By Joshua Arnold
The Washington Stand
“The continued growth of homeschooling” is due to “the inherent advantages and attractions of homeschooling that parents and students are finding,” Home School Legal Defense Association executive director Joel Grewe declared on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” The number of homeschooled children is rising in all but two states with available data, according to a recent report from The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Research Lab.
“They weren’t able to tell you why people were choosing home education, just that more and more people were,” said Grewe. “Homeschooling occurs honestly for an amazing variety of reasons.”
Notably, Johns Hopkins observed a growth in homeschooling that has endured even after a brief pandemic spike. “During COVID … for a couple of weeks … everyone was doing education at home,” which “created this massive surge of people that identified as homeschoolers,” explained Grewe. But “as schools reopened, logically, we knew people were going to go back into what they considered their normal form of education.” However, after COVID-related school closures gave many families a brief taste of home education, “some people went, ‘You know, that wasn’t a bad idea; we’re going to stick with that,’” Grewe said.
One reason for the post-pandemic surge in homeschooling is parents realizing the woke indoctrination that passes for education in some classrooms. “Parents and students are fighting for the rights to raise the kids, the right to educate their kids, the right to determine what their kids and how their kids are going to be educated,” Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice pointed out. Such objections to the content of public education marked the rise of homeschooling as a “modern education choice” in the 1980s, said Grewe.
But this isn’t the only reason. Many parents are now turning to homeschooling as a “major reaction to failures in the traditional form of education,” Grewe added. “We’re really seeing that growth … where people found that the options they had in front of them weren’t serving their needs. … Sometimes it was safety, sometimes it was educational quality. Sometimes it was content that parents found they disagreed with. … Sometimes it was a unique gift.”
The failure of public schools has driven an increasingly diverse array of families to pursue education alternatives. When they do, they not only find that “homeschooling is the first and earliest form of alternative education,” he emphasized, but also that “you can do it with a very low dollar amount compared to normal [or] other forms of education.” As a result, “we’re seeing record numbers of Hispanics and black Americans who are homeschooling,” Grewe continued. Homeschooling “really has grown to be not a kind of fringe movement, but … an enduring institution.”
“Homeschooling is the ultimate customization of education,” Grewe explained. “God makes every kid unique. … It is not an irrational extension … to recognize how they learn, and how best to teach them, and the uniqueness of the parents, the home they’re in — all of that put together can result in customized education. And homeschooling is the ultimate way to do that.”
So, he applied his logic, “If you’ve got a kid that’s special needs or has a specific interest, or talent, or some sort of God-given interest, or area they want to learn in, standardized education-in-a-box sometimes really struggles to meet those needs or talents and opportunities. … A remarkable number of kids really thrive in that.”
Another reason for the continued growth of homeschooling is the increasing development of resources and options. Parents can now access a growing number of co-ops or “hybrid” schools, where students meet for class one, two, or three days out of the week, and work from home the rest of the time. This expands the universe of possible customization to meet each family’s needs.
Homeschoolers socializing? It happens more than one might expect. “Homeschoolers kind of get the reputation of being isolated, but really we’re very not,” said Grewe. In addition to the legal organization he works for, families can also “find local homeschool groups in your area,” “state groups,” and “different kinds of communities that help come around homeschoolers to make them thrive, to help them excel.”
“I was homeschooled as a kid,” Grewe testified. “I had to talk my mom into it back in the day. She was worried she couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘Well give it a try, Mom. Please let me be homeschooled. If it doesn’t work in a year, I’ll go back.’ And I didn’t. And now my wife and I homeschool our kids, and it’s been a great thing for them.”
“We homeschooled our kids too,” Hice concurred. “It was just fantastic. I wouldn’t take anything for it.”
This author was also homeschooled from pre-K through high school and believes that he gained from it (thanks, Mom!).
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
