My early brushes with homeschooling

This weekend I was brainstorming for a homeschooling topic. I wanted something I could submit to the Carnival of Homeschooling. Sunday it hit me that in almost seven years of blogging I have never mentioned my first brush with homeschooling. I wasn’t aware until I was in my late teens or early twenties that in the 1970s I might have homeschooled.

Education goes deep in my family. Both my parents and all four of my grandparents earned college degrees. My mother taught math and physics at a high school in Alaska when she and my father got married. Her mother taught home economics for decades. There are many others in my family who have taught over the years.

In the early 1970s there was a big push for busing. My parents didn’t want to have their children spend an hour or more on the bus each day. They investigated the possibilities of private schools, but found them to be expensive. They knew of Calvert School. They bought the curriculum for a complete year to check it out. The school district got enough push back from the parents that they dropped the idea of busing children around and so my parents dropped the idea of using the Calvert system.

I have a cousin who was homeschooling in the late 1980s. When we got together for family reunions I was impressed with how his children were doing.

My younger sister got married several years before me. In the early 1990s as she started having children she fell in with a group of like-minded mothers. Many of these women homeschooled. As my sister’s children grew older she decided to homeschool.

So when Janine and I started having children we were acquainted with the idea. We could see that it worked well. As our children started getting to the appropriate age we decided to give it a try, and as they say the rest is history.

Back in the early 1970s homeschooling was barely getting started as a movement and it appears my parents didn’t even know about it.  But they were considering it.  I wonder how my life might have turned out if the school district had pushed hard for busing?