Latest / Homeschool Insights - Biblical Home Education Inspiration in Under 10 Minutes! / What Are We Losing in the Modern Homeschool Movement? — Israel Wayne
Transcript
- speaker-0: Prior to COVID, approximately ⁓ two thirds of all homeschoolers were doing so for religious reasons. And now post COVID it's only one third that are doing so for religious reasons. So we've really had a shift. It's really not the Christian homeschool community anymore. speaker-1: Just so happy to have you here. It was great getting to see you at Chia of California at one of the more recent ⁓ you know, homeschool events that we were both at at the same time. And man, you kind of came off of that and you wrote, I guess it's not just because of Chia, but you came off a bunch of your speaking things. And you wrote a really great Facebook post all about kind of the state of homeschooling from your perspective. And that really caught our attention. And we wanted to bring you on to talk about it. So what led you to write that Facebook post about the state of home schooling? speaker-0: I think a lot of things have changed in the homeschooling movement, especially since COVID. We've had a revolution that's happened in terms of ⁓ parents choosing to exit the government school system for lots of different alternative forms of education. but I I think there's some fundamental differences between the homeschooling movement of today and what it was when my family started. Now, my family started actually before. The beginning of the modern day homeschooling movement. ⁓ my mother started homeschooling my older sister and myself in 1978. And the modern day homeschool movement started in 1983. So we were about five years out ahead of that. And if you look at the studies that have been done on homeschooling in the late 1970s, people estimate that in the United States there were possibly a few thousand families. ⁓ that seems really high to me, honestly. ⁓ because of the fact that it was so decentralized, like there was no coherence to it. No one knew anyone else who was doing it. These were just families ⁓ very independent of each other. ⁓ and I think that would probably include some families who were celebrities, who had hired tutors, and you know, it'd just be ⁓ a lot of things that were not what what we would consider today to be traditional homeschooling. ⁓ but the the unschooling movement started about nineteen seventy-seven. That was kind of a secular ⁓ movement of people who had come out of the hippie movement mostly. ⁓ and it just were anti-establishment, anti-government. They're like, you can't tell me how to raise my child. And so you had some of those families that were beginning with John Holt and the growing without schooling movement and all that. But the modern Christian homeschool movement began about 1983. ⁓ nineteen eighty-eight, my mother started publishing a national magazine on homeschooling. So I grew up not just being homeschooled, but kind of being on the national leadership side of homeschooling and knowing a lot of the ⁓ pioneers and influencers, the authors and conference speakers of the nineteen eighties and nineties and and so on. And her magazine actually kind of provided a platform for a lot of the voices that became well known and established in the nineties, two thousands, two thousand tens and so on. So I actually started working for her publication in 1993. I came on as marketing director and spent the next 20 years ⁓ working for a national homeschool publication. And my day job was interfacing with curriculum publishers. ⁓ and and also I was a conference speaker and author. I'd written my first book on homeschooling in 2000. And so I've spent my whole adult life really interfacing on a lot of different levels with the homeschool community as a publisher, as a speaker, author, vendor. ⁓ I've worked in state leadership. I'm ⁓ current board member and vice president for the Michigan State Homeschool Association. So I've had a lot of different capacities in which I've watched this whole thing emerge and grow and develop from a handful of families in the late 1970s to Today, the latest statistics that we have from the National Home Education Research Institute puts ⁓ the number of homeschool students at about 3.4 million. And so it's really grown to something ⁓ very substantive, but there are some sizable differences, I think, in the motivations of why people are homeschooling, what they're looking for. And then there's kind of an industry that's grown up around all of this, ⁓ which isn't intrinsically wrong or bad. ⁓ but it it definitely is presenting some new challenges that I think ⁓ we need to make sure that we're considering ⁓ because anytime you add something and gain something you also lose things. And some of the things that I fear that we're losing are things that are too valuable for us to lose. speaker-2: This episode of Homeschool Insights is brought to you by Liberty HealthShare. Choosing to homeschool is about making intentional decisions for your family. Liberty HealthShare is another way families across the country are choosing a different path, one that offers a community-centered approach to health care cost sharing that can help you keep more of your hard-earned dollars while getting the medical care your family needs. Learn more at LibertyHealthShare.org. That's LibertyHealthShare.org.