Quotes of the Day

It was several months before anastasia was born that her parents decided she wouldn't be going to school. Her mother, Katharina Russell-Head, had driven the idea, doubtful that schooling was the best way for children to learn. Without instruction, she reasoned, infants accomplish the astonishing feats of learning to walk and talk. "I wondered what would happen if you applied that same philosophy - just letting them be - to children after the age of five," she says. "Would they continue to do their job as children?" There's a twist in Russell-Head's case. A schoolteacher in Melbourne for 10 years before Anastasia came along, she might have been expected to regard teaching as a job best done by professionals. But that's not her view at all. While teacher training is worthwhile, she says, its main benefit is to prepare trainees for tutoring large groups. "Anyone can teach one-on-one," she says. "And my method wasn't really teaching, anyway. It was just being there." Academically, Anastasia seemed to thrive at home, an impression confirmed when - curious about school and keen to develop her musical talent - she started at the somewhat alternative Melbourne Rudolf Steiner School in Year 10. "She immediately excelled in everything," her mother says. "But after two weeks she came home and said, 'Mum, do you mind if I stop being top in everything? It's embarrassing.'" Anastasia is now 27 and concert manager at the Victorian College of the Arts. With her parents and sisters, she was a pioneer in a field that has grown markedly in Australia and New Zealand since the 1970s, when homeschooling reappeared after an absence of more than a century. Because a portion of homeschooling families choose not to tell authorities what they're doing, no one knows exactly how many children are involved in it. In Australia, estimates range from between 0.2% and 2% of the school-age population. Analysis of available numbers suggests the true figure is around 0.5% - or about 10,000 to 20,000 kids.

On the whole, New Zealand's roughly 6,000 homeschooling parents are a contented lot, pocketing a government allowance of up to $NZ743 for each child they educate themselves. There's no such grant in Australia, where, although homeschooling is legal, many practitioners feel marginalized. In Victoria, home educators are protesting parts of the state government's proposed new Education Act, under which they'll be required to register with authorities from next year. For now, Victoria remains the only place in Australia where no such obligation exists. It's a freedom they'll fight to retain, say prominent homeschoolers, who argue parents have a right to educate their children without interference from the state.

Spats over registration are perhaps the least interesting element of homeschooling, which raises many of the most basic questions about the needs of children. Most people's gut reaction is that children simply must go to school. Perhaps parents can look after the three Rs, they say, but nothing beats school for preparing the child for life beyond home. There's probably some truth in that. Yet it's fair to ask why, as a society, we assume that a minimum of 10 years at school is appropriate for all children any more than a spell in the Army is right for all 18-year-old males. Homeschoolers are not "school bashers," says Terry Harding, principal of the Australian Christian Academy, the country's largest homeschooling organization. "They see schools as a wonderful community service. But they also want what (homeschoolers) do recognized as a new educational phenomenon." Others say homeschooling is more than that - a glimpse into the future of education.

In fact, ripping into schooling is something homeschoolers have done with vigor and eloquence. "There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school," wrote the partly home-educated George Bernard Shaw. "It is a prison (where teachers) discourse without charm on subjects they don't understand and don't care about." Shaw's sentiment lives on in Sydney mother Mujahidah Flint, who withdrew two of her daughters from their Muslim school before the older one had finished Year 2. Flint felt the school wasn't honoring Islamic values, among other failings. Later, her view of school soured as she read the works of the American John Taylor Gatto, a former prizewinning teacher who lectures on what he calls the "tyranny of compulsory schooling." Gatto portrays schooling as an instrument of social engineering where children are taught to know their place. Flint at first doubted her ability to teach Aleah, now 15, and Tahirrah, 13. Today, she and the girls say the arrangement has worked fine. "I've become really anti-school," Flint says. "I just don't believe it suits the majority of students."

Once upon a time, homeschooling ruled. In colonial Australia, education occurred in the family home or in dame schools, where a benevolent woman taught several children for a few hours a day in her home. In 1880, when less than a third of New South Wales children received schooling, the state's Premier, Henry Parkes, pushed through the Public Instruction Act, establishing free, secular and compulsory education. School has been seen as the place for kids to learn ever since. But homeschoolers are now lobbing water bombs at that status quo.

