Parents Browse So They Can Teach 3 Rs at Home

Cafi Cohen sat this week in the lobby of a Woodland Hills hotel peddling her books “Home Schooling--the Teen Years” and “What About College?”

Cohen, of Arroyo Grande, was one of more than 40 vendors at the fifth annual home schooling conference sponsored by the Link, a Thousand Oaks-based tabloid sent to 100,000 home schoolers nationwide.

The vendors’ wares ranged from playing cards featuring Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures to hand bells, an instrument that is rarely taught in schools but is popular with home schoolers.

As the mother of Jeff Cohen, 25, one of the first home schooled cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Cafi Cohen is a pioneer in the burgeoning home education movement. And, like other trail blazers, she thinks the “settlers,” as she calls them, have no idea how hard it used to be to find good teaching aids when school is the family dining room.

“It’s so easy now,” Cohen, 51, said. She remembers when a parent searching for, say, a seventh-grade science course was plain out of luck. “Nobody would even sell you curriculum. They’d say, ‘You’re not a school.’ ”

But marketers have begun to pay attention, now that a movement once limited mostly to fundamentalist Christians has expanded to include people of all faiths, secular home schoolers and “unschoolers,” those philosophically opposed to institutionalized education.

“It’s big enough to attract some big vendors now,” Cohen said. “Nobody knows how many there are,” she said. But the market is perceived as large enough to attract such mainstream vendors to the Warner Center Marriott as Toluca Lake-based Precision Microscopes, which was selling its $89 My First Lab Microscope as well as a $1,000 high-performance model.

Why bother marketing to home schoolers, who teach an estimated 4% or less of the nation’s school age children? Because 4% of more than 40 million school age children could need a lot of flash cards and No. 2 pencils.

“If you’ve got an educational product, after you’ve looked at the public and private schools, we’re the next niche,” Cohen said.

A lecturer on the subject, Cohen is sometimes hired by companies who want to reach home schoolers. For a $300-an-hour consultation fee, she recently cautioned a client about the conservative politics of many home schoolers after he boasted that his database was excellent for researching feminism: “Don’t ever use that word around home schoolers again.”

In Cohen’s view, the perfect product for home schoolers was being sold nearby. A large sign advertised: “Dnet--it’s just like the Internet except everybody’s got their clothes on.”

As company representative Joseph Parker explained, Dnet is an Internet service provider that filters out pornography. Undesirable Web sites are blocked by the provider, relieving parents of the need to constantly monitor their children’s surfing.

Since many home schoolers see the computer as an essential educational tool, Dnet staff members emphasize that they don’t filter sites by keyword. Instead, the North Carolina-based company methodically evaluates site after site. As a result, Parker said, a user could access a medical site to learn more about breast cancer. The site wouldn’t automatically be blocked simply because the word “breast” so often sends users straight to sleazy sites.

About 1,500 people were expected over the three-day conference that ends today, organizer Michael Leppert said. Many participants had their children with them.

Irma Delgado of Playa del Rey is considering home schooling because the family has a boat in Baja and travels extensively, and school officials complain about frequent absences by 8-year-old Austin and 14-year-old Louie.

“I told them, if they see anything they’re interested in, call my attention to it,” Delgado said of her sons. Louis plays the guitar and Delgado was eyeing a book and CD on great composers.

Books on the subjects usually taught in school were on display, as were language tapes and tubs of colored pencils and other art supplies. Bookseller Ellen Knowles said dinosaur titles always sell well, except to customers who believe in creationism.