familiar with his work, read the New York Times obituary for a brief summary of Sizer’s accomplishments in education.)

I thought that those of you who are carrying on the interesting and lively comment-discussion below about high school at home might find this excerpt from Sizer’s 2004 book The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education thought-provoking.

Americans have long been on a search for order, expecially in communities composed of peoples from varied geographic, racial, and religious quarters. Public education has been perceived as a pivotal mechanism, often the prime mechanism for such order….

To all too many in our time, however, “order” in schools has in effect meant the appearance of order: a clearly demarcated district plan, a fully outlined step-by-step curriculum, complete with local, state, and Federal “benchmarks” for students and teachers to meet, quiet hallways, a low hum of teachers explaining things, an absence of graffiti and litter, well-groomed students, unruffled principals, a generous cup of hot coffee and a quiet, uninterrupted briefing for visitors. Most of us who have lived in schools know, however, that such an appearance is a means, and often not the best means, to the end of orderly minds.

There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything in quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back–if we have the opportunity–again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings…

….The damnable problem is that no one of us learns, in whatever fashion, in precisely the same period of time. As an eighth grader, my heart froze when I heard Mrs. Hitchcock, our teacher, say to me and my classmates, “It’s quiz time!” She turned to the board and wrote a question. “You have ten minutes.” Pause. “Now, Go!” The hearts of some of my quick-working classmates leapt with joy. Another chance to show off how good we are! For me, the set time was paralyzing. Whatever good work I produced as an early teenager emerged from slow, time-consuming toil. Timed tests were a poor demonstration of what in fact I could do.

If the end is learning by each student, the time expended to get there has to some practical degree to reflect each particular learner at each moment. Some of us are “fast” learnings, in some subjects but perhaps not others, and some are “slow.” The time each one takes and when he or she takes it are major factors. On a Monday morning I may be sleepy and inattentive, but on a Wednesday I am brimming with energy. For the teacher and for the distant curriculum planner, that is terribly inconvenient….

What to do? This is a solvable problem. Clarify what the student is expected to show (that is, know and use) in order to receive (say) a high school diploma. Insist, assist, and cajole every young person to work toward this target as attentively as possible. Assess the progress of each student regularly. Recognize the student’s hitting of the target when in fact he hits it…whatever his chronological age. None of this is arcane. I am describing what good soccer coaches and violin teachers do routinely with each of their players.

Is such practice totally impractical? No, but it is surely complex….Students will have to be taken one by one, just like patients in a good hospital and candidates for drivers’ licenses in sensible departments of motor vehicles….The process is necessarily cumbersome but far more sensible than the inefficient and profoundly discriminatory time-driven/age-delimited system that we have now.

I have had many opportunities over the past two decades to make the preceding argument. Few disagree with it. Few choose to follow its logic into decisive practice, however, and the worship of “time” continues in most schools today. With minutes as coins, the creation of “a school day” is a ready and standardizable possibility. It is superficially rational. It certainly appears orderly. It has the weight of tradition behind it….However, it flies in the face of both common sense and generations of research on human learning.

(From pp. 56-57, 62-63 of the 2005 paperback version.)

There is clearly a great deal that still needs to be said about the decision to educate high school students at home, and I hope to join in this discussion over the coming months. Here’s a starting place: although Sizer’s not here suggesting home education, many of us who have chosen to bring (or keep) our high school students home despair of finding classrooms that are capable of this level of flexibility and personalized attention.

Browsing through my morning news sites, I came across a home schooling piece written by Andrew O’Hehir for Salon.com. In home schooling their twins, he writes, he and his wife Leslie draw on

some of the alternative educational theories that inform the home-school movement. These include the ideas of “unschooling” guru John Holt, the literature-based approach identified with 19th-century English educator Charlotte Mason, and the “classical education” model popularized in bestselling books by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise.

I was particularly struck by two things. First, note this family’s journey into home education: a we-don’t-have-any-other-option decision.

…[H]ome schooling sneaked up on us, or at least on me. It’s true that Leslie knew about the rapidly expanding world of urban, mostly secular home schooling through online parents’ groups, and was already drawn to alternative educational approaches. But right up until the moment she quit her lefty-nonprofit job early in 2007, when our twins were 2½, we were a pretty typical big-city, middle-class family, with two kids, two incomes and a full-time nanny.

One of the numerous screwy things about raising children these days, especially in a hotbed of social-Darwinist parenting like New York, is that by taking time off to hang out with a couple of toddlers, Leslie became a home-schooler by default. Neither of us completely understood this until it happened. But in an economy that essentially requires all able-bodied adults to work outside the home, and an environment where preschools for 3-year-olds have an intensely competitive application process (and can cost $15,000 a year), you can’t opt out without making a statement, whether you intend one or not.

I suspect that ten or fifteen years ago, Brooklyn parents searching for an alternative to pricey high-pressure preschool would no more have considered calling themselves “home schoolers” than they’d have considered moving into a sod house on the prairie and cooking over an open fire. Which leads me to my second thought. For those of you who still haven’t noticed, home schooling has moved off the far fringes of American educational choices.

Over ten years ago, when our literary agent sent the proposal for The Well-Trained Mind to W. W. Norton, our editor-to-be had to convince a whole lot of skeptics that there really were parents out there who needed the book. (And would buy it, publishing being what it is.) I have the feeling he was swimming against the tide for quite a while: “I’m really hopeful about this book’s success,” I remember an editorial assistant at Norton saying to me, right before it came out. “I mean, there have to be people, like out in the Midwest, who are really doing this kind of thing.”

I should add, quickly, that the good folks at Norton have been thoroughly converted by this point. And so have a lot of others.

Not that home schooling has moved firmly to the center of American culture. I know just how widespread home education is, and I’m still kind of startled to see this piece in the we’re-so-mainstream-it-hurts Salon. And Mr. O’Heheir’s initial column about home schooling his kids begins, “Call us crackpots, but…” (That column’s also worth a read, particularly for his observations about the defensiveness that other parents often feel towards home educators.)

But I think we’re better off on the edges. I actually hope that home education remains the highly diverse, alternative movement that it is. Because it’s alternative, parents have to think hard before choosing it–something that’s vital when you’re embarking on such an important project.

So welcome to my blog reflecting on the alternative, diverse, sort-of-fringe movement that home education has become.