Home Schooling

            Home schooling is defined by Preiss (1989) as "the educational alternative in which parents/guardians assume the primary responsibility for the education of their children.
             The home-schooling movement stands as one of the most significant educational developments of the century. The number of American children being taught at home, although minuscule compared to public school enrollments, had grown by the late 1990s from near zero to a near million- (Wagner, 2001, p. 58). Indeed, the rise of homeschooling is one of the most significant trends of the past half-century. The main reason for this reemergence of an old practice is a desire to gain control from the education bureaucrats and reestablish the family as central to a child's learning (Lines, 2000). The homeschooling movement surprised the professional education establishment with its rapid growth. The number of homeschoolers nearly tripled in the five years from 1990-91 to 1995-96 when there were approximately 700,000 homeschoolers (Lines, 2000). Patricia Lines conservatively estimates the number of homeschooled children at approximately 1 million, while less conservative appraisals among homeschooling researchers and associations place the number of homeschooled children at approximately 1.2 million (Welner & Welner, 1999). .
             Homeschooling is definitely not a new practice. The government did not begin to require that states to build public schools and force parents to enroll their children into them until the nineteenth century. Before this time, parents taught their kids in the privacy of their own home. Many families in the 1800s lived in very remote places with few neighbors, so the only chance of kids to receive a formal education was to travel great distances be horse or train to go to school. Many pioneer families just found it easier to teach their children at home so they could work on the farm. Homeschooling was the normal thing to do back in these days.