In Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the kids keep contact with school and got their assignments by shortwave radio.

OK I read the comments so far, and I'd like to add my direct, first-hand knowledge of Home Schooling, as two of my three children were home schooled for at least part of their elementary education.

Unlike in many other nations, in the United States, it is perfectly legal to decide that you do not want your kids to attend school, and that you will teach them what they need to know yourself.

The United States of America is, after all, 50 "states" which used to mean "countries" - as a result, there is no national standard for what must be taught and how (this is also true of "regular" schooling).

As a result, "homeschooling" isn't one way of doing things, indeed the only thing that we can say for sure that is common for all who home school their children is that they have decided to not participate in the institution of facilities-based learning.

There is a strong correlation in the USA between home schooling and deeply conservative, typically Christian, families. For the most part, they have opted out of the school system because of a perceived conflict with their religious values - for example, many "Young Earth Creationists" do not want their children exposed to science curriculum that they see as conflicting with their belief system, and so they opt to teach in a manner that is consistent with their worldview.

However, while there is a correlation between strongly conservative religious views and homeschooling, it is not a domination of the home school movement. There are also ample secular (non-religious) home schooling families, my family was included in this group. In the group, there is also a feeling of dissonance with the public (and often private) school concept itself - in short, "schooling" is the problem, not education.

John Taylor Gatto wrote extensively on the subject of schools - he was a former teacher and had very passionate feelings about the failings of schools:

His central thesis might be best expressed from this essay:

"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated."

Indeed, we were strongly aligned with John Taylor Gatto personally and for several years - my son and middle daughter both have several years of early education years in home schooling, and while they are now all at the public school, we do not regret our decision.

As far as testing goes, as I had mentioned before, each state has its own laws pertaining to home schooling, where I live, the child was required to keep a journal and pass an assessment of skills on an annual basis, but no "certificates" or anything is issued. For secondary school (high school), if a home schooled child wants a high school diploma, they must pass a "General Equivalency Degree" test (GED)in order to demonstrate that the core skills required of that school district have been met. Other states have different rules. Some states have no particular requirements at all.

Within the homeschooling household, however, there may be no testing at all - in fact, there may be no classes, no curriculum, no specific direction. Adults and others with more experience simply give instruction as the child shows interest and that instruction is led by the interests of the child. This approach - called "unschooling" by many seems anti-intuitive, but I know a few families who not only have "unschooled" all of their children, their children are incredibly smart, competent and accomplished in what we could call "classic" academic skills.

There's more to be said later. Scurrying off to a meeting now.

The historical problem that public education has tried to solve is the masses with neither the money, the time, the energy, the intellect, nor the ability to educate their kids. Public education hasn't been a part of history until… fairly recently in history. What did we have? Massive amount of ignorance, the majority of the population unable to rise in society and get a higher standard of living because they lacked even basic literacy, concentration of wealth and power amongst the few that could afford education, etc.

Yeah, sure, many Americans rose to prominence without any compulsory state schooling. In fact, the same could be said of *everyone* before the advent of public education. They had no choice, because there was no public education. But they were in the tiny minority, and this minority, for the most part, was privileged enough to hire private tutors -- they were all "homeschooled"! If you were the king of Macedon, you could hire Aristotle, the most famous thinker of his day, to be the private tutor for your son Alexander. And if you were poor but you had the mind of an Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin, you could educate yourself. If you were poor or average in intellect, then you were out of luck.

In the larger context of history, homeschooling is a luxury. Parents have to make enough income and have enough free time to teach their kids themselves, or they have to make a lot of income to hire a good tutor for the long run. I know of a Harvard graduate who worked as a live-in tutor the children of a immensely rich family. Servants came to her luxurious apartment in her employer's mansion every morning to open her curtains and to serve her breakfast in bed (if she so desired). Alright, not every homeschooler is this rich, but there is definitely a base income and free time you need to have.

So I find Gatto's quote quite misleading and blind to history.

I did put my kids back in school, you know

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think you will find that the average homeschooling family is middle class, two parents/one income and by no means “wealthy”. It is more about sacrifice than luxury.

