Education
Homeschooling Offers Hope

Homeschooling Offers Hope

Homeschooling is a positive trend giving hope to American education. ...
John Larabell

The above quotes, which can be found in their entirety along with many others on the website of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), hslda.org, serve as a poignant testimony to the success and cultural impact of homeschooling in 21st-century America.

The deteriorating state of American academics, particularly manifest in K-12 public schooling, has led to a sense of frustration and hopelessness among parents and students alike. How do we know this? One only needs to look at the number of parents pulling their children out of the government school system, a number that grows every year, in favor of private schooling or homeschooling.

Modern homeschooling began as somewhat of a countercultural movement. During the ’60s and ’70s, educational reformers and authors began questioning the methods and results of the government school system. Pioneers in the modern homeschool movement included John Holt and Raymond Moore. Holt was a professional educator from Massachusetts who began to seriously criticize the public education system in the 1960s with the publication of his book How Children Fail. He broke with the established public education system in 1977 when he felt that true reform was impossible. Holt died in 1985, but his ideas of “unschooling,” or education without any formal structure or coursework, are still very popular, especially in the northeastern region of the United States.

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