Live and Learn : Traditionally associated with the religious right, home schooling is now the choice of a diverse group of parents who say their successes prove education doesn’t have to stop in the classroom

Skylar Lenox is almost 8, but she hasn’t set foot in a school building since preschool.

Instead, Skylar spends her time learning what she chooses as one of a growing number of secular home-schooled children nationwide.

Her parents opted for schooling in their Van Nuys home not to insulate her, they said, but rather to introduce her to life firsthand with an education drawn from the community. To the Lenox family, this means art classes at a museum, reading sessions at the library, piano lessons from a tutor and gymnastics at a nonprofit gym.

“I’m not home schooling to keep her sheltered or away from the real world,” said Skylar’s mother, Marsha Lenox. “I want her to retain her love of learning. I want her to be her own person and part of the real world.”

As many as half a million children are being educated outside traditional schools in the United States, up from 10,000 to 15,000 in the 1970s, according to estimates compiled by Patricia Lines, an analyst in the U.S. Department of Education’s office of Educational Resource and Improvement.

Among the reasons parents give for choosing home schooling are safety and educational concerns, as well as a desire to strengthen the family. Many education specialists take no exception to those issues, but they say home schooling is not without its own drawbacks.

For one thing, cautioned David D. Marsh, a professor of curriculum and theory at the USC School of Education, teaching and parenting do not necessarily draw on the same set of skills. Among families who have chosen home schooling, Marsh said, “Most have intense commitment--they just don’t have the skills and the talent that it takes to be a teacher.”

Home schooling also means a confluence of adult-authority roles, Marsh pointed out. “When you are also the parent, I think it’s confusing in your mind and in the kid’s mind, when you’re the teacher and when you’re the parent. It’s a hard balance, ethically.”

The 2.2-million member National Education Assn. adopted a platform in 1989 saying that “home-schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.”

School districts are charged with enforcement of California’s compulsory education law, which requires parents who provide home schooling to hold a teaching credential.

Yet officials in many school districts say a loophole in the law permits the practice by non-credentialed parents who file an affidavit stating that they’re running a private school, said Barbara Beach-Courchesne, a consultant for pupil personnel with the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

The California Department of Education and the Los Angeles County Office of Education take no formal position on home schooling, agency officials said. (“It’s not that we allow it or we don’t allow it,” said Carolyn Pirillo, staff attorney with the state Department of Education. “We don’t make value judgments about it.”) And no state or local agency keeps official estimates of the number of home schoolers in the region.

Still, more parents are attempting to wear both hats, causing the makeup of the home schooling population to shift, experts said.

“The ones who got the most attention in the mid- to late-1980s were the evangelical and fundamental Christians,” said Pat Farenga, president of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Holt Associates and publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine. “(Today) it’s an incredibly diverse group of people.”

Support organizations have formed to serve several religious or ethnic groups, he said, ranging from the Jewish Home Educators Newsletter, published in Sharon, Mass., to the Drinking Gourd, a newsletter published in Redmond, Wash., for African American home-schooling families.

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“I’m having a great time watching my kids grow at this age, which a lot of parents don’t get to see,” said Jim Berrios, a stage builder from Marina del Rey who shares the home-schooling duties of his sons, 4 and 6, with his wife, Katie O’Neil, a TV producer.

“I see a lot of the little disputes and problems as well as the great findings when they discover something new and creative,” he said.

Berrios and his wife initially planned to teach their children at home only temporarily. But that goal meant balancing both their careers. After coming up with a strategy that sees Berrios working outside the home four months a year and O’Neil eight months, they decided home schooling was a viable option for their family.

“We’ve been home schooling since the day they were born,” Berrios said. “And to give this responsibility to a total stranger just didn’t make sense.”

Marsha Lenox and husband John Thomas Lenox, who works in film and television and teaches night classes at UCLA, decided to teach Skylar at home only after they became disillusioned with traditional schools.

“I went to kindergartens at public schools and private schools that people would recommend,” said Marsha Lenox, who wanted a relaxed, nurturing environment for her daughter. “My friends would go to an orientation and think it was good school and having missed the orientation, I would go to a class in progress and see a different thing.”

Many home schoolers didn’t choose it at first, said Terri Endsley, president of the Los Angeles-based Home Education League of Parents, known as HELP, a national, nonprofit support service organization for secular home-schooling families. “It’s not something they were looking for. It became the option of last choice. But once they get into it, they find it’s so exciting and it draws the family together in a way they haven’t experienced since the children were in preschool.”

Home-schooling parents in the area, such as Mary Shannon and her husband, Koddy Nuckols, of Kagel Canyon, near Lake View Terrace, say the support groups they belong to have grown considerably in recent years and community acceptance seems to be improving as well.

Shannon and Nuckols, a masonry contractor, have never enrolled their sons--Max, 8 and Sam, 6--in school.

The couple, like the Lenox and Berrios-O’Neil families, doesn’t follow any curriculum or structured learning program. Instead, they allow their children to explore and develop their interests in a self-directed or interest-led style of learning.

“There’s such a leap of faith that comes with that, but I trust that they will learn, I trust that they will be interested,” Shannon said.

