Happy As Kings

Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids

The subject line is the title of a Slate article.  I'd take apart the article, but most of it is of the 'old news' variety that has been dealt with many times. 

Effective research would have revealed information about the objections, as research would also have shown that Robert Reich (former Labor secretary) and Rob Reich (Stanford professor) are two different people, another bit of information fairly well-known in the (older?) homeschooling community.

 

Robert Reich http://robertreich.org/ 
 
Rob Reich 
http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/reich

 

A resonable reply to the article is in the comments section: search -- Ctrl. F for PC-users -- for Patrick Farenga.

In Plain Sight

Finally, a tv show on which the homeschooling family is shown in a positive light.

• Girls, Interrupted, In Plain Sight

A family Mary Shannon comes across while chasing the errant dog, of whom she has custody, sparks Mary's interest as an adoptive family for her child.

Law & Order's homeschool fixation

A couple of years ago, I stopped watching Law & Order SVU, in part because of the homeschool fixation of the producers and writers of the series.  I almost felt that when "the cellos" kicked in with the suspense music, each time a parent-figure came onscreen, that homeschooling would be part of the story. It wasn't enough that parents-in-general are marginalized by the series -- watch sometime and see who children light up for, who they're shown to be best protected by, who has the kids' best interests at heart (hint:  rarely the parents), but that homeschooling parents in particular are bad guys.  When a series reaches that level of predictability, the theme is a cliché. 

Yes, the crimes of murder and molestation of children happen disproportionally in families, but just because that's where the crimes usually happen doesn't mean that most parents commit such crimes.  After a while, I had enough of Law & Order's viewpoint and stopped spending any time with Olivia and Elliot.

I have not yet stopped watching Law & Order Criminal Intent, but if this series goes the way of SVU, then Mr. D'Onofrio will have to complete the show's final season without this viewer.  Tonight's episode has the homeschooled grad as a political radical, indoctrinated by his single-mother who herself was a '70s counterculture criminal with explosive tendencies. (and I just noticed my kids and I don't have matching wrist tattoos with Korean letters -- have to get on that)  I can tell you, from personal experience, that even kids who graduate from day schools can be strongly influenced by their parents' opinions.

As I've said before, I'd like to see the Law & Order writers feature an observant homeschooled kid who helps solve the crime because she wasn't cooped up in school.  With all the good PR that homeschooling gets, there should be at least one homeschooling family in the nation with a good enough rep to be used on a prime time show as a model for common sense.

Homeschooling as a Form of Child Abuse

I'm glad I discovered that making people angry is the point of the blog with the above title as a post.  Now I needn't reply.  If you want to give the blog traffic, Google will take you there.

I'm also glad I never had to put up with that teaching style ... and I was in the Army.

Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees?

Two days ago, Psychology Today's website featured a blog post from Laura Brodie, author of Love in a Time of Homeschooling.  Dr. Brodie's subject was "Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees?"  Comments were open for a day, but now seem to be closed.

Points in the article were:

• Why home-educated children are not held to the same "minimum standards" as public school students.
• Parental competence
• The perception that GED certificate holders were granted their certificates, rather than earning them.
• Parents' proficiency in English.
• Americans' inherent interest in the production of an educated citizenry.
• Should parents who choose to educate their child(ren) at home be required to demonstrate their competence to a public authority?

These concerns range too widely for me to answer them in one post -- I'm too wordy -- so I thought a re-write of the original piece would make my point more easily than justifying the importance of academic freedom for everyone. 

For the most part, every day our society sends helpless firstborns home to be cared for by new parents, care that is unregulated except for existing laws against abuse and neglect.  If these parents can learn enough to make decisions to ensure that their infant will not only live, but thrive, and manage to keep up their level of 'continuing education' until their child reaches the age of traditional school attendance, why, when the kid turns five, would these parents suddenly get stupid? 

Why do we think that parents can't shift from raising their four-year old to raising their five-year old?  In our information-heavy world, why is it assumed that parents won't be able to find the information they need to school their child, just as they have been schooled?  And if parents manage to school their child(ren) to the age of traditional high school attendance, why would they not be able to continue learning, or find a tutor, or program, or video course, or textbook, to continue?

