Growing Number of Parents Teach Their Childen : Home Is Where the Classroom Is for Some Students

Eight-year-old Lorien Evans doesn’t go to school. She wakes up there.

Lorien, who lives in Eagle Rock, is one of a growing number of children who are being educated at home for reasons that range from their parents’ conviction that the Bible mandates it to dissatisfaction with public education.

No bells ring in Lorien’s school. No principal’s voice booms over the public address system. There are no exams, no grades, no competition for the teacher’s attention, no schoolyard pals--or bullies.

Mother Is Teacher

Lorien’s teacher is her mother, Linda Evans, a former school librarian who devotes several hours a day to teaching Lorien and her siblings, Sarah, 5, and Andy, 3. While children in conventional schools are wriggling in their seats, Lorien curls up in the living room rocking chair to read the library books that are her textbooks.

Nobody knows exactly how many children are being taught at home. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman recently estimated that 250,000 children attend home schools nationwide, double the number of three years ago. Proponents of home schooling put the current figure as high as 1 million.

Fred Fernandez, a consultant on private schools to the California Office of Education, estimates the number of California home schools at 1,800. In the Los Angeles area, hundreds of children study long division at kitchen tables, pledge allegiance to dining room American flags and call the teacher “Mom.”

Permitted in All States

Home schooling is permitted in all 50 states. California law does not speak directly to the issue (much to the chagrin of critics of home schooling), but it does allow parents who wish to teach their children at home to do so if they file an affidavit with the state declaring their homes to be private schools.

Supervision of California’s vague private school statute is left to local school districts. The law requires, for example, that private-school students must be taught the subjects taught in public school. The law also requires that private-school teachers, including those who teach at home, be capable of teaching, although it does not specify who should make that judgment.

Not surprisingly, officials in the 1,100 school districts in California vary in their views of the desirability and legality of home schooling and, thus, in their tolerance of home schools. The educational Establishment voices many concerns about home learning, ranging from questions about the quality of education most parents can provide to fears that children educated apart from their peers may suffer socially or psychologically. Home school advocates insist that those fears are largely groundless.

Lorien’s school, which has never been visited by an education official, is called the Questing House.

Outshines Sister in Math

Unlike Lorien, the younger children are not yet legally required to be in school. But as Linda Evans said, “We don’t send the younger ones into the other room, so they all pick up on it.” As a result, Sarah already outshines her older sister in math, a situation that might be harder for Lorien to bear if she was not such a gifted artist.

Although Linda Evans carries most of the family’s teaching burden, husband Steve Evans, an insurance agent, also teaches. He reads to the children when he comes home for lunch each day and again at night. He leads them through math games and has taught them a smattering of Spanish and Swedish. And he was the one who helped Lorien bind last year’s schoolwork into a handsome volume entitled “Lorien’s Frist Grade Workbook,” lovingly preserving her almost correct spelling of first.

Like many others who teach their children at home--as many as 80% by some estimates--the Evanses are fundamentalist Christians. Home schooling allows them greater control over the values their children absorb with their phonics and other academic lessons. But Steve Evans said their reasons for opting for home schooling are as much secular as religious. Indeed, the burgeoning home education movement has created strange bedfellows--a large number who want to turn their homes into God’s classrooms and a secular minority who read the reformist work of educators John Holt, Ivan Illich and others and decided that the best school is no school at all.

The Evanses are a little of each.

Learning Part of Each Day

Advocates of “de-schooling,” the Evanses try to make learning part of the natural flow of their family day, a day imbued with their belief in God.

In the Evanses’ view, making a batch of blueberry muffins is a better lesson in reading and measuring than any classroom exercise. As Steve Evans said: “The more homelike we make our schooling, the more successful it is. As soon as we make it class-like, it becomes less successful.”

The Evanses believe that they can do a better job than the public and most private schools. “We’re very impressed with the quality of some of the teachers we’ve seen, but they’re up against an impossible situation,” Steve Evans said.

From her school librarian days Linda Evans recalls how frequently even good teachers were overwhelmed by the demands of teaching 30 children at once. “The odds were against the individual child because the teacher was always tied up with the bright kids or the slow kids,” she said.

The Evanses spend about $50 a year for an elementary-school curriculum devised by the Oak Meadow School, a private school in Ojai whose home-study curriculum is used by about 3,000 children nationwide. The Evanses do not hesitate to modify the curriculum as they see fit. Paper is their biggest school expense.

The Evanses say they would consider sending the children to a conventional school if that was what the youngsters wanted. But so far, the Questing House is just fine with Lorien. “I have more time to play,” she said as she dashed into her bedroom for her latest arts-and-crafts project, a house for her teddy bear.

Many observers express concern over the lack of quality control over home schools. Others, including UCLA education professor Donald L. Erickson, say that learning at home can be as good or better than regular school.