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for all the present problems, are at least promising vehi-

cles that could help poor and middle-income parents to find

better schools for their children and break up the monopoly

of a "one-size-fits-all" philosophy of education.

In light of the educational quagmire the United States

finds itself in toward the end of the 20th century, many

parents, impatient for reform, are taking matters into their

own hands.  One alternative that is gaining growing public

acceptance is the educational option known as homeschooling.

What Homeschooling Is

Homeschooling is defined simply as the "education of

school-aged children at home rather than at a school."9

Homeschools, according to those who have observed or created

them, are as diverse as the individuals who choose that

educational method.

They [homeschools] range from the highly struc-

tured to the structured to the unstructured, from

those which use the approaches of conventional

schools to those which are repulsed by convention-

al practice, and from the homeschool that follows

homemade materials and plans to the one that con-

sumes hundreds of dollars worth of commercial

curriculum materials per year.10

Homeschoolers like to say that the world is their

classroom.  Or, as John Lyon, writing for the Rockford

Institute, has observed,

Schooling, rather obviously, is what goes on in

schools; education takes place wherever and when-

ever the nature with which we are born is nurtured

so as to draw out of those capacities which con-

duce to true humanity.  The home, the church, the

neighborhood, the peer group, the media, the shop-

ping mall . . . are all educational institu-

tions.11

Modern learning theories aside, homeschoolers believe

that the student who receives his instruction simultaneously

from the home and the community at large will be a more

culturally sophisticated child than the one the bulk of

whose learning experiences is confined to a school.  The

historical record offers noteworthy examples of the "world

is my teacher" model.  Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Andrew

Wyeth, Pearl Buck, and the Founding Fathers were all taught

at home.  Those famous Americans' parents were pioneers.