Few first-time parents have had experience raising a child, but we've all been through some form of school.  New parents may need an infant orientation course, but most of us are already clued in to what learning consists of, especially concerning a small person who has been sharing our lives for years, and especially with subsequent children.

If homeschooling families lose their freedom to allow their children to learn at a different pace and in a different manner than the public school template, then that applies across the board, and where does that leave parents and their children if school problems develop?  Any parent can have the need to homeschool -- it's not just for those outside the mainstream.

In the following adaptation, I've only replaced school-words with words about the care of a child:  feeding, housing, clothing, need for medical care, and so on.  The rest of the article is the original.  See what you think of the Psychology Today's writer's thoughts applied to all raising of children.

===========adaptation===========

Should Stay-at-home Parents Have College Degrees?

Here's a subject that can make tempers flare: staying home with children. Some parents feel that our federal and state governments should keep their fingerprints completely off of whether or not children should be raised at home only by parents. Others believe that modest oversight on a state-by-state basis is acceptable. And then there are plenty of observers outside the stay-at-home community who wonder: Why aren't stay-at-home children held to the same minimum standards as children in daycare? And shouldn't stay-at-home parents be required to get a parenting license?

I'll consider the question of standards for stay-at-home children in a future post. For now, let's focus on the second issue: the qualifications of stay-at-home parents. Child care books and magazines often insist that all parents are capable of caring for their children. Parents know their kids best, and are their natural care-givers, right?

Not necessarily. While the vast majority of parents might be well-suited to "care for their own," not all parents are cut out for raising children unsupervised. Not only does it require double doses of patience, humor, and the financial freedom for one parent to forego a fulltime job, stay-at-home Moms and Dads need basic competency in food preparation and elementary medical concerns, and that's where the government tends to step in.

Most states require that stay-at-home parents have high school diplomas or GEDs. Only one state, North Dakota, expects the parent-caregiver to have a college degree, otherwise a family's child raising program must be monitored on a weekly basis by a certified caregiver. My state, Virginia, used to include a college diploma as a requirement in its original at-home statute, but in 1996 this qualification was lowered to a high school diploma.

Whenever I mention these facts to friends outside the stay-at-home parenting world, they tend to be shocked, saying things like : "Are you kidding?...A high school diploma or GED? Some people can get a GED without being able to read."

I admit that I share their skepticism. To me, the idea that parents with GEDs could, if they desired, turn around and raise their children until they're teens is setting the bar very low. More problematic is the fact that several states have almost no home-inspection regulations, including no specified qualifications for stay-at-home -- not even a basic elementary education.

Don't get me wrong-the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are bright and diligent and well-qualified to raise their kids. My own brief sojourn into the world of stay-at-home parenting left me greatly impressed with the SAHMs I met. And there are plenty of child care facilities that are doing a poor job supervising children.  When we talk about child care regulation, the question is whether there are rules that can help minimize worst-case scenarios, and whether all children have the right to a basic level of care that should be ensured by the state.

Years ago I worked as a child care volunteer in my local community, and I saw how an inability to maintain a home environment can be passed from generation to generation. Children with parents who can not read often repeat the pattern, occasionally due to problems with dyslexia or various learning disabilities. At a minimum, should all states require that stay-at-home parents demonstrate a certain level of literacy? Taking it further, should all stay-at-home parents show that they can read and write English, or is it OK for an American child to receive no stay-at-home care in English, and be spoken to entirely in Spanish, or Japanese, or Arabic?

Because Americans value freedom and self-reliance, the idea of regulating any aspect of the parent-child relationship makes some people furious. Nevertheless, all Americans have an interest in breaking cycles of poverty and producing a civilized citizenry. A college education might not be a fair requirement for stay-at-home parents, but what does constitute a reasonable baseline?

In my next post, I'll share more of my own, constantly evolving, thoughts on the subject. But before I offer my opinions, I invite anyone who cares about this topic to voice their own:

How much education should a stay-at-home parent be required to have? A high school diploma? A two-year associate's degree? A four year college degree? A teaching certificate?

Should all stay-at-home parents be required to pass a test demonstrating their ability to read and write in English, and calculate math at a basic (say, fifth grade) level?

Is all regulation bad regulation?

