Today Joyce Reed ’61, ’65 A.M. might be hailed as a pioneer
of the modern homeschooling movement, but thirty years ago she
was an aberration. In 1970 she moved to the island of Hawaii
with her anthropologist husband and young daughter. They lived
in the town of Hilo for a year, then fell in love with a
falling-down house forty miles outside town. Reed and her
husband rebuilt the house, decided they liked living closer to
the land, and eventually had four more children there. For ten
years they lived off the grid: no electricity, no telephone, no
indoor plumbing, no television, no radio. And no school.
To educate the children, Reed, who had started a doctorate in
English before moving to Hawaii, read to the kids for two or
three hours each day. She taught them how to write letters to
their grandparents and introduced them to math by having them
measure cooking ingredients in the kitchen and engine oil for
the car. Her husband, Charles Taylor, who taught part-time at
the University of Hawaii in Hilo, worked with the children in
his woodshop and demonstrated how to repair the lawnmower. There
were also chickens to feed, eggs to collect, firewood to gather,
and a garden to weed. A number of like-minded families lived a
few miles away, and together the adults taught the kids what
they knew: algebra, for example, or French, or knitting. Now
thirty, Reed and Taylor’s son Ben Taylor ’93 remembers
learning biology and botany from “a crazy hippie who drove the
kids around in his bus, talking about plants and animals.”
A slender woman with deep-set blue eyes, Reed is now an
associate dean at Brown. Despite having founded a small private
school during the year she lived in Hilo, she says that with
homeschooling she didn’t really know what she was doing—only
what she wasn’t doing. “I wasn’t saying to my kids,
‘This is what you have to know and this is when you have to
know it,’ ” she says. “In school, kids are working to
achieve someone else’s goals. I wanted to see what would
happen if you took kids who are intrinsically bright and let
their minds be free.”
IN THE LATE 1970s, when Reed was reading Johnny
Tremain to her kids, only about 15,000 children were being
schooled at home around the entire country. In fact, the
practice was still outlawed in some states—and didn’t become
legal in all fifty until the early 1990s. By the 1999–2000
academic year, thirty years after Reed started out, 850,000
school-age children were taught at home, according to a report
published last August by the U.S. Department of Education. But
officials at the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI)
believe that homeschooling had grown even faster. They say the
number of homeschooled children is closer to 1.7 million and has
been growing between 7 and 15 percent a year for the past
decade.
Whichever figures are correct, one thing is certain:
homeschooling has become an increasingly popular alternative to
public schools judged by many parents to be inadequate and
unsafe. As its popularity has grown, what was once the oddball
practice of isolated families has become a widely accepted
educational approach, with its own lobbyists, organized support
networks, and how-to-get-into-college guidebooks. These days,
two thirds of homeschoolers go on to college, according to a
NHERI study published five years ago. All of Joyce Reed’s five
kids went to college. Two of them, Ben and Maria Taylor,
graduated from Brown, in 1993 and 1995, respectively. According
to Brown’s director of admission, Michael Goldberger,
thirty-eight of the 16,600 applicants for the class of 2005 were
homeschooled—a tiny percentage—but of these, five were
accepted, an acceptance rate roughly equal to that for students
educated in conventional public and private schools.
| |
Homeschoolers
“are the epitome of Brown students,” says Dean Joyce
Reed. “They are self-directed, they take risks, and
they don’t back off.” |
Education scholar Patricia M. Lines, a former senior research
analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, has studied the
homeschooling movement extensively, from its beginnings in the
late 1950s and early 1960s as a liberal alternative to what some
people viewed as rigidly conservative public schools. In the
1980s, Lines observes, “school culture drifted to the left,”
and conservative families turned to homeschooling to keep
religion in their children’s education. Today, “both groups
are running strong,” she says, and they have been joined by an
increasing number of parents “who simply seek the highest
quality education for their child, which they believe public and
even private schools can no longer provide.” These parents,
like Joyce Reed, want their children to learn at their own pace,
without the boredom that comes when the other children in class
are learning more slowly or the anxiety that can arise when
other kids are learning too fast.
Although the number of homeschoolers applying to college is
still small, it represents only the first wave. The next
homeschooled generation—the real boom—is just hitting
puberty. A school like Brown, with its reputation for valuing
independence and self-direction, may be particularly attractive
to homeschoolers accustomed to charting their own course.
Brown’s curriculum, too, may be a good academic match for
homeschoolers, many of whom have shaped their own curriculum
with their parents or have simply followed their own interests
with their parents as guides.
Tibet Sprague ’04 is typical of this new homeschooled
vanguard. Fascinated by computers at a young age, he enlisted a
programmer friend of his father to take him on as an apprentice.
