Home Is Where the School Is

My wife and I hadn't originally planned on home-schooling, but with six children and one modest income, we couldn't afford a house in one of the better school districts in the state. We were living in Plainfield, an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence. In one notorious incident, third-graders in one school were strip-searched because someone suspected one of them of stealing $20. That wasn't what we wanted for our children. We first tried a local Catholic school, but we thought that the teachers' expectations for students were too low. Since we couldn't afford classy private school tuitions, we turned to home-schooling.

Though we first tried to teach the children what the official curriculum standards said they ought to be learning in school, we soon realized that this only made sense in the context of a school. So we scrapped dry textbooks and workbooks and found more interesting ways for our children to learn.

We haunted used-book sales and assembled a library of classics for pennies on the dollar. We introduced statistics by driving to Florida for spring training (learning some geography on the way). When the dollar was strong and the airlines offered good deals in the off-season -- when other children were in school -- we took ours to Europe to see the great art and architecture or to learn about ancient Rome by walking through the Forum. Travel showed our children things they never could have learned in classrooms.

For several years, they participated in a fife and drum corps, playing colonial and traditional patriotic music, marching in parades, learning not only music and history but also teamwork, perseverance, discipline and a great deal about the communities through which they marched. This kind of experience is fairly typical of home-schooling.

Home-schoolers also work across a much wider socioeconomic spectrum than the conventionally schooled. We have worked on many projects, and in many organizations, that draw participating home-schoolers from all around our state, from far beyond school district borders. We joined a Shakespeare troupe founded by a single mother who was a college professor of literature. She taught the children to find the characters through the language, and they staged a complete Shakespeare play every year. Other members of that troupe founded a home-schooled robotics team, building robots to compete in regional, national and international events. We founded a debate and speech team that continues to compete at the middle school and high school levels.

The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills. This, I believe, isn't because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them but because we do better things than schools do.

I've never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as "learning disabled," for instance. There are many kinds of intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one. Take late reading. A conventional school education depends on written textbooks and workbooks and homework, so a child who can't read is unable to learn. But home-schoolers have developed systems and approaches that work with the kind of talent and intelligence a child has. One of our sons didn't read until he was 8 years old. That was no disability, though. He learned from audio tapes and DVDs and from being read to and -- very importantly -- from going outside and looking around. He could spot a deer on a hillside or a bluebird in a tree long before the rest of us. When he finally decided to read, he jumped into "The Chronicles of Narnia" and finished the series within weeks. "I want to read the books before I see the movie," he told us.

Home-schooled students' high performance continues into college. Admissions officers at IUPUI, a joint-venture urban campus of Indiana University and Purdue, and at Georgia's Kennesaw State University, have tracked the performance of admitted home-schoolers and found that they earn higher GPAs than the general student population. Associate Dean Joyce Reed of Brown University has called home-schoolers "the epitome of Brown students," telling the university's alumni magazine that "they are self-directed, they take risks, and they don't back off." Admissions officers at other highly selective colleges, such as Swarthmore and Stanford, have made similar statements. Some colleges and universities are admittedly more open than others to making the effort to understand home-schooling, but we've gone through the admissions process with three daughters, and all were admitted to excellent colleges.

Conventional schools are like the nation's Rust Belt companies, designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of international competition today. School boards and administrators should be concentrating on ways to make schools more like home-schooling -- not on ways to force home-schooled children to go back to schools. People who are free to think for themselves usually get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats can devise.

Those are the kinds of principles that gave us California's Silicon Valley. Let's hope that someday soon, home-schooling will be perfectly legal there once again.

gregandmartine@gmail.com

Gregory J. Millman is co-author, with Martine Millman, of "Homeschooling: A Family's Journey," to be published in August.