Homeschooling
Homeschooling
Home education, also called homeschooling or home school, is the process by which children are educated at home rather than at an institution such as a public or private school. Prior to the introduction of compulsory school attendance in the 19th century, most education worldwide occurred within the family and community, with only a small proportion of the population attending schools or employing tutors.
The terms "homeschooling" or "home education" may refer to instruction in the home under the supervision of correspondence schools called "umbrella schools" [example: Christian Liberty Academy]. A curriculum-free philosophy of homeschooling may be called unschooling, a term coined in 1977 by American educator John Holt in his magazine Growing Without Schooling.
In the United States, homeschooling can be an option for parents who wish to provide their children with a quality of education they believe is unattainable in schools. At present, however, most children are institutionally schooled.
History
The foundations of modern home education may originate with the rise of government operated schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The usual situation in rural areas before 1860 was that most children were taught farm chores and rudimentary arithmetic and spelling. Occasionally some families would pool and hire a traveling tutor, usually a young Yankee like Stephen Douglas. In exchange for room and board he would provide a few months schooling for the children in the group. In this fashion Abraham Lincoln acquired about 18 months of schooling.
A few famous figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson might be considered to have been home-educated, as they underwent little formal education. Home schoolers often attend college -- Roosevelt went to Harvard and Wilson to Princeton -- as colleges and universities do accept home school applicants. Patrick Henry College in Virginia is particularly welcoming to home schooled youth with strongly conservative political and religious beliefs.
In the United States, the "curriculum in a box", or All-in-one curriculum form of home education appeared in 1906, when the Calvert Day School of Baltimore, Maryland made such materials available through a downtown Baltimore bookstore and a National Geographic advertisement. Within five years, nearly 300 children were making use of materials from Calvert's Home Instruction Department. In less than a century the materials became the basis for lessons for more than 350,000 children annually in more than 90 countries.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Homeschooling".
