To homeschool or not to homeschool, that may be your question. And that only leads to more questions: How do I know if I should or not? What should I even start to think about? What about curriculum? If you have at all considered homeschooling these questions have probably run through your mind.
Many parents choose to teach their children at home, instead of enrolling them and making them study within the formal settings of public or private schools. With homeschooling, the parents take full responsibility of their children’s education. It is intense parenting, as parents spend more time with their children, doing the hard work and having the patience to educate their kids. Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling, reveals that homeschooling, which was used to be popular in rural areas, is now being practiced widely in America’s cities as well, with children of secular, highly educated professionals as students. Advances in digital learning and availability of resources over the internet also make homeschooling easier and more effective than ever.
Homeschoolers are actually not the easiest marketing targets in general. You might think that we are such a specific subset of the population that we basically have a marketing bullseye on our foreheads, but the truth is that people homeschool their children for such a wide variety of reasons that figuring out where we are coming from can be a full-time job in itself. The one thing homeschoolers DO have in common is their belief that by homeschooling, they are providing a customized education for their child.