Home Schooling

            
             Home schooling is a method of education through which the parents take sole responsibility to oversee the entire education of their children in a personal, direct manner. It is a one-on-one tutorial method of education using the parents as teachers/tutors and most often takes place within the home of the students. Today between half a million and one and a half million students in the United States are believed to participate in home schooling education. Twenty years earlier only 12,500 children were involved in being home schooled. Most people have given credit for the increase in the number of home schooling to the growth of fundamentalist Christianity, although no one will ever know for certain.
             There can be many reasons as to why a family chooses this form of education for their children. In urban areas the lack of school safety may persuade parents to educate their children in the security of their own homes. This way their children will be safe from guns, and violence. Some parents are dissatisfied with the quality and lack of responsiveness of schools, and home schooling provides them with a chance to initiate their ideas about education, and to test their own teaching skills. Another reason why some families choose to home school their children is because of finances. For example, In some two-parent working families the income earned by one parent is consumed by the high cost of child-care. In such cases a parent is readily agreeable to become a home teacher, and the family might not lose any real income. Other parents" motives for withdrawing their children from school are because of racism. Anti-Semitism, or another hateful reason. The principal reason, however, is that home schooling offers freedom, along with responsibility, to make their own decisions regarding how they wish their children to live and learn. Whatever initially leads parents to make this choice, home schooling nearly always turns into something far more than an alternative education choice, it becomes a lifestyle choice of personal responsibility and freedom and within a close family life, incredible joy.