Homeschooling or home schooling, also known as home education or elective home education (EHE), is the education of school-aged children at home or a variety of places other than school. Usually conducted by a parent, tutor, or an online teacher, many homeschool families use less formal, more personalized methods of learning that are not always found in schools. The actual practice of homeschooling can look very different. The spectrum ranges from highly structured forms based on traditional school lessons to more open, free forms such as unschooling, which is a lesson- and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Some families who initially attended a school go through a deschool phase to break away from their school habits and prepare for homeschooling. While "homeschooling" is the term commonly used in North America, "home education" is primarily used in Europe and many Commonwealth countries.
The philosophy of education examines the goals, forms, methods, and meaning of education. The term is used to describe both fundamental philosophical analysis of these themes and the description or analysis of particular pedagogical approaches. Considerations of how the profession relates to broader philosophical or sociocultural contexts may be included. The philosophy of education thus overlaps with the field of education and applied philosophy.
Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschoolers learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Often considered a lesson- and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling, unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, fixed times at which learning should take place, conventional grading methods in standardized tests, forced contact with children in their own age group, the compulsion to do homework, regardless of whether it helps you in your individual situation, the effectiveness of listening to and obeying the orders of one authority figure for several hours each day, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling and, specifically, the unschooling approach, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
Grace Llewellyn is an American educator, author, and publisher in the fields of youth liberation, unschooling and homeschooling. She is the founder of Lowry House Publishers, founder/director of Not Back To School Camp, and founder/director of The Hive: Self-Directed Learning for Teens
An alternative school is an educational establishment with a curriculum and methods that are nontraditional. Such schools offer a wide range of philosophies and teaching methods; some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, while others are more ad hoc assemblies of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education.
Alternative education encompasses many pedagogical approaches differing from mainstream pedagogy. Such alternative learning environments may be found within state, charter, and independent schools as well as home-based learning environments. Many educational alternatives emphasize small class sizes, close relationships between students and teachers and a sense of community.
Sandra Dee was an American actress. Dee began her career as a child model, working first in commercials, and then film in her teenage years. Best known for her portrayal of ingénues, Dee earned a Golden Globe Award as one of the year's most promising newcomers for her performance in Robert Wise's Until They Sail (1958). She became a teenage star for her subsequent performances in Imitation of Life and Gidget, which made her a household name.
John Taylor Gatto was an American author and school teacher. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, which is sometimes considered to be his magnum opus.
Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall, which has since gone on to become a significant project with the formation of Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL), a cooperative effort between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation, employed in some 300 'learning stations', covering some 300,000 children in India and several African countries.
Deschooling is a term invented by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. Today, the word is mainly used by homeschoolers, especially unschoolers, to refer to the transition process that children and parents go through when they leave the school system in order to start homeschooling. It is a crucial process that is the basis for homeschooling to work, in which children should slowly break out of their school routine and mentality, develop the ability to learn via self-determination again, and find interests to decide what they want to learn in their first homeschool days. Depending on the type of person and time the child spent in the school system, this phase can last different lengths of time and may have different effects on the behavior of children. Especially in the first days of deschooling, it is often the case that children mainly want to recover from the school surroundings and therefore will generally sleep very long and refuse any kind of intentional learning and instead search for substitute satisfactions like watching TV or playing video games, very similar to the behavior during early school holidays. Moving on in this transition process, children may feel bored or cannot cope well with the missing daily structure, until they eventually find out how to make use of their time and freedom to find interests, which in the best case results in them voluntarily informing themselves about certain things they're interested in, whereupon homeschooling can start.
BrainPop is a group of educational websites with over 1,000 short animated movies for students in grades K-12, together with quizzes and related materials, covering the subjects of science, social studies, English, math, engineering and technology, health, and arts and music. BrainPop is used in more than 25% of U.S. schools and also offers subscriptions for families and homeschoolers. It is also used in schools in Mexico, France, Spain, Israel and several other countries, where it offers videos in local languages that are designed for students in those countries. BrainPop is available by subscription but has some free content, including a movie of the day, several free movies from each topic area, educators materials, including lesson plans, and an extensive library of educational games called GameUp. Its free smartphone and tablet application accesses BrainPop's free and subscription content.
Angela Bowie is an American model, actress and journalist who, along with her ex-husband David Bowie, influenced the glam rock culture and fashion of the 1970s.
Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science and humor. As of 2016, she has published seven books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016).
George Dawson was called "America's favorite poster child for literacy" after learning to read at the age of 98. His life story, Life Is So Good, was published in 2000.
Wendy Priesnitz is a Canadian alternative education and environmental advocate. She was leader of the Green Party of Canada from July 1996 to January 1997, when she abruptly resigned.
Mary Pride is an American author and magazine producer on homeschooling and Christian topics. She is best known for her homeschooling works, but has also written on women’s roles, computer technology in education, parental rights, and new age thought from a conservative evangelical perspective. For her role in authoring guides for the homeschooling movement, Pride has been described as "the queen of the home school movement" and as a "homeschooling guru". Stemming from her first book, The Way Home, she is also considered an activist in the Christian Quiverfull movement.
The legality of homeschooling in India and a plethora of alternative education schools spread over different states has been debated by educators, lawmakers, and parents since the passing of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) which makes formal education a fundamental right of every child between the ages of 6 to 14 and specifies minimum norms for schools. While the legality of homeschooling still remains a grey area, there have been petitions by parents and alternate schools in the past for granting relief. As per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which India is a signatory, quote: "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."
The School of Hard Knocks is an idiomatic phrase meaning the education one gets from life's usually negative experiences, often contrasted with formal education. The term originated in the United States; its earliest documented use was in 1870 in the book The Men Who Advertise:
... his misfortunes were largely owing to the inexperience of youth. Trained, however, in the school of hard knocks, he now had learned the theory of success".
The Albany Free School is the oldest independent, inner-city alternative school in the United States. Founded by Mary Leue in 1969 based on the English Summerhill School philosophy, the free school lets students learn at their own pace. It has no grades, tests, or firm schedule: students design their own daily plans for learning. The school is self-governed through a weekly, democratic all-school meeting run by students in Robert's Rules. Students and staff alike receive one equal vote apiece. Unlike Summerhill-style schools, the Albany Free School is a day school that serves predominantly working-class children. Nearly 80 percent of the school is eligible for reduced-price meals in the public schools. About 60 students between the ages of three and fourteen attend, and are staffed by six full-time teachers and a number of volunteers.
