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GWS 32 continued from previous page. This is page 7 of 13.
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_____
A parent in Brooklyn wrote:
About five years ago, I took my daughter out of sixth grade, keeping her out of the seventh and eighth grade too... She's attending high school now, a small private school.
...Regarding the years my daughter stayed at home: they were really hard. We were both very isolated and the only reason she didn't go back to school was that school was worse than staying home. She wouldn't let me tutor her and she wouldn't do all the educational, things I had planned, like go to museums and stuff. She hung around in her bathrobe and drew pictures all day. For nearly three years. Summers too.
Well, you should see her art work today. Fantastic!
...Staying home was hard for my daughter, but we both think it was necessary, if only to recuperate from the previous six years of schooling... _____
From Sarah O'Keefe in California:
...I do Sylvia Hare's Abilities Research Associates schooling program (I love it).
I'm taking this program because I hate school - that doesn't mean I have schoolwork. I like schoolwork. I do Sylvia's courses and expand them... By expand I mean independent work I thought up... Right now I'm reading archaeology, Egyptology and about Jupiter's 12th moon - whatever.
...The other thing I love about independent courses is I'll work on Saturday and then on Tuesday take off and go to an open rock concert or a beach. You can't do than in school!... _____
Tammy Mills (TX) wrote last fall:
...I am a teenage homeschooler... This year would be my first year in high school, so I'm feeling sort of isolated. I've been a home-schooler for almost two years and hadn't minded until now. All my friends here talk about what a "blast" high school is, and that I'm really missing out on something.
But I feel that education is more than having the best football team or the prettiest cheerleaders. Education should be learning things worth learning in a good atmosphere and should be made interesting. Home education is all of the above.
Education is not someone you don't know telling you where to be - and when - or else. Education is someone who loves you as a person, patiently helping you where you need help, encouraging you to learn for yourself. In those six hours a day, I can read, play the piano, help one of the younger ones with their math, or cook, or whatever else I may feel like doing at the time.
I have gotten in touch with several other people my age whose addresses I found in the GWS directory, becoming "pen pals" with each. It is very interesting to hear about different ways of life in different parts of the country. And yet most of these people have returned to the public school. But every one of them who has, has stated clearly that they were not going back for the education, that in fact, they had loved home-schooling, except for one fact - they missed their friends...
I feel very good towards home-schooling, because of my pen pals, who make me feel that although I may be isolated from the public school group, I have friends everywhere who care about me and the home-schooling movement. I would love to get letters from any other home-schoolers who feel this way, and will answer all letters...
ON CORRESPONDENCE COURSES
[JH:] I happened to see in the US Air magazine a very interesting article by Kate Ennis about correspondence courses. It said in part:
...For Joyce Gerig, the idea of being an intertior decorator was more than a career goal. It was an obsession... The problem was she had neither the time nor money to continue her education. Then, while browsing through a magazine called 1001 Decorating Ideas, she came across what seemed to be the answer: correspondence courses.
Eight months later, after completing a comprehensive course through the mail, she started her own interior-design business, and today is ready to hire her own full-time secretary...
...Lynell Scaff... five years ago was working as a clerk at a small electronics firm in Pennsylvania. Unable to support herself and go to school at the same time, she invested in a three-year [International Correspondence Schools] program to earn a bachelor's degree in accounting. Today, at age 23, she's earning $25,000 a year as a regional, accountant for the McDonald's Corporation...
These days, more and more people like Gerig are finding success through the US mails, and correspondence schools are earning the respect of educators and business people. [JH: More than can be said for many public schools - see "Graduates Lack Skills", GWS #31.]
While college enrollments continue to drop, correspondence school admissions are increasing by approximately 25% every year. Why? For one thing, correspondence schools - sometimes known as "proprietary" schools - offer many courses than aren't available elsewhere, occasionally at exceptionally low prices. At last count, over 1500 subjects were being offered in such nontraditional home-study areas as wine appreciation, stock- market science, paralegal training, landscape design, gem appraisal, and even robot-building. At least six of the country's proprietary schools offer bachelor and associate degrees in such subjects as electronics engineering, business management, and Bible theology - all through the mail.
One of the home-study's strongest points is its flexibility. Students can take several years to complete a course, putting in as little as two hours a week for study...
For a free copy of the National Home Study Council's Directory of Accredited Home Study Schools, write to National Home Study Council, 1601 18th St. NW, Washington DC 20009... _____
[JH:] We print this article for two reasons. One is that some of our readers might want to use some of these correspondence course. The other, and more important one, is that the very existence of these courses, and the fact that their credentials are honored by businesses and other institutions and that their graduates are demonstrably competent in their chosen fields, is conclusive proof that the contention that we can only learn important things by spending many hours in a place designated as a "school" and in the face-to- face presence of someone designated as a "certified teacher", is wholly untrue.
