The next generation of home educators

One of the parents commenting here is unusual in that she was herself home educated. I have been wondering lately what the feeling of home educated children is towards not being taught in school like everybody else. In particular, I was curious to know of any of the older home educated children or young people have expressed any interest or desire in educating their own children in this way.

The public pronouncements of some of the more well known home educated children are not encouraging. In recent times , We have heard people like Ruth Lawrence and Edith Stern say that they wish their own children to have 'normal' childhoods; which clearly suggests a degree of dissatisfaction with the way that they were raised. However, such people are probably not typical of home educated children. Like John Stuart Mill, they were taught intensively by their fathers and the education they received was probably not a common one in the British home education scene today. My own daughter does not really care for babies and children and has said that if she had one then she would want others to take care of it as much as possible!

If the experience of home education is a good one for children, then I should think that quite a few would be eager to repeat this sort of childrearing when they had kids of their own. I have heard of one or two cases in the USA and, as I say, one of the people on here belongs to this category, but that seems to be all. Have other people's children ever expressed any thoughts on this? There must be thousands of young people in their early twenties who were educated in this way and the numbers are swelling every year. Will we will be seeing the emergence of a family tradition of home educating? I am thinking that this would be a real endorsement of the practice; that those upon whom it was used, then chose to use it themselves upon their own children. Does anybody know of such cases? With an estimated eighty thousand or so home educated children, it must surely be happening from time to time.