Tabletop Teaching : Learning: An increasing number of families, including affluent Westsiders, are choosing to educate children in their own homes.

Gillian Bennett goes to school in her pajamas.

Janel Morehouse skips class on days when she feels low on brain power, then doubles up later.

Noel and Josh Hamilton’s teachers have scheduled field trips to Nicaragua and Africa this year.

Lisa Nedelman substitutes ice-skating for dreary PE classes.

That’s because for these five youngsters, school is at home--in Brentwood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Westchester, respectively--and the teacher is Mom or Dad.

Home schooling is hardly new. Settlers and farmers did it when the nearest school was miles away. Hippies and flower children of the ‘60s did it in communes in hopes of nurturing creativity and nonconformity. Religious groups have long encouraged it in an effort to insulate their young from the world’s sinfulness.

But an increasing number of families today, including affluent, well-educated Westsiders, are choosing to teach their children at home. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that as many as 350,000 children are being home-schooled today, compared to only about 15,000 in the early 1980s.

Some parents take this route because they are dissatisfied with the quality of public and private schools or fear the influence of drugs or gangs; others express reluctance at relinquishing control of their youngsters to outsiders for seven hours a day. Some are opting out of the system for only a year or two for remedial or enriched studies.

“It’s pervasive throughout the state,” said Roger Wolfertz, a lawyer with the Department of Education in Sacramento. Estimating that from 6,000 to 20,000 California families are home-schooling, Wolfertz said they do so for a variety of reasons: “religion, distance, safety concerns or the belief that they do a better job than the schools.”

Most often, they are fundamentalist Christians or parents who see their offspring as budding geniuses.

The most organized and visible segment of the home-schooling movement identifies with the religious right. They say they do not want their children to succumb to peer pressure or to worldly values, and they object to education about sex, AIDS and evolution, and to the lack of patriotism, religious history and prayer in the classroom.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, a smaller group of anti-Establishment parents say they find traditional schooling too rigid and want to encourage creative, independent thinking in their children.

While other children are lining up in the schoolyard, 5 1/2-year-old Gillian Bennett sits at the kitchen table, still in pajamas, marking goals for the day on her calendar as her mother clears the breakfast dishes.

For the next two to five hours, Gillian will work on reading, writing, arithmetic, geography--and an extra credit activity of her choice--under the watchful eye of her mother, Randi Bennett.

The Brentwood mother said reading and friends persuaded her when her firstborn was still a toddler that home schooling was the way to go.

“I’ve been working with Gillian since the moment she was born,” Bennett said proudly, “and started teaching her to read at about 3 1/2. For her fifth birthday, I made a decision to purchase a first-grade curriculum and see how it went. We started last April, and slowly but surely settled into a well-defined pattern of about three hours a day. She’s now about to move into the second grade,” just short of her sixth birthday.

The Bennetts, who have their own video company, clashed on the home-schooling issue initially. But Bennett said she has won over her skeptical British husband. Friends who once looked at her askance now want her to teach their children.

Bennett said she sent Gillian to nursery school but found it unchallenging academically and downright damaging socially: “No one was teaching them how to play safely and fairly.”

Aware of the need to provide experiences with other children, Bennett has enrolled her daughter at the local YMCA for swimming, gym classes and after-school care. Gillian also takes lessons at a nearby art center and goes to University Synagogue for religious training.

Regular studies, with rewards for goals set and met, are supplemented with community service (mother and daughter deliver Meals on Wheels), travel, library time, cooking and field trips with “study buddies.”

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s been a total success,” said Bennett, whose kitchen is overflowing with charts, flash cards, books and drawings. “There’s no question in my mind that I will do it with Cole,” her 1-year-old son.

Home schooling is legal, although laws differ in each state. Under California law, Wolfertz said, public school education is mandatory unless the child falls under one of two exemptions: He is being taught by a credentialed tutor or he is enrolled in a bona fide private school. Many private schools offer independent study programs that allow a child to be taught at home, and the Los Angeles Unified School District also permits home schooling if the child is registered at a school where the principal and teacher will agree to oversee the arrangement.

California is a haven for home schoolers because parents here need not be certified to teach and no testing of students or monitoring by local school officials is mandated.

