ExclusiveHomeschooling started early America’s legacy of learning, literacy, and virtue
Education and literacy were very important to Americans in the Colonial Era. There were no government schools, so families took the instruction of their young upon themselves, using the limited but practical resources at their disposal. More than book knowledge, however, high moral values and a strong character were cultivated and prized. As our country grew, home education fell out of favor because the public school system became the primary education model. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that families began to be dissatisfied with the status quo school system. A combination of circumstances, both legal and societal, over the next two decades made homeschooling a feasible alternative for families.
There are two articles on homeschooling in the Life & Tradition section of the Epoch Times, written by homeschooling expert and mother of two Karen Doll. Tiffany Brannan compares these articles with her own personal experiences of having been homeschooled from kindergarten to high school graduation at age 13. Like the home education of the American Colonies, homeschooling prioritizing personalized learning, individualized lesson plans, and the incorporation of real-world learning, skills, and knowledge beyond the standardized curriculum to build strong character.
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Welcome to Epoch Insights with Tiffany. My name is Tiffany Brannon.
When we think of the early days of our country, during the Revolutionary War and even in the 19th
century, I think there's a misconception that a lot of people weren't educated. We tend to think
of people in George Washington's era as all having wooden teeth and not knowing how to read or write,
not having the basics which we consider civilization today, such as lack of cleanliness
and lack of education. However, if you read and learn more about the early days of our country
and Europe throughout the days after the Middle Ages, you'll find that there was a very high level
of civilization, knowledge and learning. There's an article in the Life and Tradition section of
the Epoch Times which talks about education, knowledge and literacy in colonial America.
It describes that education and literacy were a near obsession among the founding fathers and
just the average citizens. It was very important to these people in the colonies to be intelligent
and to be well read. So the first step was to make sure that you and your children knew how to read.
There were no government schools at this point, no public school, no library. Benjamin Franklin
actually started the first library. There was a loaning library in the United States.
But that doesn't mean the children didn't learn how to read and write. They learned at home. Their
parents would teach them, perhaps in the ashes of the hearth of the fire, how to write their first
letters. And those with a little bit of money could easily get a horn book which would have
everything they needed to know to begin their learning journey. It was a teaching device
that had several pieces of paper that had the alphabet, a prayer and the different digits. And
then that would be the beginning of learning. There also were simple reading books and most
children learned how to read from the Bible. It wouldn't be too hard for them to decipher and
recognize the passages which they already knew well. An inventory from 1700 reveals that one
Boston bookshop had on hand for sale 11 dozen spellers and 61 dozen primers. That shows that
a lot of people in this young colony were eager to learn how to read and write and continue to
improve their minds. By the year 1800, literacy in Massachusetts was more than 90%. That's a
startlingly high percentage and people took great pride in not only reading but learning how to
write excellently and read all the classics. This article is called A Matter of Character
and it discusses the fact that just as important as knowledge was founding virtue in young people
and instilling them with a sense of right and wrong and having a high moral character.
It says for them the development of character was the central purpose of education. Now that's
interesting. It's not just something that needs to happen as well. Learn all your figures and
memorize all these facts and also learn to be a good person. They believed that the whole point
of education was to make yourself a good member of society, a good human being, a civilized person
and the training and education system because it was individualized was according to that purpose.
You would read the classics because you needed to learn about the history of mankind and the wisdom
of great writers of the past. You would read your history books to find out what people had done
wrong and what they had done right. The Bible of course was one of the central books used for
learning because it had not only history of the Christian religion which was the foundation of
civilization but also how to behave properly with the Psalms and Proverbs and learning how
to do mathematics wasn't just to train your mind but also to work in business. Yet these other
things which were difficult to learn like geometry and intricate matters of philosophy,
learning foreign languages like Latin which wouldn't be spoken except perhaps used by those
in the law profession or medicine, but the point was to train your mind and to make yourself be
ready for the challenges you would face in life. Benjamin Franklin wrote extensively on the sort
of education and knowledge and learning that was needed in trying to achieve virtue. He wrote the
Book of Virtue with a course of how to pinpoint the certain things which he considered vices and
try to eradicate them. He first tried it on himself and he found that it was much harder
than he imagined using a chart and marking down x's every time he made a mistake and failed in
his journey toward virtue. Yet he found that certain vices he was able to master quite well
and although perfection isn't something we can achieve one can certainly try to improve oneself.