I mean, Jeeves forgot to open the curtains this morning and I've been sitting in this dark room all day...

Our reason for home schooling was safety issues first, and secondly the inability of the public school district to provide any sort of special needs help. We moved to get a good public school now and are pleased.

There are organizations that provide testing of the home schooled as well as public schooled to help provide placement info for college etc.

I have no kids, but if I did I certainly wouldn't/couldn't homeschool them. I could do pretty well with English, history, social science, philosophy and science...but anything beyond trig & geometry is out of range, math-wise.

Homeschooling is a very broad topic as we have seen here already. At first, we homeschooled our daughter for some of the aforementioned conservative reasons. At the time we started, my wife was a high school grad with some college and I was recent graduate with a bachelor's degree. We did our research. We checked out close to a hundred different curricula and approaches. We spoke with homeschooling families and how they approached their situation. We decided to follow our hearts and principles and keep our daughter at home. Her academics were fine. She was never interested in sports. We were active enough in church that she was around a ton of kids frequently. As she got older, her character of being a "social" person was manifesting itself. She was not socially handicapped, but she just loved being in crowd and the noise that goes with it. We put her in "real" school in the eighth grade. Her academics never suffered. She was always her own person. She had trouble with some of the other girls (teenage girls are miserable beasts!). All in all, it was probably neutral for her and us.

Our son was a different story. We homeschooled him through the ninth grade. The schooling was again based on our dissatisfaction with the public system. Also, he had, and still has, a sleep deprivation condition since age 7 (he is almost 21 now). We put him in school for one year after I returned to New York. It almost killed him. Since he turned 16 during the school year, we opted to not have him attend school the next fall. New York has compulsory education through age 16. We gathered curricula for him and started on the homeschool path again. Oddly enough, the school system worked with us when we went to get him his GED testing. Due to weird rules (mostly relating to funding) they had (chose) to classify him as a dropout. That allowed him to enter the adult GED program and attend college.

As for "professional qualifications and/or certifications", we knew a family in the military that homeschooled their 6 or 7 children (cannot remember how many they had). The mother was a person for whom learning was a delayed process. They had a daughter that was very smart, two children who were "slow" (her words, not mine), and the others were average, run-of-the-mill learners. She managed to successfully teach the kids because she researched what was best for each kid. She and her husband were fully committed to homeschooling. It worked for them.

In our case and the one just mentioned, the key was we were able to match curriculum to the strengths and needs of our children. Personally, I could care less what the reason for homeschooling is; just be committed to doing it to bring out the best in your kids and give them the best opportunity to learn.

There are many who grind the "socialization" axe. We never really concerned ourselves with it. We were active enough in our church and other things that our kids learned how to behave and interact with a wide range of people. But, to each their own.

So, as you can see, it is a mixed bag no matter how you look at it. Also, you can tell I am an advocate of homeschooling; only if you are going to make any sacrifice to make sure you get the best materials and appropriate curriculum for your child. As far as the expense of specialty equipment; I figured it was worth it for the kids. The only thing that was "expensive" was a microscope. Even that, was not too bad.

As a final point. I was not well-off. My family was a single income military family. The other family was a single income family in the military, too. We were junior enlisted at the time. We hired no tutors. That family used a mix of "off-the-shelf" and individually designed programs. We designed our own curriculum. Many people use pre-designed and packaged curriculum. Most of them are very good. We just chose to design our own. Also, we dug into the books ourselves and helped the kids. Homeschooling is not as expensive as some may purport. Our average annual outlay for curriculum was far less than $500 per student. People spend that much and more on that year-round curse known as soccer. It comes down to a matter of priorities. As with many issues, there are always socio-economic issues.

In the end, it is a convoluted subject, at best.

+1 to Martin Focazio.

Phaedrus, there are many, many excellent "programmed texts", as they like to say, out there. They are designed very well. Some have a "hotline" available that is part of the purchase price of the material. Like Martin said, there are many flavors of homeschooling: from the rigid "school at home" model where kids have assigned times for "classes" to the more free-wheeling "unschooling" approach (of which I am huge fan), and everything in between. The co-ops are very popular.