Although educators generally frown on the growing practice, some public school administrators--notably in San Diego County--have come to terms with the inevitable and chosen to work with rather than ostracize home-schooling families by providing books, computer labs, on-call resource teachers, field trips and other help.

Many parents say they don’t bother with legal formalities. They order curricula and instructional materials from one of a host of correspondence schools, join a quasi-legal study group that declares itself a private school, or simply take the chance that their child won’t be turned in by a meddlesome neighbor or observant police officer.

The chances are good that they will escape notice or fall between the system’s cracks.

The state says it is the school district’s responsibility to ensure that all youngsters within its boundaries are going to school; most districts lack the resources to drag unwilling families into school or prosecute them through the district attorney’s office.

In Los Angeles, with a variety of school calendars, children stopped on the street and questioned can say, “I’m off-track,” and the inquiry ends. Although school counselors attempt to track down students who enroll and then “disappear,” they say they have no way of detecting those who never enter the system in the first place, because the district does not follow up county birth records.

Out of about a dozen Westside home-schooling families who were interviewed, the parents were uniformly enthusiastic; their children were less so.

“No, I would not home-school my own children,” said Lisa Nedelman, 17, of Westchester, who has never attended a regular school. “I liked (being taught by her mother at home) in a way,” she said, but as for her own children, “I’d like them to be normal --I’d put them in a good private school.”

Her friend, 19-year-old Janel Morehouse of Santa Monica, who was also taught at home, agrees: “I would not be where I am now if it were not for home schooling, but that is not an entirely good thing. It has kind of crippled me in a social sense. I don’t feel like I’d ever want to go through this again. . . . I am not a good example of a happy camper.”

She said parents get so “swept up in joy that their kid is learning” that they fail to recognize home schooling’s downside--that it can be isolating and lonely.

Educators caution too that going to school is about much more than lessons and activities. They say it is about learning through interaction , in collaboration with others, and about coping with the world that lies outside the home cocoon. They say the need for the group is especially important for only children, while large families sometimes can approximate a classroom situation.

“You lose certain things, such as interaction with other people, when you home-school,” said Jack Sutton, coordinator of special programs for the teacher education laboratory at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education.

“A lot of school,” he said, “is way beyond the formal written curriculum. You learn a lot of skills through working with other people that you don’t get if you are just with your own family.”

Sutton said one-on-one tutoring may provide a good, sound academic education, but he questions “whether in the long run they are going to have other skills necessary” to cope with a multifaceted, multicultural world.

But for every critical educator, every disenchanted home school veteran, there are fervid proponents who point to success stories like the Colfaxes of Boonville, Calif. David and Micki Colfax’s sons went from home schooling to Harvard and the couple chronicled the family’s lengthy experience as pioneer educators in “Homeschooling for Excellence,” a book that is in many home schoolers’ libraries, right next to Mothering magazine or stacks of materials from the Christian Home Educators Assn.

“Lisa was about 3 1/2 when it hit me,” said her mother, Susan Nedelman, “--it’s almost time for kindergarten and there’s no way I’m going to turn my daughter over to someone else. It was for spiritual reasons: God gave her a mother and a father, and I should stay home and raise her. . . . The public school system wants you to conform and not be creative.”

That was when she heard a radio program about a home school group in Hermosa Beach, where for the next few years she and about a dozen other families met three times a week in a rented building to work individually with their children.

It wasn’t easy. A decade ago, home schoolers were viewed as more weird than trendy, and Nedelman said she encountered a lot of criticism, including being turned in by a neighbor to authorities who came knocking on her door for explanations as to why Lisa was not in school.

When the Hermosa Beach group disbanded, the Nedelmans enrolled in a mail-order school that required regular visits to its Ojai branch and contact with specific teachers by phone or mail.

Looking at her bright and popular teen-ager, who teaches figure skating and works in the Culver Ice Arena’s office as she prepares to take her high school proficiency exam, Susan Nedelman feels she made the right decision.

“She went through a phase a couple of years ago when she didn’t really ask to go to school, but she felt like she was different.”

For Lisa, skating was an important outlet; for three years, she was the only girl on a hockey team.

