|
|
Article: The home-schooling special: today's choicest choice.(from the editors)
- Article from:
- Education Next
- Article date:
- January 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Hoover Institution Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
For those who think about school choice, vouchers and charter schools are canonical. But going by the numbers, home schooling is the choicest item on the choice menu. A few thousand students use vouchers, and a million or more students attend charter schools, but home-schooled students, now estimated at some 2 million, outnumber the other two groups combined.
Home schooling is hardly foreign to the American experience. John Locke's advice to parents in colonial America was to educate their children at home. He could not imagine "what qualities are ordinarily to be got from ... a troop of playfellows [at school] ... usually assembled together from parents of all ...