===========end adaptation===========

Further reading from Home Education Magazine:

Communicating the Strengths of Homeschooling

Problems with Legislation to Prevent "Unqualified" Families From Homeschooling

Watchdogging the Media 

Homeschooling: Our Perspectives, Their Views 

Parents' Work: Invaluable but Nearly Invisible

Unschooling in the un-news

ABC News reporter Hyunju "JuJu" Chang has reported once again on unschooling .  This is her second report on unschooling since April 2010 when she filmed a report on the Yablonski-Biegler family.  Her second report features the family of Joe and Dayna Martin.

Critiquing this second report is probably a poor use of time because not only are the subject and the bias not news, they're not new.  Unschooling is so old, cyber-culturally speaking, that the newsletter-magazine devoted to it, Growing Without Schooling shuttered itself in 2001 after 24 years .  As for report-bias, the second report repeated the slant of the first report almost as if the reporter used an outline.  Because of the reach of the program on which it aired, Nightline, many people saw the program, so replies are in order.

Leaving aside unschooling itself, the overall points about the report that come immediately to mind are:    

• sensational presentation
• biased editing
• unnecessary images of school
• reporter's gasps and astonishment

Sensationalist reporting is nothing new, just think of the late 1800s description of 'yellow journalism' .  And sensationalism is almost a requirement in the milieu of 24-hour 'news' channels and 500-channels that must fill their 24 hours of programming with something.  That something must be interesting enough to compete with the programming on the 499 other channels, as well as with daily family life, books, music, movies in the theater and at-home, fitness routines, and the Internet. "Infotainment," as a word dates from 1983 , so that underscores the not-newness of sensationalism.  But even knowing what the network employees are up to, and up against, I find it hard to watch the Nightline segment and then read the online text reports without sputtering, "Wait a minute!"  When the reporter audibly gasps then exclaims at a stay-at-home child's admission that he goes to bed later than the working-mother-reporter's idea of what a child's bedtime should be, that exclamation shows a lack of separation between her reporting and her own opinions.  Or she was hamming.

Keeping the bias in mind is especially important when you're reading a report about something that you're already not inclined to like, such as children who appear 'out of control' .  If 'out of control' kids are the concern, perhaps the reporters should look into the continuing rate of school dropouts, kids who, I presume, are not in a self-directed learning environment with caring parents.  Over the decades the American dropout rate has declined, but it still rests at 8%  of the 16,294,000 high school age teens  (ca. 1,303,520 individuals).

Watching the Nightline report on the Martin family, and the Good Morning America segment featuring the Yablonski-Biegler family confirmed for me why I'm a non-viewer of television news programs:  I recoil at reporters poorly manipulating my thoughts.  I'd react better to a well-planned manipulation that makes me think (which is what most nonfiction writing intends, in one way or another) than to a report that presumes I will go along with sharply edited interviews rolling across the screen in mere seconds-long bursts.

My objections about the editing of the programs stem from seeing the same the 'playbook' particulars within the two reports:

• editing discrepancies between the video report and the written version of each program
• same contrast at the beginning between a schoolroom and kids at home
• same emphasis on 'no X, no Y, in fact no nothing at all!'
• same focus on children's bedtimes when the child is an 'owl' instead of a 'lark'
• same focus on legality
• same truncated interview answers
• same recording of a field trip
• same highlighting of children eating 'wrong' food
• same questions on "what will happen when they're older?"
• same child-quizzing "do you want to go to school?"
• same challenging of the children as to the validity of their feelings and viewpoints

That looks like less like an enquiry and more like a checklist.

One difference between the two programs was of the 'how many homeschoolers are there?' variety.  In the April program, the reporter guessed that parents unschool 150,000 children, but by the June program the reporter had 150,000 families unschooling their kids.  How did the number of children increase so much between April and June?  And why was the quantity the same number?  And, since only 19 states report numbers of homeschooled children, with no breakdown of the unschooled, who supplied the number?  Of course, viewers who see the programs months apart won't distinguish between 'children' and 'families' even if they watched both programs, and even if they remember the number but the questions remain,    

• who put together the number 150,000?
• where did the numbers come from?
• who was that analyst?

Concerning interest in unschooling, the programs could have used different jumping off points - that is, if the producers meant for the programs to inquire into something new to many people.  What these 'news' programs seem to be doing is using the growing freak show television trend, a technique competing hotly with the 'can we shout at people loudly enough to make them cry?' gambit (or maybe gasp them into admitting their social deviance).   Bonus for hyperventilation.

