HOMESCHOOL.net

History

The general historic foundations of home education originate with the informal education systems that existed in many parts of the world before the rise of publicly-run schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The usual situation in rural areas before 1860 was that most children were taught farm chores and rudimentary arithmetic and spelling. Reading and writing skills were not highly valued. Occasionally some families would pool and hire a traveling tutor, usually a young Yankee like Stephen Douglas. In exchange for room and board he would provide a few months schooling for the children in the group. In this fashion Abraham Lincoln acquired about 18 months of schooling.

A few famous figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson might be considered to have been home-educated as they were self-educated or had mentors or tutors growing up, but received little formal education. Home schoolers often go on to college --Roosevelt went to Harvard and Wilson to Princeton. Today all colleges and universities accept home school applicants and one, Patrick Henry College in Virginia, appeals especially to home schooled youth with strongly conservative political and religious beliefs.

Self education was heavily promoted in the early 20th century, and the University of Chicago for a while operated a distance education program. Students who paid tuition would receive a package of reading materials and a syllabus by mail, and have to return their lessons on a regular basis to be graded by staff at the university. The magazines of the 1880-1950 period are filled with ads for these programs, of which "LaSalle University" was the most omnipresent.

In the United States, the "curriculum in a box", or All-in-one curriculum, form of home education dates back to 1906, when the Calvert Day School of Baltimore, Maryland made such materials available through a downtown Baltimore bookstore and a National Geographic advertisement. Within five years, nearly 300 children were making use of materials from Calvert's Home Instruction Department. In less than a century the materials had become the basis for lessons for more than 350,000 children annually in more than 90 countries