The article goes on to describe what strong words these wise men and women used to counsel
young people in their lives telling them about the importance of forming good character.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to a 15 year old nephew, give up money, give up fame, give up science,
give up the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act.
And he continued to say it is of great importance to set a resolution not to be shaken,
never to tell an untruth. That's just one of a few examples in this fine article
talking about how important it is to have those strong principles.
Sadly it's hard to be inspired by such great words of wisdom informing one's own character
in the public school setting. Not necessarily to the fault of the teachers with such big classes
and just trying to keep order. It can be hard to focus on such high ideals as well as to help each
individual learn. Perhaps the literacy rate and the high moral character of this strong young
country could be a part of the fact that mothers and fathers were the ones who taught their
children right there in the home. They would give them life lessons but they also didn't spend the
better part of their first 18 years of life in a school room day after day. They learned as they
were able to while also learning practical life tools. Many of these young people were working in
a printing shop with their fathers or making candles, cooking with their mothers. Whatever
the family business was or perhaps if they wanted to learn some other business they would
be apprenticed to some workmen and learn a useful trade and then study in the evenings or during a
lunch break or when they had some opportunity. Of course some people did go to the few academies or
universities which existed in the United States or they would eventually go to Europe to further
learn there. But there wasn't the obligatory school practice which makes learning such a
heated thing to so many young people. It's just like going to work, just like a meaningless job
for their parents rather than a skill or something that you truly master because it helps you improve.
Thankfully more and more people are turning to alternative forms of education these days.
Besides public school there are private schools, parochial schools, charter schools which offer a
superior form of education and usually smaller classes. But more and more families are turning
to homeschooling or some other kind of private home education. The COVID-19 pandemic really was
a tool which made more and more people turn to this because they were forced to. Everybody had
to learn at home. Some people tried to use the online classes which the public school systems
provided and which really didn't work just because it's so difficult to make a Zoom meeting work with
a group of focused businessmen. Now imagine how it is with a bunch of distractive third graders who
could easily be playing video games on their computer when they're supposed to be doing their
schoolwork. Some families however learned how to do actual homeschooling during this time
rather than just doing what the school system was providing. They did what so many families have been
doing over the past few decades and they realized that they could train their children and teach
them at home themselves and actually have a much better form of education. There are two articles
at the back of the Life and Tradition section by the same author that are both about homeschooling.
One is called Homeschooling Must-Haves and the other is Homeschool on Your Own Time.
These articles are timely of course because the school year is just beginning again
and they offer a lot of practical advice for families which do practice homeschooling. They
were written by Karen Dahl who's a freelance writer and a homeschooling consultant. She lives
in Pennsylvania and she has a blog called athomewithkarendahl.wordpress.com. I looked on her
to see a bit more about what she does and it's interesting because a lot of the homeschooling
mothers you picture live on some homestead and have 10 children who are all out there milking
the cows and then around the table but that's not the case with Karen. She had only two children
but she homeschooled them both to great success and they graduated very successfully and happily
and she uses her practical advice to give some ideas to people who maybe aren't as experienced.
Talking about in the first article things that can be useful like having a white board and
a bulletin board, laminated US and world maps, a nature guide, a scope and sequence,
sort of a planning out a way to do things and a keyboard skills program. She also mentions in here
how a library card is a very useful tool in getting books beyond what you have already chosen
in your curriculum and in the second one she talks about the fact that there really is no one
plan that works for everyone. That's the beauty of homeschooling. There doesn't have to be.
Each family can do what works best for those children and those parents and their lifestyle.
The topic of homeschooling is very personal to me because I was homeschooled K through 12
and it's interesting to see the reactions you get. I think the the most common reaction that
my parents got were what about socialization and I was involved in dance classes and plays but
the whole purpose of homeschooling is that it's not really a social event. It's about
training your mind and learning to be a self-sufficient person who not only learns to
memorize facts but learns how to acquire knowledge. I think that's something that school doesn't teach
in the public school system anymore. They teach you what they teach you and maybe you learn how to
remember facts long enough to take a test and be somewhat successful but the point of learning is
supposed to be to actually acquire knowledge, understanding, wisdom and learn skills that you
can use throughout your life. It's so sad to hear not only high school but college graduates say
like oh you know I didn't haven't taken English since you know I don't remember all those grammar
English is the language you speak. You should sort of know how to speak it and write it.
