Salon.com > Home Schooling

Rick Santorum’s home-school hokum

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is probably "the most prominent home-schooler in America." Indeed, the fact that Santorum's seven kids have largely been educated at home (two of them are now adults) is a key aspect of Santorum's appeal to his right-wing base. Of course, home-schooling is a popular issue in its own right, especially among religious conservatives, but its symbolic importance goes much deeper than that. It also symbolizes Santorum's self-presentation as a man of firm principles and unbending anti-government convictions, in obvious contrast to some flip-floppy, Obamacare-loving, one-time Northeastern governor one might mention.

A home-schooler goes to college

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I went to college when I was 18, like everyone else. But unlike other people, I had never been to school before. The first standardized test I ever took was the SAT. The day I took it was the first time I'd ever been in a high school classroom. It didn't seem like a fun place.

I started college as a Music Ed major, because while I didn't know what I wanted to study, I knew I liked music. The Intro to Music Education teacher, a woman I'll call Mrs. Grimini, had taught kindergarten at a local school before joining the university faculty. She led us in songs like "The wheels on the bus go round and round!" She wanted us to share a memory of our own music teachers from kindergarten and first grade.

Everyone had one: The triangle. Holding hands in a circle. Those rainbow xylophones.

"Actually," I said, "I didn't go to school. But my dad is a jazz pianist?"

He played every day when I was a little kid. I used to sit under the piano and he'd ask if I could remember the melody, or he'd teach me how to play a few notes. Sometimes I sat with him on the couch in the darkened living room and we listened to Gustav Holst's "The Planets" together, talking about how scary Mars was, and how big Jupiter was. We were almost never not listening to music.

Why my kids are pop-culture illiterate

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:01:00 +0000

My children have never heard of Dora the Explorer or Barney the dinosaur or "Star Wars." I'm pretty sure they still think Walt Disney's trademark mouse is named Mick, although they have stopped referring to the Marvel Comics web-slinger as "Spider-Guy." They love Thomas the Tank Engine as a toy, but they don't know he has a television show. In fact, although they've seen a handful of TV shows -- "Sesame Street" and "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Between the Lions" -- they really don't know about the existence, or the 24/7 availability, of children's television as a medium. They have never played a video game, unless you count the crappy little bowling game on kiddie author Jon Scieszka's Trucktown site.

Nini and Desmond are only 6 years old, so none of this strikes me as all that unusual or amazing. Parents of all descriptions are negotiating the endlessly vexing question of how much electronic media and what kinds, and unplugging -- or at least ramping down -- has itself become a lifestyle trend. Furthermore, it's not like our kids' pop-culture illiteracy was the result of some totally thought-out parenting strategy. Dora may be a stranger to them, but Chip 'n' Dale, the cartoon chipmunks from the '40s who make Donald Duck's life a living hell, are their beloved pals. They have never watched Nickelodeon, but they've seen the Disney/Pixar film "Cars" two dozen times. Who would make those decisions on purpose?

Why our kids don’t go to kindergarten

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:01:00 +0000

About a year ago, a friend of my wife's was touring the kindergarten classroom at her local school, in a middle-class, racially mixed New York neighborhood. She noticed the lack of blocks, craft supplies, sand or water tables, a puppet theater -- things she remembered from her own year in kindergarten, long ago. The teacher shook his head firmly. "They played with that stuff in pre-K," he said. "In kindergarten, they're here to work."

I have no doubt that the teacher thought that was the right answer, and for some parents it might have been. Our friend ended up deciding to home-school her son, which is how Leslie, my wife, met her in the first place. But that isn't the moral of the story. One isolated anecdote has no larger social relevance, and, believe it or not, I don't mean to use it as an evangelical tool.

As I began to document last fall, Leslie is currently home-schooling our twins -- Nini and Desmond, who are now almost 6 -- through kindergarten, and probably into first grade. Beyond that, it's anybody's guess. (You can follow their progress on Leslie's blog.) It seems clear from a variety of statistical and anecdotal evidence that home schooling has grown rapidly in recent years, and that includes what is often called secular home schooling, meaning home schooling not primarily motivated by religious or moral concerns.

Home schooling: How we do it

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:17:00 +0000

One morning last week, before my kids Desmond and Nini had begun their home-school kindergarten day, they were playing on the floor with a random assemblage of building blocks, figurines and toy vehicles, like a zillion other 5-year-olds around the world. Since I was theoretically in charge while their mother got ready for the day, I surfaced from my cup of coffee and the New York Times sports section to listen in for a few seconds. It turned out they were building a temple for Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who removes obstacles from the lives of observant Hindus. Their construction materials were the columns and blocks from a Greco-Roman architecture play set.

I made some wry dad comment: Hindu gods at a Greek temple, ha ha ha. Literally jumping up and down with excitement, Desmond set me straight: "We're playing ancient times, Daddy, when there was trade between Greece and India! They traded stuff, and they traded ideas!"

Confessions of a home-schooler

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:15:00 +0000

It's a Sunday night at the tail end of summer, and I've dragged two squawky kids out of the minivan and into a half-closed rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in search of non-dreadful dinner options. Leslie, their mother, is catching some precious zone-out time in the car. After we sit down with our unadorned burger and fries, I notice the woman at the next table, the one who's making eye contact and smiling.

"Are they twins?" she asks. "How wonderful!" Then she talks to Nini and Desmond: "Wow, you guys are 5. So big! Are you starting kindergarten soon?"

Here's where the fun starts.

My son and daughter regard me in grave silence, faces stuffed with processed meat and fried potato product. They field this question themselves fairly often, but they're going to let me take it this time. For an insane split second, I consider a full-on lie, just some total invention about where and when they're going to school this fall. Instead, I take a swig of fizzy fountain Pepsi and bite the bullet: "Actually, we're home schooling."

Battling for the heart and soul of home-schoolers

Mon, 02 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

As more parents have felt alienated, frustrated or unserved by American schools, home schooling has taken off. The number of kids taught at home in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past five years, zooming to an estimated 1.7 million and growing annually at an estimated 15 percent clip. Young home-schoolers are consistently scoring beyond their grade levels on standardized tests, while home-schooled high school students are snapping up places at elite colleges, many of them after walking away with top honors in national academic competitions.

Recently George W. Bush mixed home schooling with presidential politics in a letter to a Texas home-schooler -- now circulating widely on national home-school e-mail listservs -- in which he enthusiastically praises home schooling and vows to fight for legislation that would allow families to set aside $5,000 tax-free annually to pay for the educational expenses of teaching at home.

Contrary to stubborn stereotypes, Bush is not preaching to the converted in targeting voters who home-school. An exhaustive look at home schooling released this year by former Department of Education home-school researcher Patricia Lines exploded the stereotype that most home-schoolers are conservative fundamentalists seeking to isolate themselves from blasphemous school systems.