“Through skating I’ve met a whole bunch of different people, from different schools and of different ages,” she said.

And home schooling does not seem to have created any serious social barriers for her. “Most of my friends think it’s pretty cool” that she was home-schooled, she said.

But Janel Morehouse, who was home-schooled coincidentally through the same Ojai organization, has found the experience to be isolating.

The 19-year-old, still living at home while she finishes up high school after taking two years off to write, says she sometimes spends 18 hours a day at her computer and has completed a dozen movie scripts, some for pay but none yet produced. She works part time for an entertainment lawyer and is involved in a local art gallery and a new film production company.

Bridling at her mother’s “being in my life 24 hours a day” in her early school years, she got permission to try the Santa Monica Alternative Schoolhouse (SMASH) for seventh grade, a nine-month experiment she characterizes as a disaster.

She was unable, she says, to handle the pressure, her attention span was too short and she didn’t fit into any clique. So she went back to school at home.

“My parents (a manufacturing coordinator for McDonnell Douglas and a professional nanny) tried to shelter me,” Morehouse says. “But I have outside sources!”

Her mother, Carol Morehouse, is aware of her daughter’s views on the subject. But she says home teaching, although “not something to take on frivolously,” was well worth her time and energy, an undertaking made all the harder by the fact that she did not have a college education. She said she decided to teach her daughter because she thought that the public school system had failed Janel’s older brother.

“They don’t foster independence,” she said. “I wanted her to ask questions, not just memorize. In the beginning, I taught her; in the end she became self -taught, with guidance. “It’s not that I am a controlling person. But, paradoxically, to foster independence I had to take control over her environment.”

She is pleased with how her daughter has turned out, she said, although she thinks that the lack of competition in a home teaching setting can be a major drawback.

But Carol Morehouse is not so sure she would take the same route again: “I know I sound enthusiastic. If I had the same choices, I would do it over. But I think now I would know how to look for better choices. I think kids need a certain amount of formalized education, but not too early. Maybe at about 10, 11 or 12. A progressive private school where kids have the opportunity, equipment and teachers to bring out their best.”

For Janel Morehouse, setting her own pace, not having to follow anyone else’s instructions and postponing work on those days “when you have no brain function power,” were pluses. “You learn a lot more on your own.”

On the other hand, she said: “I have all my time to myself. It tends to warp your thinking. It pretty much has made me a loner, made me be more antisocial. You don’t see how to relate to other kids. I feel so old.” Morehouse also believes that she may be dyslexic, but has never been tested.

Some Westside families have not abandoned conventional schools altogether but are merely taking time out to explore specific interests.

Santa Monica pediatrician Robert Hamilton and his wife, Leslie, are keeping the older two of their five children home from private religious schools this year to expand and broaden their educations. Both are enrolled in an independent study program offered by The Lighthouse School in Santa Monica.

“We’re not running from anything,” Hamilton said. “It’s a year of maturation, of gaining depth in certain areas. . . . The whole idea is to incorporate real life into the education of our children.”

For 13-year-old Noel Hamilton, already a year ahead of her age group in school, this year means four hours of academics each day--with her mother or a tutor--plus extra cello lessons, gymnastics and travel to Nicaragua with her doctor/missionary father.

For her brother, Josh, 17, it means a possible trip to Africa with Hamilton, learning about medicine through weekly observation at his father’s clinic and chemistry classes at Santa Monica College in addition to the usual academics.

Both youngsters have reacted positively to the experiment, perhaps because they know that they will be back in school next year.

“I think we’ll do this with all our children,” said Leslie Hamilton, now pregnant with their sixth. “Rather than pushing them away at a critical time in their lives, we’re pulling them close.”

No one knows how today’s home-schooled children will fare as adults, and the outcomes may turn out to be as varied as the personalities, abilities and motives of the children and families involved.

But most parents who undertake the arduous task of teaching their own children bring commitment and high hopes.

“I like to think Lisa sees that I did it out of love,” said Susan Nedelman.

“I wanted to watch her grow and learn. I wanted to be there. My biggest concern is that she doesn’t resent me for doing what I felt I had to do.”