You should be illiterate in at least one language. These founding fathers back
when they had only a few printing presses in this country could often read in several languages and
they prided themselves in writing exquisitely. I went to Christian Liberty Academy or rather I
used their system. It is a real school back in Illinois but they also have an extensive
homeschooling program. Every year I would get a box full of books which you would choose online
and you had a year to complete those books. So it was a course you could make some variations
and they all were very based in a strong Christian faith not particularly attached
to any denomination but of strong emphasis on history, a lot of English which really
gave me the basis I needed to become a writer even though that wasn't something I was planning on
doing. I ended up being equipped for that because of the excellent writing program and the English
program. It's interesting to sort of look through this and read more about what other homeschooling
groups do because we weren't particularly involved in a lot of homeschooling groups. We tried it when
I was very young but we ended up just doing it on our own. There are a few different ways you can
homeschool and this article mentions several times that you need to see what your state's laws are
because there are different laws throughout the country. An excellent resource is the Homeschool
Legal Defense Association. It was founded in 1983 by two lawyers who also were homeschooling fathers
and it has an extensive database on what each state requires in terms of curriculum, teachers,
testing, and all sorts of other accreditations so that you don't get in trouble
because some states are rather strict but for the majority of the states you don't have to
do that much reporting to school your children as you want. There are only a few states primarily on
the east coast actually that are quite strict and they're marked in red in terms of
they're rather strict but it's interesting for me to see how different states are lenient on
some points and it's not a clean political break like you think well maybe liberal states would be
really strict because they want to go to public school and conservative states would be much more
lenient. Well that's actually not true. California is on the moderate to even lenient side and that's
because homeschooling isn't the exclusive property of conservative or Christian families.
I was reading an article talking about the history of homeschooling in the United States
and it cited five different time periods you could say or rather steps that took place
in making homeschooling a widely practiced way of educating your children and also
a legal possibility something which is feasible. Between the beginning of the 20th century and
the late 1960s early 1970s public school was very accepted. Everyone went and it was
it was generally accepted well. People seemed to like it but in the late 1960s and early 70s
there started to be a good deal of dissatisfaction with the whole public school system. This was the
first step in the process toward homeschooling becoming more widespread and this first step is
called contention. Now the reason people were having so much contention was partly because
of educational reformers who were speaking out as well as social scientists and other outspoken
critics of the status quo of education. They began to be dissatisfied with the whole system.
Now this also goes along with the counter-cultural movement that was happening.
A lot of these people were you could say hippies. They were new age people who didn't like the very
traditional status quo education that the public school system offered. The next step was
confrontation. After the initial push for alternative education a string of court cases
dealing with this issue sprung up throughout the country. A lot of families were trying to
go against the school system either by taking their children out of school or suing for the
right to homeschool and it became a hot topic because of all the court cases involving it and
this was the first time since the late 1920s that there had really been any major court cases
involving education. The next step, step three, was cooperation. Most of these court cases were
won by the parents because it's pretty much a basic constitutional right that you should be
able to educate your children how you want especially because there weren't public schools
when the constitution was written. It was your right to educate yourself or your offspring as
you wanted as part of freedom of speech, the pursuit of happiness, life, liberty and the other
reason was that it was very expensive for these school systems to be having litigation against
parents and they realized all it was doing was costing them a lot of money and giving them a lot
of bad press. People didn't like to see that the public school board is suing some parents for
trying to educate their children as they want and they quickly realized that even if they did win a
case the family would usually just move to another district or even another state where they could do
it so they realized they weren't succeeding and they decided to just stop fighting. That led to
the fourth step, consolidation. During the 1970s these court cases alienated the families who are
involved. A lot of the people at public school thought you're some kind of a fringe lunatic if
you wanted to be homeschooling but as often happens in that case the people who were alienated bonded
with other similar people, other people who chose to homeschool and were perhaps outcasts because of
it. They started banding together and forming networks, forming groups, ways to support each
other and they also began finding like-minded people which leads to the fifth step, compartmentalization.
As the homeschooling movement gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s more and more people started
to join but for different reasons. The first outspoken strong leaders of the movement were
liberals. They were new age people who wanted to be able to do something different. They wanted
the right to teach their children in a more unconventional way but in the 1980s with the
Reagan era there began to be a much stronger conservative Christian movement and these people
started to doubt what was being taught in schools and they decided that they would like to teach
their children themselves and at that point a strong Christian homeschooling movement began
to spring up. Now they didn't agree with the liberal new age people. Other people who chose
to homeschool would be Jews or Muslims and as these different groups began to take form they began
disagreeing. They didn't want to be in the same group so they started forming
different separate organizations, compartmentalization. Now all this information comes from
a research paper which is called From Pedagogy to Ideology Origins and Phases of Home Education in
the United States 1970 to 1990. It was written by J. Gary Knowles, Stacy E. Marlow and James A.