John Barratt-Peacock has looked more closely than any other Australian into why parents choose homeschooling. Religion (or "world view") plays a role as often as not, says the former teacher, though its influence isn't straightforward. He tells of two fathers who each withdrew their daughter from the same Year 4 class in northern Tasmania: one felt too much time was being wasted on Easter and Christmas frippery; the other objected to the humanistic curriculum, "so that teacher was damned either way." Some parents act on the view that the drudgery of school dulls children's desire to learn. Others recognize that while a teacher in charge of 30 children has no hope of catering to their different levels of intelligence and motivation (never mind their preferences on light and noise, posture and the scheduling of breaks), parents responsible for a much smaller group - their own children - can and do.

Home educators no doubt have a heightened sense of parental responsibility. While critics dismiss them as oddballs, no one could accuse these parents of taking the easy option. By rejecting school, they commit to a plan that will diminish their earning power and personal freedom for years to come. "There's nothing more artificial in the whole world than a classroom," says Craig Smith, a homeschooling father of eight in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His and wife Barbara's experience mirrors that of many families: having spent the first year or two of home education trying to duplicate the classroom scene, the Smiths nowadays largely eschew anything resembling lessons. Their view is that children need intensive one-on-one tuition to master the three Rs, but thereafter only guidance and access to books. The jovial Smith plonks his youngsters on his knees and tells them news and stories. They go to church twice on Sundays and travel often within New Zealand and occasionally overseas. Three times a day they eat together as a family. "Visitors will say, 'You're not doing any schooling at all!' I'll say, 'You're correct. However, the children are learning heaps, and they're learning it in the context of everyday life.'"

Authorities don't object to the world-is-my-classroom approach. So long as parents appear to be committed to their child's education, getting registered as a home educator is usually a formality. "The few who are knocked back," says Colleen Strange, Sydney-based founder of the Home Education Association, "haven't the slightest idea what they're doing." Registration comes up for renewal every year or two - when, in most parts of Australia, a bureaucrat will pay a visit to check that the child is making progress. It may be interesting to ponder how much you've retained of what you learned at school. Those who've forgotten umpteen mathematical formulas and the periodic table are generally none the worse for it. Though there's much to be said for a broad education, there's also merit in the view that children should be free to explore what interests them. Mujahidah Flint's daughter Tahirrah reads encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun. "I don't like dumb, funny books," she says. "I like the classics . . . Dickens, Kipling." At 10, she wrote her first book; her latest follows a troubled teen whose parents decide to homeschool her. Tahirrah has a clear picture of her future: teaching English in Turkey, her father's homeland, while continuing to write novels. And much of her learning is geared toward that goal.

Sean Devenish's parents withdrew him from his Perth school 10 years ago when he was in Year 5. A bright boy, "I'd finish a task," he says, "then wait for the rest of the kids to catch up." His sister Joanne, meanwhile, was struggling in Year 3 and feeling stupid, and her parents pulled her out at the same time. Today, in their new home in Colebrook, north of Hobart, none of the Devenishes' eight children attends formal classes. "We help them excel at what they're good at and work on their weaknesses," says mother Helen. Joanne, she adds, never took to intellectual pursuits, but at 18 she sews and bakes bread and helps her six-year-old sister learn to read. So how do homeschooled kids turn out? Pretty well, it seems. They're ineligible to sit for exams such as the N.S.W. Higher School Certificate or New Zealand's 7th Form Bursary, which would indicate how they stack up academically against their traditionally schooled peers. However, numerous studies, mainly American, have given homeschooled children a glowing report card: better abstract thinking and language skills, above average in all the main subjects. While much of this research was commissioned by homeschooling organizations, few experts argue against the practice on academic grounds. "Homeschooling can often produce very smart kids," says psychologist Bob Murray - largely because learning becomes a way to please their parents.