This is important to home schoolers from a legal point of view because it gives us strong grounds for saying in court (if we are pushed there) that any requirement of schools anmd/or legislatures that only people with teachers' certificates shall be allowed to teach children is unreasonable and a denial of our Fourteenth Amendment right to equal treatment under the law. It is clearly absurd to say that I can get a bachelor's degree for myself without spending a single minute in school buildings or in the presence of a certified teacher, but that my child can't. Furthermore, the good track record of correspondence schools conclusively refutes the schools' argument that the higher we go in the grades, the more necessary it is for certified teachers to teach us.
This argument can be very useful, not just because it could carry considerable weight right now in many state and federal courts, but even more because, since it does not depend on Pierce or Tokushige, it will still carry weight, even if we lose these valuable precedents (see p. 17).
[JH:] I asked our friend and colleague, Dr. Raymond Moore, of the HEWITT RESEARCH CENTER, to write us a letter explaining or defending his estimate that there are 500,000 or more home schoolers in the country. I said I would print in GWS what he had to say about this question, and that if he convinced me, I would say so, and if he didn't, I would say why not. Out of his busy schedule he took time to write, saying in part (I have numbered the excerpted paragraphs for reference):
... (1) John, I could not live with my conscience if I ignored the handicapped children and migrant youngsters as home schoolers. When I was with the U.S. Office of Education, some of the leading Spanish officials were former migrant children. Why should we exclude these precious children?
... (2) I first picked up my figures from the Wall Street Journal which has figures in excess of 300,000, and then went to the U.S. Census and Labor Department and determined that there were close to 5,000,000 children in areas of handicapped, migrant, and normal children who are at home or at least away from school. Then we did some brief factoring in a town or two and concluded that at least five to ten percent of these youngsters were getting some kind of instruction at home. This would give a net figure of at least a quarter to half a million youngsters who are receiving some kind of home instruction. And bear in mind that this does not include the family schools in which parents have their children going to institutional schools and coming home to study and work with them part of the day. And there are many Amish, Mennonite and other families who are doing exactly that .
... (3) It may be that such writers as John Naisbitt are thinking in terms of the gross figure of all students who are studying at home, when they give the figure of 1,000,000 or so, and they may very well be right, although I do not normally quote them. In any event, Bill Cochard, who is the leading marriage and family counselor in the nation, with seminars up to 15,000 or 20,000 people, has repeatedly told me that there must be at least 100,000 new families per year now going into this movement. He has gathered his data from his seminars. And he is now making the family school the center of his entire family and marriage counseling ministry.
... (4) Almost every day we get a new letter that tells us how they felt they were the only home schoolers around and shortly found that there were 30 in their local town, or others who called meetings, as recently in Sacramento, and found several times as many showed up as expected. This was our experience not long ago in Vancouver where we were told that we might have 30 or 40 people, and we had over 200.
... (5) 1 still stick by my figure of quarter to a half million at least, and the figures probably range higher than that now. This does not include those children who are going to school as well as studying at home.
... (6) All I know is that when I inquire of the University of Nebraska I find that they have more than 10,000 home school students of all kinds, Missouri more than 5,000, Home Study Institute more than 8,000, and so on and on and on until we got tired of writing and telephoning all these people to obtain information that way. Christian Liberty Academy has 6,000 students itself, according to the last statement that they gave to us a year or so ago. Such figures as these put the figure of 10,000 to 15,000 totally out of the picture, it seems to me.
... (7) The facts are that there are probably thousands of families who have started their own private schools in the northern California area. I would tend to believe that there are a very small number of those who actually have registered with the state compared with those that are actually doing teaching at home.
... (8) You say that you do not know of a state that has as many as 1,000 home school families by your definition. Of course your definition may be more limiting than my definition, but we have far more than 1,000 home school records on California in our files. Now maybe some of these have gone out of business or whatever, for we have not made checks, but I would suggest that there are probably many thousands of home schoolers in California. I do not know what the figure is in Utah, but it is considerable.
... (9) And the other night when I was in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka, on a very, very bad night weather-wise and I thought we would be fortunate if we had 40 or 50 people, there turned out 400.
... (10) In Louisiana, my information from Woody Jenkins is that things are growing, not declining. There is a growth of opposition from the NEA and other vested interests, of course, but when they came by the legislature to make some changes in Woody's law, 2,000 people showed up on the capitol steps to oppose them.