Mushmore and it was published in the American Journal of Education, the 1992 issue from February.
Now that's over 30 years ago. Things have changed a lot since then but it's interesting to get
that perspective of something written in the 90s because as far-reaching and all-knowing as
the internet is it can be very hard to find information from just a couple of decades ago.
People tend to rewrite history sometimes even unintentionally. They talk about where we are now.
It can be very hard to find out where we were in 1992 and it's interesting to see that perspective.
Sort of a conclusion near the end of that paper was that this compartmentalization could damage
the homeschool movement but ultimately I don't think that's what happened. It actually has
grown to be very strong and these days, although not everyone understands it still,
it's certainly a much more accepted thing to do.
Christian Liberty Academy, the curriculum I used, was actually one of the pioneers
of homeschooling in the United States and really in the world. It was formed in 1967,
long before a lot of this stuff started happening. It was formed by Dr. Paul Lindstrom who is
considered a pioneer of modern home education. He created the curriculum for one student who
needed to be able to study at home and soon he used it for a few more and before long
people were clamoring for it. The original system was called Christian Liberty Academy
Satellite Schools because they were offshoots. You could do it on your own and the next year,
1968, the Christian Liberty Academy in Illinois, the actual day school, was founded which I find
very interesting. I just found that out last night when I was doing some research even though I went
all the way through that school. I always figured it was a school first and they had homeschooling
as another option but it turns out it was first and foremost a homeschool program.
They ended up changing the name from the Satellite School to the
Christian Liberty Academy School System, still with the acronym class, in the year 2000 because
apparently the word satellite confused some people. A lot of parents would ask, do we need
a satellite on our roof to be able to use the school system? That was too confusing so they
had to change that. I think that it's an excellent system because it's not quite as
starting from scratch as some of these descriptions but that can be very rewarding too.
In this article it mentions some books which are available to help with homeschooling and it
mentions on her blog as well and she mentioned many books which are part of the Christian Liberty
Academy like the Abeka books and of course Christian Liberty Press which was formed in 1985
is an excellent source. In this homeschooling on your own time it's interesting to see how some
people are so structured like they have the whole school year, they follow the school system and
that's very different from what we did. According to Karen Dahl here, my mom was the cool homeschooling
mom because she would let us do it in our pajamas and get up late and we still managed to
finish a school year, my sister and I, within a few months and before long we were a
couple of years ahead and I skipped two grades and we both graduated from high school at 13.
Now when you hear that you probably think you must have been really organized and just completely
down to the letter like this is describing how you can be so detailed. We really weren't
but it just happened naturally and I think that's the beauty of homeschooling. If it happens
naturally that you find yourself going through it really quickly and we didn't need to devote as
much time every day because you waste so much time in school but the beauty of it is that it
allows you to then focus on other things that you want to learn and she talks about that you can have
practical life skills. She says remember to add in practical life skills, music lessons,
extracurricular activities, volunteer hours because these all count as school and leave
space perhaps in the afternoons for interest-led learning so that the children can dig deeper into
topics of interest and it's a powerful motivator for learning in general and that's certainly what
we did with our music lessons and dancing, being in plays, getting to run around in our backyard
and explore in nature. It's great and it doesn't have to be just for geniuses or people who are
living off the grid or families of a lot of children although it can be really good if you
have a lot of children that the older ones can help. I even helped my sister a lot who's three
years younger and I found that I understood some topics and concepts so much better as I was going
through it again helping her with her high school and different books or the same books that I had
taken already. The important thing which is described in these articles and which I definitely
experienced myself is to learn on your own terms and to not feel like you have to fit into a box.
That's what education and learning should be because everyone learns differently and
different people have different skills and different talents and while you need to strengthen
the things which are your weaknesses you also need to develop your talents and while you're
doing it form a strong moral character and homeschooling offers a great opportunity for
families to do that because children then are being educated, taught and nurtured by their
parents and their siblings and people they choose to have in their lives rather than strangers who
end up being more like parents than the parents sometimes. Thank you for spending this time with me
I hope you enjoyed this little exploration of the history of homeschooling and the benefits it can
offer to families. If you enjoyed this video I hope you'll like it and leave a comment telling
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