Here are two more reports, about how home schooling is on the up and up, in Scotland:
The latest figures produced by the Scottish Executive show there were 480 children educated outside school in Scotland, who were known to the authorities, in 2002/03. The number represents a 38% increase compared with 2000/01, when there were 349 children in the same category.Over the past five years, the number of children excluded from Scottish schools for violent behaviour has increased by almost 18%. A study of young people in Glasgow last June revealed that 20% of young boys, including primary children, carried knives to protect themselves.
A spokeswoman for the Home Education Advisory Service (HEAS), told Scotland on Sunday: "The most common reason which people give us for considering home education is fear of violence and bullying at school. They fear that their learning is being disrupted, and that it’s making their lives miserable.
"Many fear that the system is unable to cope and keep the small number of children who cause problems from ruining it for the rest of them.
... and in the USA.
In Florida, the number of home-school students has nearly tripled over the past ten years. Nationally, the United States Department of Education says the number has swelled to more than a million kids. Home-school experts say it's even higher.Oregon researcher Brian Ray, of the National Home Education Research Institute, estimates two million kids are now taught at home.
"In the last four years, we think home schooling has grown at least 30 percent," says Ray. "Study after study, many of which I've done, have shown that home-schooled children are well above average – 15 to 30 percentile points above on standardized achievement tests."
Ray points to last year's first and second place winners of the National Spelling Bee – both home-schooled. And now even Harvard University says it accepts home-schooled applicants.
My bet is that it won't be long before Harvard goes looking for home schooled applicants.
The Harvard bit is really old news. They've admitted homeschoolers for at least a decade, if not longer. I don't know if Harvard actively seeks them out, but many colleges in the US now have a homeschool recruiter in their admissions office. Stanford Univ. (one of the premier colleges here) admits homeschoolers at twice the rate of the general population.
Harvard admitted Grant Colfax -- raised on a homestead hacked out of the Northern California wilderness in the early 1970s -- in 1983. He was called the "Goat Boy" in the national media at the time (one of the family's revenue streams was raising goats), and he's now a doctor and director of HIV prevention studies for the San Francisco department of public health. Two of his three brothers subsequently went to Harvard as well. His parents wrote an excellent book about their experiences called "Hard Times in Paradise".
"My bet is that it won't be long before Harvard goes looking for home schooled applicants."
Ditto British Universities. When NuLab makes it illegal for Universities to recruit more than a miniscule percentage of students from Private Schools (as will surely happen in the name of social justice), the home-ed sector will be the obvious place for universities to recruit undergraduates. Once word gets around of this amongst the aspirational middle classes, it will be interesting to see what happens ....
p.s. "Wrong or missing Security Code" first time I tried to post the above. is there a time-limit on how long each code is valid?
Julius -- next time, try typing the code in after you finish your comment and just before you hit post -- it always works for me that way.
