Home-Schoolers Unite in Search for Teaching Aids

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

Cohen, from 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 rarely taught in schools but popular with home-schoolers.

The mother of Jeff Cohen, 25, one of the first home-schooled cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Cohen is a genuine pioneer in the burgeoning home-education movement. And, like other trail blazers, she thinks the current “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,” said Cohen, 51. 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 those philosophically opposed to institutionalized education, called “unschoolers.”

“It’s big enough to attract some big vendors now,” Cohen said of the home-school market. As to the actual numbers, she said, “Nobody knows how many there are.” But the market is at least 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 advised a client who 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 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.

About 1,500 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 her family, which has a boat in Baja, travels extensively and school officials complain about 8-year-old Austin and 14-year-old Louie’s frequent absences.

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

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

Knowles, who lives in Thousand Oaks, said she is considering home-schooling her own preteen son because the young science whiz is constantly being bullied by his private school classmates.

“I’m spending $700 a month,” she said. “I might as well bring him home and spend it on curriculum.”

Bluestocking Press offered a wide range of reading material, including Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” and a revisionist history titled “The Myth of the Robber Barons.”

Owner Jane Williams said she tries to avoid labels such as liberal or conservative, but that many home-schoolers tend to take a conservative approach to politics, history and economics. She cited the observation: “Someone will brainwash your children. Better it be you.”