A starting point for reporting on unschooling might be to look at how far schooling itself has branched off from natural learning so that natural learning appears to be radical and irresponsible.  Down through the millennia, people who want to make money from learning have co-opted the process - an example from antiquity being the Sophists .  Today, basic compulsory schooling in America costs over a half-trillion dollars every year.   That's not million with six zeroes, or billion with nine zeroes, but trillion with twelve zeroes. Contrasting an unschooling household with a classroom is comparing two far ends.  The reporter might have contrasted unschooling with school-at-home, summer school, or camp. Will family life without curriculum and classrooms look radical in the shadow of an industry whose yearly cost has twelve zeroes in it?

|<-- If 'just family life' is here …

a half-trillion dollar industry in $1,000 bills face-to-face is about 34 miles thataway -->

Which end is the extreme?

There will always be differences within a group of individuals or among individual data points.    If you line up all the leaves on a tree, some will be lighter, some will be darker, and most will be about the same hue, but you will be able to line them up, lighter to darker.  Same thing with the height of individuals, number of peas per pod, worst-to-best ping pong players and smallest to largest chocolate covered raisins (eat the smaller ones first, save the big ones for last).

Maybe if the USA channel featured the Yablonski-Bieglers and the Martins on a television program the public would find them less threatening.  Too bad that "Characters welcome" turns out in the 'real' world of television to be just a clever tagline.

For information on unschooling, please see: 

• What is unschooling?  
• Unschooling - What's The Real Story  (see comments for discussion)
• Unparenting and unschooling 
• Unschooling Stephanopoulos: Good Morning America Fail
• Unschooling : How Good Morning America Got It All Wrong  

Copyright Valerie Bonham Moon 2010

footnoted article is at: Download 2010 06 Jun 03 critique of ABC News's unschooling reports

Lydia Schatz, via Salon

The Pearls are not "normalized" in the homeschooling circles I'm part of ...

Godly discipline turned deadly, 22 Feb 2010, Salon.com

Because they did not want to admit that a 'normal' home-schooling mom could abuse her child to death, they did not want to admit that a book that has been normalized in home-schooling circles was a factor in the death, ...

 

Slow news day? "Some homeschooling parents choose religious texts"

Top Home-School Texts Dismiss Darwin, Evolution, 6 March 2010, Fox News

"The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program."

And Mr. Slatter comes by the characterization "most," how?  Given that "most" homeschooling noses remain uncounted, and that many homeschooling families may very well use trade books or other resources that are uncounted as to who is using what, the quote may just be 'ink on paper.'

According to the National Center for Education Statistics,

Parents were then asked which one of the applicable reasons they considered to be their most important reason for homeschooling ... 30 percent had parents who said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction (table 4).   (emphasis added)

Thirty percent is not "most."  And of that thirty percent who credited religious or moral instruction as most important for them in homeschooling their children, it cannot be assumed that they are all evangelical Christians.  Regardless of the reasons from the parents, the number of evangelicals in the homeschooling ranks should come as no surprise given the percentage of Americans who say they are Christian.  Homeschooling parents come from the same general population as everyone else in the country so the representation of any particular group within homeschooling will probably reflect that group's overall presence in the population. 

Another factor is that not all homeschooling parents choose materials written specifically for the homeschooling market.  Many of us use trade books and magazines, or perhaps courses from providers such as The Teaching Company. Tracking individuals' purchases from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, or from specialty catalogs and labeling them as 'homeschooling texts' is impossible.

For an organization to publish an article underscoring the creationists' "mostness" within homeschooling sounds either like someone protesting too much, or maybe trying to goose the readership on a slow news day.

The following list is a collection of homeschooling resources and advocates whose public contribution is from a generalist viewpoint.

