National Charter School Watch Blog

Apples and Oranges - Rocks and Pears - Schools and Homeschools 

by Helen Hegener
Publisher’s Note in Home Education Magazine
May-June 2004 - Articles and Columns 

 **snip only–please visit link to read in its entirety**
So to return to the question, what makes homeschooling such a unique approach to living and learning? It’s primarily the freedom, the autonomy, the ability to make our own decisions about what is important and worth doing in our lives and in the lives of our children. Homeschooling means having the freedom to choose which talents and interests we’ll encourage our children to pursue. Homeschooling means following their passions and ours wherever they may lead, without needlessly worrying about the conventional limits and restrictions of teaching and learning. Homeschooling means following our own family dictates, our own individual muses, our own wandering stars wherever they may lead us.

This freedom from school’s rules and regulations, this wonderful freedom from schoolish routines and requirements, this important freedom from unnecessary outside authority over our lives, distinguishes homeschooling from conventional public schooling.

This distinction is an important one, because as homeschooling families we are part of a small minority that is, in a sense, in competition with The largest, most powerful, and most pervasive institutions in our society, the public school system. Designed to serve the interests of government and big business, public schooling dismisses the most basic needs of childhood. Public school demands performance; it rewards those who perform well and punishes those who do not rise to the objectives of age and grade level standards. The expectation is to conform, to fit in, to lose the unique and distinguishing features of oneself and become part of the larger whole.

Homeschooling, in contrast, encourages development of a child’s own individuality and presents a nurturing approach to learning. A child’s innate talents can be fully explored and his personal interests built upon. Homeschooling means taking responsibility, taking care, and taking the time to get learning right.

And yet, as the homeschooling movement has matured and become just another widely accepted option for educating children, many families have turned back to the institutional schooling models for educational resources and support. This has led us toward a gradual breaking down of the important “wall of separation” between homeschooling and public schooling, an invisible wall which divides family responsibility from institutional responsibility. In part this has happened because schools have come to be regarded as the “keeping-places of wisdom” in our society, and their original purpose has been largely replaced with a disingenuously benign sheen of simply “helping children succeed”.

Helping children succeed? Success has come to mean conforming, following dictates, observing the rules and regulations, the policies and procedures of the institution of school. Success is defined as good attendance records and high test scores. Homeschooling, on the other hand, redefines success as the learner taking responsibility for his or her own life. (end of snip, see link above)