Home Schooling

Historical Aspects of Home Schooling

Tobak and Zirkel (1982) reported that in colonial American responsibility for the education of children was invested in parents, so much so that parents not only had the authority to school their children, they had the authority to choose not to school their children. The fact that most parents chose to school (as well as the fact that home schooling was successful) can be seen in a comment purported to have been made by John Adams who said that a person who could not read and write in New England of 1765 was as rare as a comet (Dupont-de-Nemours, 1923).

Even as late as 1925, the right of parents to educate their children was upheld by the Supreme Court. Indeed, in Pierce vs. Society of Sisters (1925),

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parents with choice through the use of tax credits, vouchers, and home schooling. The result was that two public schools had to close due to reduced student bodies and when, later, they reopened, it was with new staff and programs. Bolick (1990) states that when most of the objections to home schooling are analyzed, many of them amount to no more than schemes cooked up by the education establishment to protect its monopoly and job security. Kilgore (1987) states that there are two primary criticisms of home schooling: (1) the belief that home schooling cannot provide the quality or degree of education that can be provided by an institution of formally trained teachers; and (2) the belief that due to being at home, children who are home schooled will not develop social maturity. However, Kilgore states that a good deal of research has found just the opposite; that is, research tends to be supportive of the notion that home schoolers are better educated and better socialized than their public school counterparts. One point that needs to be stressed is that the literature on objections to home schooling indicates that there appears to be a good deal of animosity between those affiliated with the public education system and home
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 9742
Approximate Pages = 39 (250 words per page)