The Core Knowledge Blog

With over a million kids and growing at double-digit rates, homeschooling is no longer a fringe activity for the religious and rebellious. Increasingly it’s a sensible answer to chaotic and dysfunctional schools.

Homeschoolers reflect “the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising — we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we’ve found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed,” writes homeschooling father of six Gregory J. Millman in a compelling essay in the Washington Post. “Today, a well-established and widespread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family,” he says.

With six children, one income and priced out of the better school districts in New Jersey, to say nothing of private schooling, Millman turned to homeschooling rather than send his children to school in Plainfield, “an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence.”

Millman’s words are clearly intended to support homeschooling, not indict traditional schooling, but some of what he has to say cuts deeply. “I’ve never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as “learning disabled,” he writes. “There are many kinds of intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one. Take late reading. A conventional school education depends on written textbooks and workbooks and homework, so a child who can’t read is unable to learn. But home-schoolers have developed systems and approaches that work with the kind of talent and intelligence a child has. One of our sons didn’t read until he was 8 years old. That was no disability, though. He learned from audio tapes and DVDs and from being read to and — very importantly — from going outside and looking around.”

Homeschooled kids are finding favor with college admissions officers, and Millman notes studies showing homeschooled kids outperform traditionally educated peers. That prompts blogger Joanne Jacobs, commenting on the piece to observe “home-schooling parents are, by definition, highly motivated, education-first people so it’s not surprising their children tend to do well.”

“Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills,” Millman writes. “This, I believe, isn’t because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them but because we do better things than schools do.”