Talk:Homeschooling

How can I make homeschooling automatically be directed to this article? Elizabeth Lawver 19:41, 14 November 2007 (CST)

By making a redirect. In homeschooling I simply put the text "#REDIRECT [[Home education]]"; however you want to use redirects sparingly so you don't end up with double redirects. --Robert W King 20:22, 14 November 2007 (CST)

Thank you!Elizabeth Lawver 23:52, 14 November 2007 (CST)

run-on sentence

The definition I created, "Home education (also called "homeschooling") is often considered to encompass all forms of education used as a primary means of educating a person of compulsory school age which are not directly controlled by an institution or a professional educator other than the parent or guardian of the student as well as education which is primarily based in the home which is under the control of an institution or a professional educator," is a run-on sentence. I'm going to try to come up with a way to convey this information effectively while splitting up this sentence into sentences of a more manageable size, but if anyone else happens upon this article and has any ideas about how to do this, that would be helpful. Elizabeth Lawver 23:58, 14 November 2007 (CST)

Question on scope of article

Should the scope of this article be narrowed to "Home education in the United States"? The same question would apply to an article on the "History of education". Should there be a separate article on the "History of education in the United States"? James F. Perry 18:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Terminology

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines homeschooling as "the education of children at home by their parents".

This is all well and good, but it disguises the origin of the term in the 1970s in the United States to describe a movement to take back from the schools the traditional role of the family in the education of the young.

The term homeschooling arose at that time specifically with reference to the education of young children of school-age (that is, subject to state compulsory attendance statutes) in the home rather than in public (or private) school settings. To apply the term, as the above dictionary definition invites us to do, outside the context of a society in which compulsory school attendance is regulated by state law is to rip it out of its social, political, and historical context.

(To highlight the problem, we can ask whether it is proper, for example, to say that Joan of Arc was homeschooled? It is somewhat the same problem with the back-application of modern terminology to any personage and time in the past outside the social and political context in which the term arose. Much the same problem would arise were we to ask whether Joan of Arc was a feminist. Or a cross-dresser.)

Home education (meaning learning which takes place outside established institutional settings), on the other hand, would seem to be a much broader concept that could refer to people of any age and in almost any social context.

(Thus, returning to the above example, I think it is proper to say that Joan of Arc was home educated (to the extent that she was educated), but not that she was homeschooled.)

Still, I don't object to a discussion of homeschooling under the rubric of an article on home education provided the introductory section makes clear the use of terminology.

James F. Perry 17:38, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

In an "Issue Brief" published by the National Center for Education Statistics on homeschooling in America [1], the following definition of homeschooling is adopted:

"In this Brief, students are considered to be homeschooled if their parents reported them as being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school . . ."

Thus, the term homeschooling is defined as an alternative to (instead of) institutional schooling (public or private) and, by this definition, makes no sense outside the context of a society with such types of schools (and the compulsory education statutes that go with them). Note that homeschool advocates use the terms homeschooling and home education synonymously.

I am arguing that CZ should not adopt this approach.

James F. Perry 20:28, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Article move - explanation

After posting this explanation, I will move this article to Homeschooling. The reason is to bring the article name into conformity with CZ naming conventions requiring that the most common name be used.

Consulting with a listing of homeschool / home education support groups in WA, OR, and CA, I find 58 using the name homeschool (or some variant thereof), only 12 using home education or home learning.

A check at one local area bookstore revealed numerous book titles all using homeschool or a variant, none using home education. Same at a local area homeschool store which, as if to punctuate the point, uses homeschool in the name of the store.

James F. Perry 02:55, 10 April 2009 (UTC)