By age sixteen, Sprague was attending conferences to present
computer applications he’d helped design, and coteaching a
seminar for computer programmers thirty and forty years his
senior. “These kids are the epitome of Brown students,” says
Joyce Reed, who became an associate dean of the College twelve
years ago. “They’ve learned to be self-directed, they take
risks, they face challenges with total fervor, and they don’t
back off.”
LAURA BRION ’04 sits nursing a cup of coffee in a
Starbucks on Thayer Street a few days before the start of the
fall semester. With long, dark hair and almond eyes, she’s
calm and matter-of-fact in conversation, but when, on the walk
back to her dorm, she encounters friends she hasn’t seen all
summer, she turns into a force of nature, hugging and squealing
and bouncing up and down on the sidewalk.
| |
Piano
lessons led to a job as a church organist. An interest
in the Revolutionary War evolved into playing in a
fife-and-drum corps. |
Brion learned to read at two and a half. She attended a regular
kindergarten in Sherman, Connecticut, before her parents decided
to teach her themselves. One of their reasons was practical:
Brion’s father, a pilot, was frequently away; when he was
home, he wanted to spend as much time as he could with his
daughter. In addition, after kindergarten Laura was asking her
mother why the teacher was telling her things she already knew.
“It’s my job to raise my children,” Alison Brion remembers
thinking. “It didn’t seem unusual that I should continue
what I started.” While many people in town seemed to think the
family was crazy, “I didn’t have any real worry that we
could go wrong,” Alison Brion says. “Laura’s first five
years went well. Why wouldn’t ages six through whenever go the
same way?”
For the first few years the family enrolled in a homeschooling
program that provided a long-distance curriculum and guidance.
But as they grew more comfortable with homeschooling, they
struck out on their own. When Laura Brion was young, this meant
spending a lot of time at the library. “We lived at the
library,” she says. “The librarian was one of my best
friends.” Brion was the first homeschooler in her small town,
but over time her parents found others nearby, so the families
joined forces. There were play dates, field trips to nature
centers, and group classes in French and geology. One thing led
to another. The piano lessons Brion began when she was nine led
to a job as a church organist at sixteen. An interest in the
Revolutionary War evolved into playing in a fife-and-drum corps.
As a teenager Brion worked at two small farms, one owned and run
by a former physicist, the other by an ethnobotanist, both of
whom welcomed her nonstop questions. “I realized learning was
something I just couldn’t get away from,” she says.
“Everything became a learning experience.” It is, in fact,
this aspect of homeschooling—learning as something that occurs
at any time, in any place, throughout one’s life—that
explains much of its appeal.
Another advantage of homeschooling, its advocates say, is that
it allows children to socialize with—and learn from—a wide
variety of people, instead of remaining confined in a classroom
for most of the day with children their own age. Amois Gonzalez
’03 was homeschooled in Ashland, Oregon, because her parents
wanted her to remain “family-based” for as long as possible;
they also wanted her to “grow up being able to interact with
people of all ages,” she says, not just her peers. Alison
Brion had the same wish for Laura. The Brions joined
homeschooling groups and after-school activities so Laura could
be with other children, but they also went to library discussion
groups and town meetings. “Laura saw adults socializing,
making decisions, stating their opinions, challenging each
other,” Alison Brion says. “She learned that there’s no
one right answer to a question, which is not what usually
happens in a classroom.”
| |
“I
was very outgoing until I went to school,” Amois
Gonzalez ’03 says. “I never had to worry about
fitting in. It took me a while to regain my
self-confidence.” |
This issue of socialization, however, is also one over which
homeschoolers are often criticized. How can kids learn to deal
with other people, the question usually goes, if they’re not
in school? “Such criticisms rest on certain professional
assumptions about the nature of ‘healthy socialization,’ ”
Patricia Lines wrote in the July 1, 2000, issue of the journal The
Public Interest. Homeschooling parents want their kids to
learn values—religious or otherwise—from them, not from
other kids. They worry about the negative peer pressure found in
schools and as a countermeasure want children to spend more time
with adults. “But this does not mean that homeschooled
children are isolated from their peers,” Lines wrote in The
Public Interest. “They participate in homeschool support
groups, scouting groups, churches, and other associations.”
Sometimes, though, homeschoolers create more of a hybrid
education. When Amois Gonzalez’s best friend started going to
a conventional school in the fourth grade (and got to ride the
school bus), Gonzalez grew curious about what all the other kids
were doing. Two years later, not wanting to be left out, she
started school herself. Academically, she soared, but the social
scene was tough to handle at first. “I was very outgoing until
I went to school,” Gonzalez recalls. “I became really shy
and insecure. I wanted everyone to like me. I wanted to fit in.
