Meet My Teachers: Mom and Dad

Excellent article in this week's Business Week entitled Meet My Teachers: Mom and Dad, A growing number of affluent parents think they can do better than any school.

I'll grant you the subtitle sounds a little snotty, but the tone of the article as a whole is positive. "No longer the bailiwick of religious fundamentalists or neo-hippies looking to go off the cultural grid, homeschooling is a growing trend among the educated elite. More parents believe that even the best-endowed schools are in an Old Economy death grip in which kids are learning passively when they should be learning actively, especially if they want an edge in the global knowledge economy. "A lot of families are looking at what's happening in public or private school and saying, 'You know what? I could do better, and I'd like to be a bigger part of my kid's life,"' says University of Illinois education professor Christopher Lubienski."

The lone voice of criticism in the article isn't even really a criticism for those in the know: "Schooling in isolation could threaten civic cohesion and diversity of thought, says Stanford University education professor Rob Reich." (emphasis mine)

I absolutely agree with him. What we as homeschoolers need to get across is that homeschooling does not occur in isolation. Even the article points this out in the final paragraph: "The biggest misnomer is the word home since the family travels all over, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to Chicago's Museum of Science & Industry to the world's most active volcano in Hawaii. Morillo's fear was that homeschooling would make her kids' world smaller. But instead, she says, "it's opening it up more."

Well done, Business Week!