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David Guterson, a high school English teacher in Washington state for 10 years and prominent advocate of home schooling, said parents need no special educational expertise to teach their children.

Guterson, who with his wife educates his four children at home, said studies that compare the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of home-schooled youngsters with their school peers find not only that home schoolers generally have the better scores, but that their parents’ level of education appears to have no bearing on their success.

But Tom Ewing, at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., said his organization had no data to support claims of higher test scores. Ewing said ETS forms do not have a category for home-schooling. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the very fact that these kids are schooled at home makes it hard to track them.”

And while agreeing that in his experience, home-schooled students do tend to perform well on standardized tests, Donald W. Oliver, a professor of education at Harvard University, said other factors must be considered.

“There is a narrow range of social class that does this,” Oliver said of the home-school movement. Very few low-income families pursue home schooling, he said, and testing well “has never been a problem for middle-class families. No matter how they are educated, they always test well.”

Even Guterson, author of the book “Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), has concerns about educating children at home.

“Schools in theory operate for some kind of social cohesion and potentially home schooling could be a divisive force that tears at the social fabric,” he said. “People who have problems with mainstream values such as diversity and multiculturalism may find home schooling a way to keep their children from being exposed to . . . all values but their own and that is truly dangerous.”

But, he insisted: “All parents are extremely well-qualified to educate their children, given the commitment to do it.”

Guterson said a common misperception about home schooling is that it requires the parents do all the teaching.

“That’s not what it’s about,” he said. “It’s about children learning in the world in many different situations.”

That can mean enrolling the children in community education programs. Other times it’s as simple as taking the children along on the regular household errands.

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But even those families who opt for a more structured, academic curriculum say they often have ample free time each day.

Anthony and Alizon Harris, Westside parents of two sons, ages 5 and 9, and a daughter, 2, follow an academic lesson plan for their two oldest children.

Alizon, the daughter of a teacher who supports her home-schooling decision, decided to keep her children out of school because she believed public schools weren’t safe and the private schools she visited were too academically intense.

“They were for the most part very pushy in education and wanted the kids to do things too early and too quickly,” she said, echoing concerns shared by many home-schooling parents. “I want my kids to read early if they want to read early, but not to be forced into it.”

She said her children have seemed to flourish in the relaxed educational surrounding of their home.

While critics voice concern about sheltered children, many parents who keep their children out of school say their youngsters have many more opportunities for healthy, social development than is offered in school, where children are grouped into age categories that often don’t mix with those who are younger and older.

“Once you get out of school, you’re not dealing with just people your own age who share your interests,” Lenox said. “You have to deal with a wide range of people age-wise and culturally, and these kids are already doing it. They’re already out there.”

Most home-schooled children do end up in school at some point, however, Guterson said.

“The majority of home-schooling families eventually quit before their child leaves home as an adult,” he said. “As kids reach high school age they are socially tantalized by school . . . with dating and the need for contact of a romantic nature being the primary draw.”

In fact, Guterson’s 13-year-old son is planning on trying school next year as a high school freshman, and his middle son, 10 1/2, has already tasted a semester of school. “He went, excelled and had a great time, but by Christmas he had decided he preferred home schooling,” Guterson said.

Several recent studies have reflected favorably on home schooling, including a 1991 University of Michigan survey of adults who had been home schooled. It found that such children are socially well-adjusted and show substantially fewer behavior problems than those educated in traditional schools.

Most colleges and universities have experience with home-schooled applicants and will consider them for admission.

Joe Allen, dean of admissions at the USC, said applications from home-schooled students are so uncommon that they must be reviewed and judged individually.

“Almost every case is different,” said Allen, adding that for home-schooled students, scholastic aptitude and achievement tests often take on greater weight. Allen said confirmation of a home-schooled student’s work also becomes important because “in the end, what we want to judge is the student’s ability to function in the classroom.”

A spokesman for the office of undergraduate admissions at UCLA said that institution also receives very few applications from home-schooled students.

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Logistic arrangements among home schooling families vary. In some families, one parent stays home full-time with the children. But many dual-work couples have managed to home school as well.

The most common of these arrangements, Farenga, of Holt Associates, said, is the split shift--with one parent who works during the day and the other at night. Then there are those parents who telecommute or have home-based businesses that allow them to work around their family activities.

Whatever the setup, most parents agree that support groups are essential. Oliver, at the Harvard School of Education, concurred, noting that “home-schoolers tend to be very creative in the way they ally with other parents.”

Endsley’s HELP chapter charges a $25 annual fee and provides members with a calendar of activities that usually include two home-schooling events each week in the L.A. area.

It also helps parents find support groups, which usually offer regular play days for the children, organized classes, field trips, co-op child care and evenings out for parents.

Marsha Lenox said that involvement with the Burbank-based Mountain View Park Homeschoolers has opened up numerous educational opportunities for Skylar, who recently created a volunteer organization she’s dubbed Home Schoolers Helping the Homeless.

“The common attitude is that kids don’t know what’s best for themselves,” Lenox said. “If we stop projecting our own wishes and desires on children, they do know what’s best for them. They know what their own needs are and that’s what I like about home schooling.”