I had never had to worry about fitting in before. It took me a
while to regain my self-confidence.” Gonzalez stuck it out and
went on to become a track star and homecoming queen.
Tibet Sprague followed almost the opposite path: he made it
through eighth grade in Amherst, Massachusetts, before choosing
to be schooled at home. Lanky and easygoing, he’d been doing
fine academically and socially, but he was losing steam fast.
“The learning part became not fun,” he says. “You get all
these assignments and 90 percent of them aren’t interesting.
Then if you get bad grades it’s easy to lose your
confidence.” When two of his favorite teachers announced that
they were leaving the Amherst school system to launch the
Pathfinder Center, a homeschooling “resource center” for
teenagers, Tibet chose to follow them.
Through Pathfinder, which helps homeschoolers and their parents
design individual study plans and even offers some classes and
activities, Sprague took literature, history, and physics
seminars. He also studied electronics and chemistry with his
grandfather and Buddhism with his father. He worked his way
through algebra and Spanish textbooks at home, and aced computer
science and calculus classes at the nearby University of
Massachusetts. He even grew accustomed to questions like the one
posed by a woman who approached him one weekday as he sat on a
bench in downtown Amherst: why, she demanded to know, wasn’t
he in school?
There was no opposition to homeschooling out in the woods of
Hawaii, where Ben and Maria Taylor grew up. Every week they went
with their mother to the nearest public library, but otherwise
they stayed close to home, reading voraciously, doing their
chores, and roaming with homeschooled kids who lived nearby.
Maria and her friends liked to dress up as medieval characters
and act out stories they had written. Ben helped his father and
the neighbors build fences and houses, and he figured out enough
electronics to repair radios and televisions.
| |
Another
advantage of homeschooling, advocates say, is that it
allows children to socialize with—and learn from—a
wide variety of people, instead of remaining confined in
a classroom for most of the day with children their own
age. |
All this seemed normal to Ben and Maria until their family moved
to the town of Waimea in the mid-1980s and they saw other kids
going off to school. Ben and Maria eventually supplemented their
work at home with history and Japanese classes, among others, at
a local private high school. They wanted to play on sports teams
and see what going to school was all about. Similarly, Tad Heuer
’99, who was homeschooled in Holliston, Massachusetts, took
chemistry and biology classes at his local public
school—primarily, he says, because single frogs in
formaldehyde are hard to come by. (Heuer may be Brown’s most
decorated homeschooler so far: he was a Royce Fellow, a Truman
Scholar, and a Marshall Scholar; was elected to Phi Beta Kappa;
and received a combined four-year bachelor and master of arts
degree, magna cum laude. He is now studying at Oxford.)
At seventeen, Maria Taylor actually enrolled full-time in high
school for a semester, after her mother—who was now divorced
from Maria’s father—moved the family to Providence to take
the dean’s job. “The teachers seemed to take it for granted
that I wouldn’t be interested in what I was learning,” Maria
recalls. “We’d study something and take a quiz, but we never
really talked about why it was important.” And after years of
making her own choices about how to spend her time, Maria found
the school’s structure difficult to take. “The first time I
had to go to the bathroom, and the teacher said no, I couldn’t
believe it,” she recalls. Maria dropped out and spent the rest
of the school year reading, working in a video store, and
watching old movies.
SO HOW DOES a homeschooler fill out a college
application, which usually requires school transcripts,
standardized test scores, and teacher recommendations? When
Joyce Reed bought her son Ben a review book for the GED exam, he
looked through it and said to himself, “Oh, man, I’m an
idiot.” (He passed the exam on his first try and scored in the
top 1 percent of students who took the test in Hawaii.) Laura
Brion debated whether she should even apply to college—“Is
it an adventure or a copout?” she wondered. But she says that
once she decided that a degree would be a practical thing to
have, “I had this initial feeling of, ‘Oh no, what have I
been doing all these years?’ ” Nevertheless, Brion took the
SATs, wrote her essays, put together a transcript, and sent off
the applications. A few colleges responded with postcards
stating that she’d neglected to include a transcript.
| |
Brown
looks for writing skills and some form of outside
assessment. “We take recommendations from family
members with a grain of salt,” says admission director
Michael Goldberger. |
Brown was not one of them. Among colleges and universities
across the country, Brown is considered receptive to
homeschoolers because it does not require them to supply any
more information than traditional applicants. Some schools go
further, offering scholarships specifically for homeschoolers
or, as in Stanford’s case, posting special information for
potential homeschooled applicants on their admission-office Web
sites. On the other end of the spectrum are universities such as
Columbia, where homeschooled applicants must supply results from
five SAT II tests (formerly called achievement tests); regular
applicants, by comparison, must only submit three. Notre Dame
also asks homeschoolers to send scores from five SAT II tests,
even though its regular applicants aren’t required to take
any.
