Home education
You teach them, with a plan.
Education at home with a structure you choose — bought curriculum, your own sequence, or a co-operative with other families. It gives complete control over pace, content and values, and it converts one parent's time into the school. The outcome research is genuinely good and almost entirely drawn from self-selected families, so it should be read as what is possible rather than as what is typical.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- One adult's working life, in most arrangements
- Building a social world deliberately, since it does not arrive with the building
- Teaching subjects you are not confident in, for years
- A plan for the transition back, if there ever is one
How it gets misread
Assumed to be ideological. In most countries the commonest stated reason is a specific child whose school was not working, rather than a position about schooling.
Where it stands
Every position with the source it was read from, and the pale band is how much internal variation the approach genuinely tolerates. A wide band is not vagueness — it means the texts in this family really do disagree with each other about that axis.
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: The Well-Trained Mind
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
The highest parent-time demand in the instrument by a wide margin. Everything else here is a variation on a school.
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Source: A Review of Research on Homeschooling
What to read
The Well-Trained Mind — Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise
The most used practical curriculum guide for structured home education.
A Review of Research on Homeschooling — Brian Ray
The outcome research. Read it aware that the samples are self-selected and the author advocates.
Compared with
Sources for this row
A Review of Research on Homeschooling
Brian Ray, National Home Education Research Institute. The main body of homeschooling outcome research. Cited with the caveat that almost all of it is on self-selected samples and the author is an advocate — which is the honest state of this literature.
The Well-Trained Mind
Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise, Norton, 4th ed. 2016. The standard modern statement of classical education: the trivium, a fixed sequence, and memorisation before analysis.