by Michael Smoker

Created on: August 28, 2010

Home education has become an established practice in the United States. Initiated by parent concerns about the reputation of public schools for low performance and poor safety, home schooling grew in preponderance during the 1990s and '00s until, today, it is an established structure within society. Parents wishing to home school their children can now earn various teaching certificates from accreditation bodies. To counteract the concern that home-educated children don't have an opportunity to socialize properly, home schooling societies have formed, and these days organized group extracurricular activities for home-schooled children are common. If a family is large, the six or more children receiving home schooling can enjoy an atmosphere similar to the old one-room schoolhouse. Parent-teachers who wish to introduce subjects not normally taught in public school, such as Latin or Greek, or who wish their children's education to have a strong religious focus, may also prefer to home school their children.

Basic home education was the norm for many thousands of years, as most people worked at home and received elementary instruction from parents and relatives. This instruction, however, was not structured and nationally organized. Early grades schooling outside the home, in organized classrooms with a professional teacher, began only a couple of hundred years ago. Today's move toward home schooling reflects a blend of traditional parent-child education practices and formal institutional education. Home schooling often involves set "class" times and rooms, assignments, grading, testing, and government accreditation of both the parent-teacher and the pupil. As a result, the differences between home education and institutional education are not as great as might be supposed.

Today's home education is driven by a factor that drives many things: money. Parents concerned about having their children educated in public schools can sometimes send them to private schools, but such schools are often expensive. Home education provides an affordable alternative.

The value of home schooling versus institutional public schooling often depends on how much the parent-teacher is willing-and able-to put into it. Home schooling several children within a family is a time-consuming job requiring great preparation, and households in which all adult members work might not be able to commit enough time to it. If they can, home schooling offers the advantage of smaller class size, greater possibility of individual instruction and tutoring, and the introduction of unorthodox subjects not offered in public school. The main advantages of public school is that it typically costs nothing and gives the parent time away from her children where the children still remain supervised.

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