When Brown admission officers come across a homeschooler’s
application, they look for evidence of good writing skills and
some sort of “outside assessment,” such as courses taken at
a community college or standardized test scores. “We take
recommendations from family members with a grain of salt,”
Michael Goldberger says. Otherwise the evaluation process for
homeschoolers is not much different from that of other
applicants. “We always look at each kid in the context of
where they came from, whether it’s a small, rural public high
school or a sophisticated private school,” Goldberger says.
“In a homeschool situation, our approach is, let’s see what
they give us and go from there.”
Tibet Sprague gave Brown a transcript that included no grades
(except for those he earned at UMass). Instead it detailed the
books he had read (among them, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit
451), the musical instruments he played (saxophone and
recorder), the science projects he completed (building rockets
to demonstrate trajectory physics), and even the cultural events
he attended (the Bill T. Jones Dance Company). In some ways, he
says, he had an advantage over college applicants with typical
high school backgrounds. “Their acceptance was based almost
entirely on grades and scores,” he wrote in a Pathfinder
Center newsletter. “But I could present everything I had done
during the last four years, show every aspect of my intelligence
and creativity, without lingering on my shortcomings.”
FROM THEIR PROFESSORS and fellow students, homeschoolers
at Brown elicit a wide range of reactions. “Some people said,
‘Wow, that’s so cool!’ ” recounts Sprague. On the other
hand, Maria Taylor says that one of her professors “couldn’t
understand how I learned things, how I could be smart. He was
like a lot of people who think homeschooling means no
schooling.” In fact, these homeschoolers say, their transition
to college wasn’t that different from that of other new
students. “It didn’t matter what your previous background
was,” recalls Tad Heuer. “Every single student was a bit
nervous, and most were away from home for the first time.”
Laura Brion adds, “I just figured I’d adapt.” But what
Brion had to adapt to were such everyday experiences as sitting
in a classroom and having a constant schedule. It wasn’t that
big a deal. After years of showing up for music lessons and
holding down jobs, she points out, “It’s not as if I’d
never encountered rules or guidelines.”
Homeschoolers are also buoyed by their self-confidence. “My
college friends got so daunted by everything,” Maria Taylor
explains. “I didn’t have that problem. I’d always been
told that I was capable of doing anything. My friends [at Brown]
also had strange ideas about adults. They had a hard time
talking to professors as people. They were intimidated. I’d
always been encouraged to talk about my opinions, and I had
confidence in what I had to say.”
Homeschooling had not prepared Taylor for one thing, though:
meanness. “I had little experience with being hurt by kids my
own age,” she says. “People who are malicious, who say
things about you that aren’t true—I was so shocked by all of
that. I had never lost friendships before.” Taylor ended up
taking a leave of absence from Brown during her junior year.
| |
 |
| (Rob
Pike) |
| Laura
Brion ’04 in the stacks at the John D. Rockefeller
Library |
If Laura Brion has experienced similar setbacks, she’s not
telling. She had worried at first that Brown might be too big a
detour from the autonomy of her homeschooling, that sitting in
classrooms and taking exams might cause her to “start viewing
learning as a chore.” Luckily, that hasn’t happened.
“I’ve found people here who have so much talent and idealism
and enthusiasm,” she says. “It’s totally infectious. I
stay up way too late.”
BEN TAYLOR DOES, too, getting by on just three or four
hours of sleep a night. It’s a habit he formed at Cambridge
Technology Partners, the computer consulting firm where he
worked after graduating from Brown, and at NerveWire, the
management consulting company he cofounded two years ago. Now
Taylor is a free agent again, living in New York City and
looking for his next project. Interactive television? Venture
capital? “I remember my parents sitting me down and saying,
‘There’s always going to be a challenge out there for
you,’ ” he says.
Like her brother, Maria Taylor is thinking about future
challenges. After graduating with honors from Brown, she earned
a master’s in photojournalism at Boston University and now
works as a graphic designer for NerveWire. She is also getting
married this summer. She and her fiancé have been talking about
moving back to the island of Hawaii in a few years, back to the
neighborhood where Maria grew up. Together with two childhood
friends, she dreams of re-creating the homeschooling community
that her mother helped start thirty years ago.
“When I have kids, I can’t imagine sending them to
school,” Maria says. “I want them to have what I had. We
were empowered. My mom would say to us, ‘Whatever you want to
do, you can do it, and if you need tools, come to me.’ I know
it’s a huge responsibility, and it’s going to be hard. But
I’m definitely going to do it.”
Jennifer Sutton is a
BAM contributing editor.
New
Great Educational Links