... (11) I don't think we should use high figures to make impressions on anyone, but if those figures are accurate I am not going to worry a bit if they alarm the opposition ... _____
[JH:] In reply, I wrote:
Dear Ray - Thanks verv much for your good letter. I remain unconvinced by your figures, for reasons I will give, but I'm sure our discussion will clarify some important issues and will be very useful to all who read it.
First of all, our numbers disagree because we are using the words "home schoolers" or "home schooled children" to mean very different things. There's nothing wrong with this, as long as the people who hear these words know what we mean by them. When people ask me, as they always do, how many home schooling families there are, I now say, more or less, "That depends, of course, on what you mean by those words. If we mean, how many families are there whose children do not go to school, perhaps because they are handicapped, perhaps because they are migrant workers, perhaps for other reasons, we get a very large number. If we mean, how many families are there in which some instruction is done in the home, we get another very large number. I use the words 'home schoolers' to mean families who having a choice of sending their children to school, choose not to send them, or to send them only on a part-time basis for courses or activities which the children have chosen for themselves." It is this latter definition, and this alone, that interests people. I then say that my best guess, the guess I am most comfortable with, the guess for which I can find at least some hard support, is somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand families, perhaps going as high as twenty thousand. The number of homeschooled children would of course be larger than this, depending on the average size of the families. My guess here would be that the average home schooling family is somewhat larger than the national average of 2+ children. A guess of three children per home schooled family would give us a total, by my definition, of somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand children.
By the way, I should say that in his latest letter to me Ed Nagel guesses that the number of home schooling families, which I think he defines much as I do, is between thirty and fifty thousand. I will ask him, as I did you, to write me explaining or defending this figure - but this will have to wait for a later issue of GWS.
Let me now comment on the paragraphs of your letter as I have numbered them.
1) I don't want to ignore these children, either. I don't include them in my estimates of home schoolers, first, because that is not the question that people want answered, and secondly, because the overwhelming majority of these people would send their children to school if they could. This is one reason the American Civil Liberties Union has not been much interested in helping us; they are far more interested in making it possible for those parents who want to send their children to school, to be able to send them, a position with which I agree. Of course this is an important issue; I only say it is an issue which ought not to be confused with ours.
2) This doesn't help me at all. Where did the Wall Street Journal get its figures? This is hardly an area in which they have expertise. In all probability, they are simply using someone else's wild guess. But a wild guess remains a wild guess, no matter how many times it is passed from hand to hand. As for the Census figures, I don't know what their definitions are or how those figures were obtained. If their definition of home schooled children is the same as yours, then it's not clear to me why you don't use their figure. If the definitions are different, then what is the difference. Unless we know what the definitions are, the numbers, even if accurate (which is questionable), are meaningless.
3) I have the same problem with these people. What does Naisbitt (author of MEGATRENDS) mean by home schoolers, and where does he get his figures? Same question for Bill Gothard. And how does he "gather this data" from a seminar of 15,000 people? What questions does he ask them? If you have an address for him, perhaps I can ask him directly.
4) Well, we've gotten letters like that, too. But if I got a letter every day for a year from someone saying that he or she had turned up 30 home schoolers, that would add up to a little over 10,000, not a million. As for attendance at meetings, that tells us only how many people are interested in the idea of home schooling, not how many are doing it. At such meetings I almost always ask how many are doing it, how many are seriously thinking about doing it, and how many are interested in the idea as such. The number actually doing it is never more than a fairly small percentage of the meeting, at the outside 20%.
5) and 6) These figures are impressive, but again we come back to definitions. How many of the people using University of Nebraska, Missouri, etc. courses, are using them to supplement regular school work, and how many of them are using them instead of regular school work? Almost certainly, the universities, Home Study Institute, etc. do not know, because this is not a question they have asked or have any reason to ask. Beyond that, how many of the people using these courses are beyond compulsory school age, which would remove them from my definition of home schoolers? Probably a large percentage, maybe a large majority. How many of these students are outside the United States? Unless we know, the numbers tell us nothing about the number of home schoolers within the U.S.
7) "The facts are that there are probably..." If it's a "fact," then it's not "probably." The fact is that this isn't a fact, but a surmise, a guess, maybe a reasonable guess, but a guess none the less. What I need to know is, on the basis of what evidence can we make such a guess. Why would only a very small number of home schoolers have registered with the state, when to do so was easy, cost nothing, and, at least until recently, seemed a sure way of staying out of trouble? Do we know of a community in which the number of unregistered home schoolers is much larger than the number of registered I done.
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