Parents put stress on private values
Nationally, more families are educating children at home, a new report shows.**
The local home schooling movement also remains strong. Numbers aredifficult to quantify, but Southwestern Indiana Home Educators, anetworking group, has 300 to 500 families on its e-mail loop.
An estimated 1.5 million United States students were home-schooledin spring 2007. That’s up from 1.1 million four years earlier,according to the National Center for Education Statistics and theDepartment of Education.
But the actual number of home-schooled children likely is closer to2 million because parents of many home-schoolers are reluctant to takepart in government surveys, experts say.
Indiana University Professor Robert Kunzman, who is writing a bookon home schooling, said the newly released data “is raising somefundamental questions about what it means to be educated and thevariety of ways in which that can and should happen.
“It may include sitting down at the computer. It may include goingto a home school cooperative. It may include learning something thatdoesn’t look like formal schooling. But you’d be hard-pressed to arguethat it isn’t education in a significant sense.”
Many parents who do home schooling are motivated by a desire tointegrate religious teaching with reading, writing and math lessons.
Jennifer Eaton of Evansville, who educates five children at homewith her husband, Darrin, said she did not want her kids to “haveeducation in one box and their Christian life in another.”
**We realize that homeschool curricula are often extremely expensive; sometimes costinghundreds of dollars a year. This sort of expense really hurts whenundertaking homeschooling already entails a loss of income. Moreover,when used as a supplement to the public or private schools, it is hardto justify the added expense in a tight family budget. But, EAU isintended to be a community; and communities help each other. Ourelementary school curriculum is of, for and by EAU members; and so forcurrent EAU members it is completely free of charge. It is yours — just for the asking. If you want access to it, just go to our organizational contact page,and send an email containing your membership number to our board ofdirectors. You’ll receive an email back that contains the accessinformation for the curriculum.
If you are not an EAU member for some reason and want access to thecurriculum; such access can be obtained by sending a $100 donation,your email address, and a short note requesting access to our regularmailbox.