Learning at Home, Students Take the Lead

 

By PETER T. KILBORN

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SILVER SPRING, Md., May 23 -- It is 10 a.m., and the school buses in this

Washington suburb have long ago finished their rounds. But the O'Malleys'

old house is rocking.

 

In a living room cluttered with toys, one girl plays while the mother cares

for the 1-year-old boy. Kevin O'Malley, 12, is practicing tai chi in the

living room, and his sister Sheila, 10, is in her bedroom painting her

nails. What they are not doing, at least not this second, is schoolwork.

 

The parents, Mary and John O'Malley, tell the two older children that

grammar is important but that they can study it at their own pace, in their

own way. The parents made up games to help them start reading and built

treehouses and forts, providing the children with lessons in measuring that

helped steer them into math.

 

The O'Malleys are engaged in a fast-growing approach to elementary

education -- home schooling -- and in the fastest-growing approach to home

schooling, according to the National Home Education Research Institute in

Salem, Ore. This is called unschooling, or less often, deschooling, eclectic

schooling, organic schooling and relaxed home schooling, where parents

respond to a child's talents and interests in guiding their learning rather

than imposing a conventional curriculum. Like charter schools, magnet

schools, private schools and parochial schools, home schooling responds to

disenchantment with conventional public schools.

 

Home schooling took hold in the 1980's, largely among fundamentalists and

religious conservatives who were fleeing the liberal education offered in

public schools. Now it is being adopted more broadly, by parents who are

disenchanted with the regimentation of schools, public and private, and the.

idea that a child's age, alone, marks the thresholds of learning.

 

These parents, who typically call themselves unschoolers, account for a

surge in home schooling, said Brian D. Ray, president of the research

institute.

 

Figures for home schooling are sketchy. Many states or local education

authorities require that parents register children to teach them at home,

but some do not keep close tabs on them.

 

The institute says 1.3 million to 1.7 million, or about 3 percent of all 53

million school-age children, attend school at home. And the numbers of these

children are growing 7 percent to 15 percent a year, far faster than the

school population, Mr. Ray said.

 

Here in Maryland, where the O'Malleys live, the State Department of

Education said that in the 1990's the number of public school students rose

19 percent, to 850,000, while those registered at home schools jumped to

15,651 from 2,296.

 

Education experts attribute most of the growth to unschooling, the

antithesis of the religion-based image of home schooling, which follows

school-like schedules and relies for curriculums and textbooks of

fundamentalist Christian publishers. Some studies have shown that

home-schooling families have slightly higher-than-average incomes even

though, typically, only one parent can hold a job outside the home.

 

Critics fault home schooling for isolating children. They say it discourages

social interaction and development of the skills of teamwork and

collaboration. They say parents can use it to cover up truancy and, by

keeping their children apart from others, to encourage racism. And they say

unschooling lets children indulge their childish whimsies. Children who want

to participate in conventional school activities, like sports, face a

decision about whether to enter conventional high schools.

 

The National Education Association, the largest teachers union, has adopted

a resolution saying that home schools cannot provide a comprehensive

education and urging that only licensed teachers be permitted to run home

schools.

 

Unschooling parents say they believe that by homing in on their children's

natural talents and curiosity, with texts and curriculums that best capture

their impulse to learn, they can guide them into the three R's when the

children are most ready, not when professional educators say they ought to

be.

 

Billy Greer of Pasadena, Md., who directs the Family Unschoolers Network

with its 3,000 member families, said, "You tend to pay attention to a

child's strengths, rather than their weaknesses, and build them up."

 

Educators credit the word "un schooling" to the late John Holt, an author

and schoolteacher in Cambridge, Mass., who provoked a national controversy

in the 1960's and 1970's with his books "How Children Fail" and "How

Children Learn."

 

In faulting mainstream education, Mr. Holt wrote, "What is essential to

realize is that children learn independently, not in bunches." He urged

"unschooling" and "deschooling" -- removing children from the schools and

teaching them at home. Un schooling has since come to encompass Mr. Holt's

ideas of independent learning.

 

Advocates say that a home climate of informal learning need not preclude a

structure.

 

"Each kid has his own style and gifts," said Mary Hood of Cartersville, Ga.,

who has been teaching five children at home and has written two guide books,

"The Relaxed Home Schooler" and "The Joyful Schooler."

 

"One might need to be floating," Ms. Hood said. "The other might need more

structure."

 

The O'Malleys live in a 140-year-old white clapboard farmhouse on 16 wooded

acres in Silver Spring, between Washington and Baltimore.

 

Scattered amid the living room's underbrush of playthings is a rocking

horse, two children's rocking chairs, a pram for a doll, an upright piano, a

bookcase with World Book encyclopedias, a globe and, on the rug, a Mother

Goose book.

