While the citizens of Richmond battle red tape and political agendas to create a single charter school (See Norm Leahy’s post, “The Patrick Henry Contract“), thousands of others are dropping out of the public education system. They’re called home schoolers, and their numbers are growing at an explosive rate.
At the invitation of Marc Montoni, a past contributor to the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, I dropped by a home school expo Sunday held at the Children’s Museum of Richmond to learn more about the movement. No one I talked to had a definitive count of the number of home schoolers in the Richmond region, but estimates ranged from 3,000 to 5,000. There are thousands more across Virginia. Statewide, the movement is growing at roughly 20 percent a year.
Let me be clear: I have no desire to home school my 10-year-old, who attends a private school. But I find much to admire in home schooling. Home-schooled children out-perform their peers in standardized tests and college admissions — and parents lay out only a tiny fraction of the cash that conventional public and private schools require.
I discovered Sunday that “home” schooling is something of a misnomer. The phrase conveys an image of children cooped up at home, books stuck in noses under the watchful eye of their teacher-mom. But if the exhibition booths were any indication, home schoolers get out and about more than most kids. Represented there were children’s gymnasiums, a rock climbing program, fitness centers, a martial arts studio, music studios, and a children’s theater — not to mention the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Science Museum, and the Children’s Museum. The private and not-for-profit sector is most happy to provide a wide array of services traditionally associated with schools.
Far from being solitary types, home schoolers are immensely sociable. Home school parents connect with one another through the Web and e-mail, often forming “co-ops” in which parents share teaching responsibilities, specializing in the fields they know best. At least one co-op in Richmond leases classroom space. Virginia home schoolers have their own magazine that shares news, resources and best practices. Publishers of textbooks, CD-ROMs and computer-assisted learning cater to the home-school market as well.
The structure of the home-school movement, which is roughly 25 years old in Virginia, is very free-form and egalitarian. I sense that the vast majority of participants are middle class: not wealthy enough to pay hefty private school tuitions, but well off enough that mom can stay at home to shepherd the kids. The people I saw were overwhelmingly white, although they defied ideological categorization. Home schoolers include evangelical Christians, libertarians and hippies.
I didn’t linger at the exhibition long enough to collect anything more than the most cursory of impressions, but I left with the notion that home schooling is the future of education in Virginia. While public schools are hamstrung by bureaucracy, home schoolers are experimenting and innovating like mad. Home schoolers are devising new curricula and new pedagogies. They’re embracing new technologies. They’re developing new models for sharing knowledge. And they’re availing themselves of community resources rather than recreating everything from libraries to sports facilities. Home schoolers have no need to invest in bricks and mortar. The community is their classroom.
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