EDUCATION: Home Sweet School

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When Bonnie Vautrot realized her daughter was dead bored in school, she decided to take on the system. She became the PTA president at the Williamsburg, Virginia, elementary school and challenged the teachers to challenge the kids. "I would go in and beg the teachers: 'What can I do?' If you have a curriculum that says you're in third grade now, but your child is ready for fourth-grade material, you hit a brick wall." The response, she recalls, was, "Well, obviously you've got nothing better to do. Why don't you teach your kids at home?" So she did. Thus was born another home school. Beverly and Brad Williams had similar reasons but different circumstances. They were not only unimpressed with their local schools, they were scared of them as well. The idea of sending their four children through the cross fire of South Central Los Angeles was too harrowing. With ruthless budgeting, they managed to pay for private schools for six years, but tuition was just too high, and they were not satisfied with what it bought. So the couple converted their basement into a classroom with three desks, bulletin boards and two computers. Now their children get dressed every morning as if headed to school and are required to report to the basement by 9 a.m. Brad, who doesn't start work as a Federal Express delivery man until 3 p.m., handles most of the teaching. They work until 1:30, then break for the day.

If the Williamses and Vautrots do not seem like traditional home schoolers, that may be because there's no such thing anymore. A movement once reserved largely for misanthropes, missionaries and religious fundamentalists now embraces such a range of families that it has become a mainstream alternative to regular public or private education. In inner cities and rural farm towns all across the country, periodic tables hang on the dining-room walls, and multiplication tables are taped to the back of car seats for practice during field trips. Home schoolers hold conventions at which hundreds of companies offer curriculum guides, textbooks and support groups. There are home-school chat sessions on the Internet, even home-school proms and graduation ceremonies.

Since the late 1970s, when roughly 12,500 children were taught at home, the number has grown as high as half a million. It remains true that most parents who choose to withdraw their children from the school system, or never send them in the first place, do so for religious reasons, seeking to shape their children's learning in accordance with their spiritual values. In addition, there are still the hermits and occasional hatemongers, observes Joe Nathan, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change, "people who have made it clear that the reason they educate at home is that they don't want their children exposed to people of different races, or that they don't want their children exposed to ideas with which they disagree."