Semi-radical, unacademic, and too much fun

The New York Times covers “Anti-Schoolers”, a piece on the growth of home education in the Big Apple:

Benny’s parents [“with two PhDs and an MD between them”] aren’t home-schooling in the traditional sense, by hewing to a curriculum, nor are they strictly “unschooling,” that is, following the teachings of John Holt, a progressive educator who promoted a child-led learning movement that is a wildly democratic subset of the home-schooling world. Rather, theirs is an ad hoc, day-by-day exploration into what it means to be a stay-at-home parent and child in an accelerated culture like New York. In a city where the race to be on top can start in infancy, the disconnect between these parents’ choices and the New York City norm is vast, as Ms. Rendell [Benny’s mother] learned recently.

Read the rest here.

Most interesting to me, aside from an engaging look at home schooling and “out-in-the-world” families in NYC, was the comment from Ms. Rendell’s editor at a “hip online magazine” for which Ms. Rendell wrote about her family’s home educating adventures: ” ‘what got people going,’ was a sense that these readers ‘were being out-hipped or out-cooled,’ as [the editor] put it, that they were ‘feeling jealous on some level that Joanne had the opportunity to stay home with her son’.” Because I’ve found that many of the stronger anti-home schooling sentiments seem to come from those who find that our family’s very personal educational choice makes them feel defensive about their own choices. As Ms. Rendell herself notes in the article, “one’s choices, if different from another’s, can seem like an affront.”