Early in January, children across the country bundle into snowsuits and return to their classrooms after the midwinter break. But not all children. In Michigan, Andy and Amy Finstrom work on their addition tables, memorize their spelling words, and read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House at home around the kitchen table. In New York, Ishmael and Vita Wallace sandwich German lessons in between keyboard practice and chamber music rehearsals. In the remote Alaskan wilds, the Hamon children use scraps of firewood to piece together a small-scale log cabin before starting their reading assignments. In each home, parents are the teachers.
In a trend that transcends cultural, economic, and geographic boundaries, thousands of families are choosing to teach their children at home. Their reasons vary from wanting a one-to-one relationship between teacher and student, to fear of violence, overcrowding, and busing that can be part of public education. "The reasons to home educate are as varied as the people doing it," says Susannah Sheffer of the Boston-based "Growing Without Schooling " organization. "Home-school parents want to be with their children; to watch them learn; to decide what and when and how; to be able to guide their religious training if they want to; to help their children develop their interests in music or apprentice themselves [in] an occupation."
On Monday morning at seven o'clock most of the children who live across from the park on Irving Place in the heart of Ithaca, New York, are stuffing their homework paper and gym suits into backpacks for the trek to the corner school bus stop. But at the house directly across from the park, fifteen-year-old Ishmael Wallace is sitting down at the Steinway Grand in his studio to work on the latest opera that he has been commissioned to compose. Upstairs, his eleven-year-old sister, Vita, works at the piano that her great-grandmother once played. Midmorning she switches to violin and her mother, Nancy, accompanies her for the two-hour practice session.
When Ishmael was six years old and his family was living in rural New Hampshire, he was eager to start first grade. He was an avid reader, especially tales from history, and he enjoyed writing stories. Ishmael's parents though that he would be an easy child to teach, but "from day one, he was miserable," Nancy Wallace reports. "His teacher would not allow him to read. She would not let him put pencil to paper. He just sort of collapsed. We told him, 'Next year will be better.'" When his second-grade teacher also discouraged Ishmael's reading and writing after he outpaced his peers, his parents became desperate and pulled him out of school.
"At first we thought of it as an experiment," says Nancy when they started to teach him at home. "We just went day by day. And the more we did it, the better it got." Music was the one subject that Ishmael had enjoyed in school, so they started piano lessons. Nightly reading sessions with his father, Bob (who translates German philosophy for M.I.T Press), carried him from Dickens' England to the ruins of Pompeii. He studied writing with his mother, and math with his father, and when Vita turned six and became subject to the state's compulsory education laws, her parents notified school officials that she was also being educated at home.
The Wallaces didn't begin home schooling with plans for Vita and Ishmael to compose librettos, write magazine articles, and perform at
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