Home schooling gets covered well by Newsweek

In 1998 the growing home schooling got fair & balanced treatment instead of the mainstream media's standard derision. My weekly take on America's news, culture and ideas -- from exactly 30 years ago.

Magazines: Grading home schooling

Thursday, October 01, 1998

By Bill Steigerwald, Post Gazette Columnist

Home schooling has finally arrived as a revolutionary movement worth worrying about.

Home schooling used to be dismissed as some loopy, antisocial idea that only a few fundamentalist Christians, whacked-out hippies and scary militia families in underdeveloped states put into practice.

Now it's become so mainstream that it's worthy of a Newsweek cover story.

Newsweek's "Learning at Home: Does It Pass the Test?" is not exactly first with the news that parents of all socioeconomic and political stripes are now schooling their kids at home.

Once upon a time - 10 years ago - the idea that you, a lowly parent, could possibly teach your own kids at home was laughed at or pitied - not to mention against the law in most corners of America.

But the number of home schooled kids in America has been growing like crazy, up from maybe 300,000 in 1980 to as high as 1.5 million by some estimates. Today, everyone has a neighbor, relative or favorite PG magazine columnist who home schools his kids.

As Newsweek shows, parents - mothers primarily - have seized control of their children's education for a wide variety of reasons. Some think schools are too dangerous, too secular, too inept or too much like minimum-security prisons. Some merely want to keep their families closer or want their kids to have more free time to pursue their own interests.

Newsweek provides a lot of helpful information to parents who might want to teach their own. And Newsweek points out the obvious - that home schooling is not for everyone and that no one really knows yet whether it works for society in the long run.

One person who doesn't need an academic study to certify the efficacy of home schooling is David Guterson, the author of "Snow Falling on Cedars." In 1992, Guterson - a public school teacher who home schools his kids - wrote "Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense."

As he says in his essay in Newsweek, home schooling is tough work, fraught with problems and complexities and highs and lows. But, he says, the main reason it has joined the mainstream since 1992 is that it "simply works. Home schoolers, on the whole, are soundly educated, perform well on standardized tests, go on to attend good colleges and universities and, as adults, thrive variously."

Newsweek is clearly nervous about appearing to endorse such a radical concept.

But it does a good, fair-minded job of pointing out the basic upsides and downsides of a grass-roots revolution, that, like vouchers and charter schools, is undermining the walls of education-as-we-know-it.

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Ranking the world's wealthiest people each year is probably Forbes' best marketing gimmick, and the folks who publish it are getting more mileage out of the wealth-ranking idea all the time.

For the second year in a row Forbes ASAP, the magazine's occasional supplement that focuses on business and the digital revolution, lists "Technology's 100 Wealthiest" guys (97) and gals (3).

Bad Billy Gates, of course, hogs No. 1, based on Aug. 3 stock market values. But the number of entrepreneurs who owe their millions to the Internet jumped from eight to 28 this year. Billionaires are up four to 15, but no one is within $40 billion of Mr. Microsoft, who each day loses or gains the annual GNP of Chad on his stock holdings.

If you think Gates is too rich for his britches, hold on. American Heritage, another product of the House of Forbes, puts him into his proper historic place in its October listing, and handy profiling, of our 40 all-time wealthiest plutocrats.

In "The American Heritage 40," which uses a formula to compare each fortune at the time of death with America's GNP at the time, Gates' $61.7 billion makes him a mere No. 5.

That puts him far behind oily John D. Rockefeller ($190 billion), steely Andrew Carnegie ($100 billion), trainy Cornelius Vanderbilt ($96 billion) and furry John Jacob Astor ($78 billion). But Gates (and No. 13 Warren Buffet and No. 22 Paul Allen) have one thing going for them that all Rockefeller's money can't buy - they're still alive.