Home Schooling: A Brief Review

Abstract

The influence of culture, society, politics and the market economy creates a more complicated and confusing environment in which families live and grow. Not the least among these influences is the plethora of options currently available to families for the education of children. The decision to send children to the local public school, to a neighborhood parochial school, or to an expensive private school has been expanded to include: charter schools, public schools of choice, schools for special needs students, private religious schools, and schooling at home.Home Schooling in AmericaThe education of children in America, from an historical perspective, has been characterized by Carper (2000) as "educational pluralism" (p. 9). From the earliest days of the settlement of the colonies, until approximately the mid-1800's, the education of children was the primary prerogative of parents. Education consisted mainly of learning to read the religious literature and learn the appropriate amounts of arithmetic in order for children to assume a vocation. Education of children occurred not only in homes, but in a wide variety of school situations that made the distinction between public and private education very difficult.By the middle of the eighteenth century, families had begun to turn many of their traditional responsibilities over to formal or public institutions. According to Mintz and Kellogg, as cited in Carper (2000, p. 11), by this time: "... a variety of specialized institutions had begun to absorb traditional familial responsibility.... Free schools and common pay schools educated a growing number of the sons of artisans and skilled laborers". During this transitional period, the demarcation between public and private education was vague.The public school movement gained momentum and support from the Protestant denominations of that day. Protestant broad support of public education was garnered by virtue of the similarities of belief and philosophy shared by religious and educational institutions. Carper (2000) observes that the differing belief systems of the Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church eventually resulted in tax dollars being unavailable to Catholic schools. By the mid-nineteenth century the line between public and private education of children was well defined.Besides having the strong support of Protestant evangelicals, public schools in the mid-nineteenth century were very localized. The majority of children in public schools were from rural areas and attended the one-room country school. These schools were administrated and funded by local people, taught by local residents, and the children were often from only a few families. Home schools became a smaller part of the educational landscape because the public school was such an approximation of the rural family.As populations became increasingly urban at the beginning of the twentieth century, schools became less philosophically similar to Protestantism, broader in terms of its funding and leadership, diverse in.its teachers, and taught children from many more families. These influences gave the public education system characteristics of a developmental environment in and of itself, and increasingly dissimilar from the Protestant familial model. "Once crusaders for the establishment of public education, conservative Protestants are now, ironically, among its most vociferous critics" (Carper, 2000, p. 16).The disenchantment of Protestant evangelicals with the public education system has resulted in a renewed interest in education at home. In fact, Protestant evangelical families comprise the majority of home schools in America. In a recent study of 22,000 home school families, Protestant evangelicals comprised 70.3 percent of the respondent families (Rudner, 1998).Achievement of Home School StudentsThe above referenced study by Rudner (1998) analyzed test scores of home schooled students who were administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency. …