Homeschooling

Why Homeschool?

There are various reasons why parents are homeschooling their children. Some parents have become disillusioned with the Public School System, others do it for religious reasons.

Homeschooler Ann Zeise, writes,

"Has it been the "year from hell" for your child at school? Is your little one just not ready to deal with crowds of unruly children in a public school situation? Perhaps your family situation or business would allow you to travel often, and you want everyone to enjoy the opportunity. Maybe your religious beliefs or cultural values are so different from your community, that you are looking to homeschooling as a haven.

Families decide to homeschool for all sorts of reasons, and then often continue homeschooling simply because the freedom is so sweet and they like the affect it's had on their children and family life. They like living joyfully with children."

How Many People Homeschool?

It is difficult to say how many people are homeschooling at any particular time, but most people estimate that approximately half a million school-aged children are homeschooled.

From the ERIC digest,

"On any given day, roughly half a million school-aged children are probably learning outside of a school classroom. They make up about 1 percent of the total school-aged population and almost 10 percent of the privately schooled population. This estimate assumes modest growth since the fall of 1990, when data were collected from three independent sources--those state education agencies (SEAs) that have data; distributors of popular curricular packages; and memberships of supportive associations. Since each source represents the tip of an iceberg, upward adjustments were made based on surveys of home-schooling groups (Patricia Lines 1991).

Because many children are home schooled for only a few years, the percentage of children who reach age 18 with some home-schooling experience will be larger than 1 percent. Until a well-designed household survey is conducted, however, it will be extremely difficult to estimate this percentage."