No Longer A Fringe Movement

IN THE FALL OF 1992, I TOOK A LEAVE OF ABSENCE FROM my job as a public-school teacher to promote my new book, ""Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense.'' Television and radio-show hosts, magazine and daily newspaper journalists, seemed shocked that a teacher would home school his own children, and the line of questioning I suffered assumed I was either a right-wing religious zealot or a left-wing, libertarian eccentric. At readings, too, I was inundated by questions implying that home schooling was undemocratic and elitist and a recipe for academic disaster. I was told that home schooling left kids ill-prepared for the social and economic realities of their adult lives. Everywhere, I met people who were adamant that home schooling should be banned.

This fall, six years later, something clearly has changed. People are much more receptive to the notion of home schooling. It is no longer perceived as a fringe movement. Even some school administrators are now designing support programs and promoting cooperation with home schoolers. Most telling of all is that the number of home schoolers has escalated dramatically--up from approximately 300,000 in 1992 to more than a million, researchers say.

These newcomers, by their very presence, are reshaping the phenomenon of home schooling. Six years ago, I described home schoolers in ""Family Matters'' as ""a diverse lot--the conservative and the progressive, the fundamentalist Christian and the libertarian, the urban, the rural, the idealist, the social skeptic, the self-sufficient and the paranoid.'' Today, I would describe them far differently. They are often from the same American mainstream that once frowned on home schooling.

There are assorted explanations for this transformation, but the best one seems academic enough: home schooling simply works. Home schoolers, on the whole, are soundly educated, perform well on standardized tests, go on to attend good colleges and universities and, as adults, thrive variously. The growth of home schooling also stems from dismay about public education in this country. A new wave of parents has chosen home schooling not primarily on its merits but because schools seemed mired in insoluble problems.

Some newcomers to home schooling are likely to view it as a panacea for educational problems or as an antidote to the malaise of schools. What they find, however, is that school at home is no miracle remedy. The romantic notion of educating one's own soon gives way to the reality: home schooling is work. It is rewarding work when things go right, full of satisfactions for all involved, but like all teaching and all learning, it makes a great variety of demands and is freighted with difficulties. Home schooling, in short, has its own complexities, its own dilemmas and issues. Those who endure at it--many don't--are realistic about their abilities and reasonable in their expectations. They suffer few illusions about themselves and persist diligently.

Some parents become quickly disenchanted, discover they are not cut out for home schooling and return their kids, swiftly, to school. Many last until their children become teenagers, at which point these children, exercising free will, decide they want to learn in classrooms. The ultimate lesson of home schooling, that we are free to pursue an education as we choose (my own children have tried a variety of things, including attending public school), is not lost on these young people. They prefer convention to novelty and recognize the drawbacks of each.