1. Home Education Magazine  (est. 1984)
2. Growing Without Schooling  (1977 - 2001)  
3. The Drinking Gourd multi-cultural magazine/catalog (no longer published)
4. Jon's Homeschool Resources  (older website -- 'secular homeschooling' is nothing new) 
5. Learn in Freedom  (older website)
6. A to Z Home's Cool (you name it, Ann's got it)
7. Best Homeschool 
8. The Evolved Homeschooler wiki 
9. Secular Homeschooling magazine  
10. Secular Homeschoolers .net
11. Atheist Homeschool .com 
12. Homeschooling Freethinkers  
13. HUUmans on the Web  
14. Montessori Homeschooling  
15. Waldorf Homeschooling 
16. FUN Books 
17. Homeschooling for Excellence 
18. The Homeschool Reader   
19. The Teenage Liberation Handbook   
20. The Homeschooling Book of Answers 
21. A Sense of Self:  Listening to homeschooled adolescent girls 
22. Homeschool Atheists email list
23. Secular Homeschoolers email list 
24. Homeschool Military email list 
25. Donn and Jean Reed
26. Linda Dobson   
27. Larry and Susan Kaseman 
28. John Taylor Gatto 
29. Pat Farenga 
30. Nancy Wallace   
31. Ann Lahrson Fisher 
32. Sandra Dodd   
33. Rebecca Rupp 
34. Earl Stevens 
35. David Guterson 
36. Cafi Cohen   
37. Mary McCarthy 
38. Tammy Takahashi 
39. Homeschool Empowerment Webring 
40. Skylark Sings  
41. Life Without School 
42. Secular Homeschool blog
43. The Meming of Life blog post 
    
44. Homeschool Is Legal 
45. Throwing Marshmallows blog 
46. American School 
    
47. Calvert School 
    
48. Clonlara School   
    
49. Keystone High School  
50. Oak Meadow School  

If you know of an organization or resource that I've omitted from this one afternoon's worth of work, please add it in the Comments section.

On the death of Lydia Schatz, 8

According to news reports, Lydia Schatz was an eight-year old girl[1], adopted in 2007 from Liberia[2] by Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of northern California.  After a 1 A.M. 911 call[3] on the fifth of February in which emergency services were summoned to the home and resuscitated Lydia, police also found her eleven-year old sister Zariah[4] to have “deep bruising”[5] injuries “which authorities believe resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired [her] kidneys and possibly other vital organs.”  Lydia died en route from one hospital to another, and Zariah’s injuries put her in the hospital on dialysis. 

Lydia and Zariah were injured while the parents held down the girls as they “took turns” beating them[6].  Lydia died from an hours-long whipping with a fifteen-inch length of quarter-inch “plumbing supply line.”[7]  According to a police officer, the reason given for Lydia’s punishment was that she had mispronounced a word[8] during a reading lesson.  Zariah was just a bad influence.[9]  After his step-sister’s death and his subsequent placement through child protection services, Lydia’s ten-year old step-brother, the Schatz’s biological son, was also found with injuries.[10] 

The type of punishment given to Lydia and Zariah is recommended[11] in the book To Train Up A Child[12] by Michael and Debi Pearl, although in the book the authors do caution against abuse.  The abuse which the Pearls counsel against is characterized as uncontrolled parental anger[13], not as corporal punishment.[14]^, [15]  Lynn Paddock, a mother convicted of suffocating Sean, her four-year old adopted son, in 2006, also credited the Pearls’ method of “discipline techniques”[16] for her actions.

Mr. and Mrs. Schatz have yet to have their day in court, and judging them in the court of public opinion without all the facts in evidence is probably rash.  Still events such as the tragic death of a child, injuries to another child requiring hospitalization, and injuries evident upon a third child provoke such reactions. 

A further outrage is the reaction of the writer of the book credited as providing the guidance for the parents:  Mr. Pearl laughed.[17]

In online discussions, supporters of the Pearls have said that the parents who killed the children are the ones who prosecutors should target, not the Pearls.  That is indeed what has happened.  The Schatzes are under detention pending investigation and trial, and Lynn Paddock is convicted.  The Pearls are still selling books.

As for who is responsible, no one has ever indicated that the parents who are, so far, alleged to have killed the children should be absolved of responsibility because they were so weak-minded that they honored ink-on-paper over the evidence of their lying eyes that what they were doing was killing their child.  But, in our society, we do have a tradition of responsibility for the effects of our actions, and the Pearls' actions of writing that book can be connected to the outcomes of at least two dead children.  People who manufacture goods that are dangerous when used as directed are required (unless they make cigarettes) to change the dangerous part of their product.

I would think that it would be even more persuasive as an argument when the (larger, stronger) actors play out their actions on another (weaker, and in thrall) party who is an involuntary participant.

