Encouragement For Home-Schooling...

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The Needless Lack of Self-Confidence of Most Home-Schooling Mothers
-Gary North

Feb. 8, 2011

The home-school movement is expanding rapidly. No one knows how many home-schooled children there are in the United States, but one U.S. government estimate was 1.5 million as of 2008. Another organization puts it at 2.1 million in 2010. This is a large market. It is growing. There is no reason to think that it will shrink.

The rights of parents to home school vary, state to state. It is still a battle, but there is little possibility in the future that the United States will ever impose what Europe has: a system of state-run schools in which home schooling is illegal.

We see a growing market. We also see information-delivery costs at zero: YouTube, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and PDFs. We would expect to see a large number of videos and curriculum strategies on-line. But we don't.

As is true of almost every phenomenon, about 20% of the curriculum publishing companies control about 80% of the market. The main ones are Accelerated Christian Education, A Beka, and Bob Jones University. There are others: Alpha-Omega, Rod and Staff. These are printed materials. They are expensive. If you print your own, you can buy low-cost, high-quality materials. By far the best for the money is the Robinson Curriculum: $200, once, for the entire family. It is on CD-ROMs.

Then there is the growing influence of the Khan Academy. Salman Khan, a graduate of M.I.T. and the Harvard Business School, teaches mathematics (K-12), physics, chemistry, and business, free of charge, using YouTube as the vehicle.

Think of what Khan has done. He is a man with no experience in teaching for money or in home schooling, yet he has launched by far the most promising secular home school curriculum on earth. His nieces and nephews told him that he is a good teacher. With that limited testimony, he created the Khan Academy. He has self-confidence, courage, vision, self-discipline, and a willingness to spend time for a larger cause.

Today, there is a generation of home-school mothers who began three decades ago, and whose grandchildren are now being home schooled by their daughters. With the new digital media, you might think that there would be dozens of detailed, step-by-step curriculum programs for sale or for free. Yet Dr. Arthur Robinson's was the first purely digital curriculum. It is delivered on CD-ROMs. He created it because his wife died unexpectedly, and he had to develop a self-taught curriculum. He was running a sheep ranch, a biological research organization, and was the publisher of the newsletter, Access to Energy. He had no time to teach his six children using the labor-intensive, mother-run programs.

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