by Mary Jessica Hammes
May 03, 2009

Benefits of homeschooling
My friend Alanna lives on an amount of property that’s tantamount to a state park in a small South Georgia town. And all of it—the yard, the woods, the lake, the swamp—is an open-air classroom for her 8-year-old daughter and almost 2-year-old son.

Alanna used to teach Spanish in public schools, but even before her daughter was born, she and her husband knew that they wanted to home school. Alanna realized it was already happening when she realized one day that her daughter, not quite a year old at the time, was following her in the garden, imitating her mother: “She’d come along behind me and plant seeds,” says Alanna.

For their family, school is “just living your life with your child and teaching and role-modeling,” she says.They follow a curriculum and have a structured day that begins early with simple chores for the children—making beds, dressing themselves, eating breakfast and cleaning up, carrying compost outside and caring for pets, unloading the dishwasher.

The two children share a circle time together before Alanna’s daughter launches into schoolwork. For physical education, she can canoe, cycle, or hike. In the afternoons, she’ll do service work: the girl volunteers an hour a week at the local nursing home. Last year, she called Bingo. This year, she leads an arts and crafts class there.

It would appear as though the stereotypical socialization stigma of homeschoolers—the idea that homeschoolers are socially stunted misfits who can’t relate to their peers—is a thing of the past, thanks to today’s online and in-person network of home schooling families.

Alanna belongs to several local and regional home schooling groups, and the children take field trips together and have play dates. (Alanna had to limit the guest list for her daughter’s latest birthday party to 30 children.) There’s even a regional homeschool science fair sponsored by Georgia Southern University—Alanna’s daughter won first prize for her age group with an insect collection project.

For Alanna, an added bonus is the closeness she and her children experience. “The main thing I see is the way I’ve gotten to know my children and the relationship we’re developing with each other,” she says. “It’s the sweetest thing to see your children really love each other.”

The benefits of unschooling
Teri Cole-Smith is a fourth grade special education teacher at a public school in Athens, but she’s hoping she’ll soon have enough students to open the Freedom to Grow (Un)school in her home. Parents will register as home schooled with the state, and Cole-Smith will be listed as the tutor, facilitating theme- and project-oriented activities that will be “chosen organically by the students,” according to the website.

Cole-Smith always felt drawn to working in social justice, and when she was earning her master’s degree in education at the University of Illinois around 20 years ago, she met Bill Ayers, the Distinguished Professor of Education who became her mentor. Ayers is known for his controversial past with the Weather Underground Organization, but he is also a well-known voice in education reform.

“I followed him around and as I read more, I got more radicalized in my view of what education should be like,” she recalls. She realized she “didn’t want to be a teacher, but a facilitator.” In the meantime, she was teaching elementary school children in impoverished neighborhoods until her first son was born in 1991; then, she left her job and homeschooled him.

Her eldest son is now 17 and enrolled at West Georgia University, living on campus in a special program in which he simultaneously finishes his last two years of high school and first two years of Honors college courses. Her 11-year-old son is a student at a Montessori school after attending public school classes; Cole-Smith had intended to homeschool him as well, but a divorce led her to working outside the home.

Her youngest likes his school, and Cole-Smith says it’s a good fit for him, even if it is different than what she’s interested in.

“Montessori is still a more structured program than I’m creating,” she says. Instead of doing prescribed activities, “with us, you go with what your child’s interest already is.”

For instance: if your child likes music, that can be a starting point for many other activities—children can learn how an instrument is made and make either their own working model or a sculpture. They might write an essay about the experience, creating instructions for others to follow. They might write poetry about music. They can learn about the instrument’s creator and country of origin, and the culture there. They can talk about patterns in music, which might lead to a math project. They can talk to adult musicians. Such a project could last two days or two months, depending on the interest of the child. Some children might want to work together on these projects; others, alone.

Cole-Smith still holds social justice causes close to he heart, and acknowledges that a choice to avoid public school might be seen as “elitist,” she says. But she says she’s purely motivated by a method of education in which she believes.

“I totally support everybody being educated to the fullest extent,” she says. “To say that I’m not going to be in that system bothers me. But the reason why I think that is so different.”

An unschooled family
After her son had a difficult school year, Ren Allen began reading the work of home schooling proponent John Holt, who founded the Growing Without Schooling newsletter in 1977.

In 1996, Allen took the leap of faith into unschooling her son, who will attend Blue Ridge Community College in N.C. this fall. Her three younger children—now aged 15, 12, and 8—have been unschooled their entire lives. (You might remember a profile on the family published in a 2006 issue of People Magazine—the same article also notes an unschooled student who later attended Harvard.)

“We started as very eclectic homeschoolers and hit lots of bumps along the way, before finally realizing that when we went with the flow everything, well, flowed,” says Allen, a makeup artist who lives in Jonesborough, Tenn. “My children have been natural learners all along and were very patient as their parents figured the whole thing out! We had to remember what it was like to trust ourselves and our children. It’s an ongoing process really, remembering to trust. It gets more and more intuitive, though, until you hardly remember what it’s like to worry about math or reading or other such things that children learn so easily.”

There’s not a typical rhythm to daily learning in the Allen household; so much depends on seasonal activities (for example, Spring means gardening and all the lessons that go with it) and the children’s own interests. Allen has never used a formal curriculum, but in the early days she experimented with unit studies—“but my children showed me that even this much was too contrived, and they learned just fine without my manipulations,” she says.

For their family, says Allen, unschooling is a lifestyle. “I feel that families living this life of freedom have such opportunities for connection and bonding,” she says. “Spending a lot of time together gives you ample opportunities to creatively meet various needs and find common solutions. It means we all get to share our interests, swirling in and out and around each other’s passions…. I don’t believe my husband and I would be as connected to our children’s joy, to their dreams and daily activities the same way if we hadn’t chosen unschooling.”

Mary Jessica Hammes is an Athens, Georgia-based writer, trapeze instructor, knitter, gardener, comic book enthusiast, and hula hooper. She is mom to Tommy.