 

Mary O'Malley nurses 1-year-old Brian, and Kathleen, 4, bounds about in a

conical cardboard cap. "I am a princess," she explains. Kevin has set aside

his seventh-grade math text to practice tai chi for a martial arts

tournament.

 

"I do not want to give the impression that we don't do anything," said Mrs.

O'Malley, who has a nursing degree. About the multiplication tables, "I

said, 'Your life will be easier if you learn this.' " About grammar, she

said, "I'll say, 'I think you need to know this.' "

 

But it is best, she said, to let children learn those skills on their own

time. Kevin, for example, did not start reading until he was 10. His mother

and father, a computer services employee of the Food and Drug Administration

in Washington, tried various prods, like encouraging him to find all the K's

on the page of a book and constructing words with Scrabble letters.

 

"We made up games," Mrs. O'Malley said. "But once it becomes tedious or

counterproductive, you put it aside."

 

"Then all of a sudden," she said, "it all came together for him."

 

Kevin said, "I picked up 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.' That's by

C. S. Lewis. I was surprised. I could read a page. Within three months, I

went from 50-page books to 400-page books. I can read a 400-page book in two

days."

 

Kevin has been in classrooms, those of his Roman Catholic church for

religious education.

 

"I was sitting at a desk," he said, "for like an hour and 15 minutes. I

found it so hard to concentrate."

 

His sister Sheila, who started reading at 9, keeps a journal and is absorbed

in the study of undersea creatures, said: "You don't have to do something at

a certain time. You don't get detention. I have never gotten detention in my

life."

 

Nor is she ever tested, graded, ranked, demoted, promoted, scheduled or

required to use texts and workbooks that some board of education deemed the

best for children her age. Neither child has a desk.

 

All 50 states allow parent-conducted home schooling, with varying degrees of

regulation. Two or three times a year, typically, inspectors are sent to the

homes or parents are asked to bring children's workbooks to school offices

for scrutiny.

 

While home-schooled students do not get conventional diplomas, studies of

their performance show that they score at least as well as conventionally

taught students on tests like the College Boards and gain admission to the

most elite universities, like Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. Without

grades or class rankings to guide them, colleges put greater emphasis on

essays, College Boards, advance placement courses that students take in

community colleges and the recommendations of unrelated adults.

 

Lynn Linde, chief of the student services and alternative programs branch at

the Maryland Department of Education, said: "When they go to college, they

seem to be doing well. We haven't done actual research, but the gist of the

anecdotes has been, 'These kids are fine; they're bright kids.' "

 

In Rockville, Md., Al Palmiter, a computer technician, and his wife,

Martine, are rearing two children, Dean, 12, and Olivia, 9.

 

One recent afternoon, Dean and two other 12-year-old boys whom he met

through their parents' home-schooling support group, Alexander Gorman and

Ben Crane-Flatt, were having a snack at the Palmiters' kitchen table.

 

"I'm studying mostly physics, chemistry and astronomy," said Alexander, who

returned to home schooling after a discouraging sixth grade in a

conventional school. "At home school, I can make models, do things with my

hands. At school you just listen."

 

"My school day begins at 7:30 and ends at 3," Alexander said.

 

He also studies math, and he must write reports on subjects of his choosing.

"My most recent report was Mongolia," he said. "I read a lot for pleasure. I

like Harry Potter, Charles Dickens. I'm reading 'Moby Dick' right now."

 

Ben said, "My mom will ask me what I want to study at the beginning of the

year." Once they have settled on a program, he said, "My mom says, 'O.K., I

want you to do nine pages of math, do your English and your chemistry.' " He

is also studying French, in which his mother is fluent.

 

Dean's course load is similar to Ben's. He plays the piano, collects coins,

has a Web page, reads voraciously. He gets up late, at 9. "I have to tell

him he'd better get his breakfast, his phone calls made and his newspaper

read before 11," she said.

 

Home-school routines can change by the month, by the minute even, Ms.

Palmiter said. " 'Mom,' " she said Dean told her one day, " 'I got to go

outside and crush some rocks.' So we had to stop our academics and get a

hammer and break some rocks so he could look at what was inside.

 

"We're trying to bring them into the world, not a building," Ms. Palmiter

said.

 

But for all the children, the biggest issue is what Ms. Palmiter calls "the

big S," for socialization. Dean, she said, is ambivalent about shifting to a

real high school at 14 or 15. Ben, who loves sports, has decided that he

will go to high school.

 

He is an accomplished soccer player, but he said children tease him as a

"home school boy" and more vulgar epithets. As a home schooler, Ben said, "I

don't get to see my friends as often. I only get to see Dean and Alexander

about once a week."

 

But Ms. Palmiter said, "I think I'm more interested in raising really nice

kids." With home schooling, she said, "I think you avoid all the social

problems of high schools."