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The impact of this educational laissez-faire on the children? "Quite marvelous for all of us," says their mother. "They need much less attention and entertainment than other children their age. They're not anxious about whether other people approve of them. They are moving in the direction of becoming truly mature people who have judgments, peacefulness and care for each other." Says her eleven-year-old son: "For some reasons I'm lucky and for some reasons I'm not. I know lots of things other children don't know. I know how to plant seeds and how to grow a garden. Last spring I read Tolkien and all of James Herriot's books. Oh, and I like C.S. Lewis." The boy does concede that he is "not so hot at arithmetic," but he counters: "I ask a lot of questions. That's how you learn. In school you can't ask questions."
To satisfy the local school district, this family has accepted a school "administrator" for their home curriculum, Sheffield's district psychologist Paul Shafiroff, who is responsible for evaluating the children's progress. The boys, he says, "possess skills generally equivalent to their grade level." Shafiroff notes: "More parents would like to do this if they could get the support of the schools."
One advantage cited by many of the parents who teach their own children is the freedom to allow them to pursue a subject for as long as they remain interested. Navy Commander Dennis McCahill, an Annapolis graduate, yanked his four children from their Annapolis, Md., school because "the system clamps down on any originality or creativity." How, he asks, "can one teacher answer all the children's questions when there's one teacher for 25 or 30 children? If a child is really interested in geography or any particular topic, after one hour he is expected to put away whatever he is doing and start something new."
The burdens imposed by home schooling can be formidable. "I wouldn't recommend it to everyone," says Housewife Eileen Trombly of Niantic, Conn., who for a time schooled all three of her daughters at home. "The house went to pot," she recalls. "The kids were home all the time." Then too there is the problem of disapproval from neighbors. "People in the community think we're fanatics," says Robert Sessions, a philosophy teacher at Iowa's Luther College, "when we're really pretty ordinary people."