Although the history of homeschooling can be traced
back for many hundreds of years, and you will often here Aristotle
quoted as being the father of homeschooling for his efforts in tutoring
Alexander the Great, it was not really until the second half of the
twentieth century that homeschooling as we know it today was born.
During
the 1960s people began to speak out openly about the problems of the
public school system and three people in particular were heard above
the crowd.
The first was an Ivy League graduate who had sought to
change the system from the inside but, when he discovered that this a
case of bashing his head against a brick wall, he began what was to
become a twenty year period during which he wrote extensively on the
subject of education in general and homeschooling in particular.
John
Holt was perhaps the most influential voice in those early days and his
many books, starting with 'How Children Fail' in 1964, are still in
print and are widely read today. Proposing a system which moved away
from the authoritarian attitude of the public schools and the
importance of curricula and schedules, John Holt focused his attention
on the innate curiosity of the child and sought to structure learning
around the interests and talents of each individual child.
But John Holt was not a lone voice and others too made a valuable contribution to the debate.
Raymond
Moore for example, a devout Christian and ex-missionary, voiced the
concerns of many parents about the lack of spiritual and moral guidance
being given by our public schools and about the growing level of
violence. Moore proposed that parents should take control over the
education of their children and should focus not simply upon academic
achievement, but should also upon ensuring that their children are
taught the values which they will need if they are to be productive and
valued members of our society.
There was also a third extremely
influential voice raised at this time. Ayn Rand, a novelist and
philosopher, did not speak or write specifically on the subject of
homeschooling at any length but gave birth to the modern libertarian
movement. Out of this movement a political party was born which,
amongst other things, opposes a state sponsored education system and
espouses an education system which focuses on the child as an
individual and seeks to develop that child's innate creativity.
These
three voices together, while stemming from very different philosophies,
were all singing from the same hymn book and gave birth to the idea
behind modern homeschooling. This is s simple idea which places the
intellectual and moral development of our children at the center of
modern education.