We may not be able to hold the originators of the ideas physically accountable, but we are right to be filled with disgust at the results, and the reaction.

---

[1] 2010 02 Feb 07  “Paradise parents accused of fatal child abuse,” 7 Feb 2010, Chico Enterprise Record, Chico, California http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14351915

[2] “New Details About Couple Accused of Killing Adopted Daughter,” 8 Feb 2010 KNVN tv, Chico, California http://www.knvn.com/content/localnews/story/New-Details-About-Couple-Accused-of-Killing/Sa_woJ_zUkuz6zFVXvnihg.cspx?rss=2224

[3] “Homicide, abuse probe continues: Ridge family was private, kids were well-behaved,” 9 Feb 2010 Chico Enterprise Record, Chico, California http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14364274

[4] 2010 02 Feb 21 in which I discuss the unthinkable http://lauriemo.blogspot.com/2010/02/in-which-i-speak-of-unspeakable.html

[5] “DA links fundamentalist ‘training’ to Paradise girl’s death,” 12 Feb 2010, Chico Enterprise Record, Chico, California http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14388171

[6] “Beating death draws national attention,” 25 Feb 2010, Chico Enterprise Record, Chico, California

http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14468067 [7] 2010 02 Feb 18 Ramsey examines ministry connected to girl's death, 18 Feb 2010, Paradise Post, Paradise, California http://www.paradisepost.com/news/ci_14427370

[8] “Homicide, abuse probe continues …”

[9] “Paradise parents face murder, torture charges,” 10 Feb 2010, Chico Enterprise Record, Chico, California http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14371777

[10] ibid

[11] “DA links fundamentalist ‘training’ to Paradise girl’s death,”

[12] To Train Up A Child  http://www.amazon.com/Train-Up-Child-ebook/dp/B0038KA6GC/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

[13] To Train Up A Child, Michael and Debi Pearl, page 48, c. 1994, “Forms of Abuse  Only a few parents are categorically abusive.  But, many parents sometimes give in to an abusive manner or employ abusive methods.  The child is rebellious.  The parent suddenly loses it and screams out.”

[14] ibid, p. 46, “If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate.  And hold him there until he is surrendered.  Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing.  Defeat him totally.  Accept no conditions for surrender.  No compromise.  You are to rule over him as a benevolent sovereign.  Your word is final. 

…  Slowly begin to spank.  If you go too fast, you may not allow time enough for the inner transformation to occur.

Use your own judgment as to what is effective.  I found five to ten licks usually sufficient.  Sometimes, with older children, usually when the licks are not forceful enough, the child may still be rebellious.  If this occurs, take time to instruct and then continue the spanking.  A general rule is to continue the disciplinary action until the child is surrendered. … Spankings don’t have to be as hard where they are consistently applied.  Your calm dignity will set the stage to make it more effective.” (underlining in original)

[15] “Beating death draws national attention”

[16] “Mother sobs when discussion boy’s death,” 9 Jun 2008, WRAL tv, Raleigh, North Carolina http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/3013647/

[17] 2010 03 Mar 03 “Michael Pearl Laughs at Critics,” 3 March 2010, Linda Dobson, Parent at the Helm blog, “Even my chickens are laughing . . . well, actually it more like cackling, because they just laid another organic egg for my breakfast and they know that it was that same piece of ¼ inch plastic supply line that trained the dogs not to eat chicken….” http://parentatthehelm.com/1335/michael-pearl-laughs-at-critics/

Salon.com: Home schooling: How we do it

The article at the link is the second in a series from Salon.com

Home schooling: How we do it -- What's the curriculum for our twin 5-year-olds? Greek myths, costumed trips to the Met and Lightning McQueen

So at least for a while, the bunny chasing and melon smashing, and the trips to the Bronx Zoo and the New York Hall of Science, were free of any explicit educational intentions, beyond the universal goals of all exhausted parents of small children: to get through the day without unacceptable acts of violence, while demonstrating that the world is full of cool and exciting stuff. But as the months rolled on and the 3-year-olds in Leslie's group turned 4 -- the age when most public-school kids head off to pre-K -- their parents began to face the inevitable question: What do we do now?

First installment:  Confessions of a home-schooler -- Call us crackpots, but our kids spend their days at beaches and museums, not in school