Thursday, February 07, 2008

Are you an accidental homeschooler?

Time 4 Learning has a promotional column on The Accidental Homeschoolers. Part of the column is trying to sell you on using their services. I haven't used them before. Part of the column explores the process of how many parents fall into being homeschoolers because of unacceptable problems at public schools.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, public school, public education, education

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Henry - Thanks. We use the "accidental homeschooler" term to describe the parents who start homeschooling as a "last resort". They started with traditional schools and ran into problems. A few things we noticed:

- they often start homeschooling with a real attitude. They are thinking of it as a burden at first.

- there are alot of these people. I've estimated that half the homeschoolers might have started this way.

- they often start very abruptly with no experience or preparation. For some reason, we hear from alot of these families on Wednesday mornings after they decided on Tuesdays to quit school. I can't explain why.

- after a year or so, these accidental homeschoolers appear indistinguishable from the families who came to homeschooling from a less twisted conflicted background.

When a non homeschooler reads the web about homeschooling, they tend to find a lot of people who are huge advocates and enthusiasts who have, at times, an "us them" attitude towards those with kids in school. I think it's useful to provide information on why many people made the transition since otherwise, they have trouble seeing identifying their case with others. In our forum, one of the discussions that I find most interesting is where people talk about their route into homeschooling.

Again, thanks for picking up on this