Another one from the archive that recently posted on BreakPoint. While the homeschooling movement was started by baby boomers, now a new generation is beginning to embrace home education. Mixed in with the new homeschoolers are second-generation homeschoolers—parents who were themselves homeschooled. This new generation is even less likely to look like the white, evangelical, Christian, middle-American homeschoolers portrayed in popular stereotypes. People of many different faiths and worldviews embrace it. The common thread among them is the importance they place on how their children are educated.
So what does the future hold for the perhaps two million homeschooled students turning their backs on many of these cultural norms most people take for granted? Will they be future-minded and forward thinking? Or will they choose to move even further off the grid?
Read the complete article: Building a Better Kid.
Plus, check out my review of Mitchell Stevens' book, Kingdom of Children at the end of article. Kingdom of Children astutely points out one of the great ironies of the homeschool movement: that this countercultural group survived and then thrived because of the cooperation of families. According to Stevens:
[Homeschoolers] like to think of themselves as . . . system challengers, pioneers, a little bit alternative, not quite like other people. Yet to be so, homeschoolers nurture relationships with other people who are "individuals" much like them. If the skeptics have worried that homeschooling represents an antisocial impulse, they have failed to see how much collective effort it has taken to make home education a provocative possibility for so many.