Universities have a discretionary power to accept applicants without entry scores, so homeschooling isn't necessarily an impediment to tertiary study. Indeed, a high proportion of the homeschooled just keep on studying, often well into their 20s. Why? Perhaps their childhood experience fires a profound love of learning. Or does their sheltered upbringing cause them to delay the leap into a scary world? The most persistent objection to home education is that it denies its charges the socializing experience of school. "Living in the community, being with other children . . . these are vital parts of a normal life for a child," says Sharryn Brownlee, immediate past president of the N.S.W. Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations. Schools aren't perfect, she adds. But nor is life. "You have to give the child the opportunity to learn and grow."

Asking someone involved in homeschooling whether it stunts children's social growth elicits much eye rolling, and a sigh-laden explanation of where you've gone wrong. It's all about false assumptions. You think homeschooled children never meet other kids? They meet them all the time, they protest - at ballet class, at church, on excursions arranged by and for homeschoolers. You think children mingle widely at school? School culture virtually precludes any but the most cursory contacts between children of different ages. You think all children are happy at school? Many spend years feeling anxious and excluded, victims of bullying or just their peers' natural insensitivity. And what else does school entail? Exposure to the juggernaut of peer pressure, to alcohol, recreational drugs and underage sex, to the myriad maladies that will bleed young minds of their innocence. "This argument that homeschooled children suffer socially is the biggest furphy," says the H.E.A.'s Strange. "Homeschooled children are better socialized. They're respectful. They speak confidently to all kinds of people. And they play easily with children younger and older than themselves."

Listening to homeschooling parents, it can seem that some of what they regard as depravity and rebellion is just youth asserting its independence. There's a bigger issue here that advocates of homeschooling tend to skirt. Socialization is too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to whether a child is sweet-natured and has a few chums. School does no less than expose children to the diversity of human nature. It's where they make, over the course of a decade, thousands of acquaintances. They might not have been friends with the weird kid, the brainiac, the pretty boy, the bully or the one whose sister got expelled, but they're more complete - and less vulnerable - for having known them. It's this vast network of acquaintances that helps to shrink and demystify the wider world, making it easier, when the time comes, to join it.

Other misgivings about homeschooling are as hard to shake. The Australian Christian Academy recommends a curriculum called Accelerated Christian Education, in which creationism is taught alongside evolution as science. Promotional material for the Muslim Education Network of Australia includes the line, "By ensuring the quality of our children's education we may be able to help save our children and ourselves from the hellfire." In her western Sydney home, Mujahidah Flint explains how important it is not to believe everything you read. Later, discussing 9/11, she and her daughters mention some material they've seen on the Internet: did their visitor know that hundreds of Jews who worked in the World Trade Center might have been told not to come to work that day? Homeschooling will never be the norm, but it's a pointer to the future of organized learning, argues researcher Barratt-Peacock. The days when the great storerooms of information were the university libraries are fading. The Internet has brought something approaching the totality of mankind's knowledge into the home, dismantling the barriers that limited people's choices about where and what they could study. In the new global village, Barratt-Peacock wonders, how long before a teenager in Christchurch, working from the computer in his bedroom, can attain a Harvard degree? "The idea of learning only in a large, formal institution with lots of other people . . . that is going to change." It's hard for outsiders to accept home education, which challenges so many fixed ideas. Teachers teach and parents raise. School is a societal glue. Brothers and sisters singing together is a little too twee. If society's aim with children is to help them become decent, happy and employable, there's little concrete evidence to suggest that homeschooling is a more flawed way of trying to achieve it than packing them off to school when they hit age five. And yet the unease persists. One day, you pass a primary school where a bunch of 10-year-olds of all colors and shapes are having a physical education class in the autumn sunshine. Within the space of a few minutes you watch them encourage and console one another, succeed and fail, concentrate like demons and muck about amid noise and mirth. And you have to wonder, whatever the arguments to the contrary: Is this a snapshot of something - school life - that children could really be better off without?

• Daniel Williams
• Growing numbers of parents are giving up on school and teaching their kids at home. Are they misguided, or have they found a better route to learning?