Schooling Kids at Home

By SAM ALLIS PORTLAND

Public school makes no sense to Bo Yoder, a strapping young native of Portland, Me. "You get interested in something, and then the bell rings, and you have to go somewhere else," he says. "It sounds horrible."

But then he wouldn't know. Aside from a brief stint in preschool, Bo, 15, ) has never been in a classroom. While his peers puzzle through the mysteries of a new high school year, he sits at home, quietly exploring the arcana of radio waves. He is a ham-radio fanatic, can take down Morse code at 13 words per minute and is aiming to get his fourth-level ham license. He has taught himself how to use a wood lathe and is rereading Mark Twain. Bo plans to go to college. He will master the artificiality of entrance exams when the time comes, he explains.

Solon Sadoway, 11, has never been to school, and displays not a whit of curiosity about the place. He is a car buff who most days pores over auto magazines at home in Lenox, Mass. Solon taught himself to read last year ("I really don't quite remember how," he muses) and learned basic arithmetic by handling the cash register at his parents' health-food store.

Home schooling -- motivated by the notion that learning should be unpolluted by the classroom -- is an eccentricity that has become a national movement. "Pick the menu. It's your meal," intones Stephen Moitozo, a home-school parent in Auburn, Me. Upwards of 500,000 U.S. children are being schooled at home, a tenfold increase in a decade. Their ranks are still swelling. In Maine alone this year, there were 1,500 parental applications to state authorities for permission to teach children at home, in contrast to four in 1981. "We have everything from Black Muslims to Jews and one woman who is a cross between a Zen Buddhist and Winnie the Pooh," says Michael Farris, president of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, which tracks developments across the country.

Professional educators blanch at the movement's expansion, and as the trend increases, their concerns rise about the quality of such instruction. Bruce Wheeler, an industrial-arts teacher in Wilton, N.H., frets about his nephew Solon Sadoway's progress. "This is a hit-or-miss effort," he says. "If he doesn't learn something, nobody notices." "If you need a license to cut hair," argues Donald Bemis, state supervisor of public instruction in Michigan, "you should have one to mold a kid's mind."

Home schooling may have fought for the right to exist in the '80s, but as the sheer numbers grow, the battle now is over how much regulation is required. Often precious little: 32 states, from New York to California, demand only a high school diploma from parents who teach at home. Others, like South Carolina, require a college degree or passing grades on an entrance- / teaching exam. "You can be a fine home-school teacher with a high school diploma, compassion and motivation," argues Robert Ruthazer, a Navy commander whose wife Diane teaches their two children at home in Topsham, Me. Issues like teaching qualifications have led to more than 100 court cases across the country in the seven years that Farris' organization has been in existence.

Home-school curriculum standards are even more elastic. Study programs usually are approved by local school boards, whose competence in the area may be minimal. In some cases, parents must submit detailed outlines of proposed courses. In others, school boards adopt a laissez-faire approach that takes on faith the commitment and competence of the parent-instructors.

The debate goes to the heart of American education. "Who is in charge of children -- parents or the state?" asks Linda Williams, a Christian Fundamentalist mother of four boys, ages 4 to 13, who teaches them for two hours each morning at home in Bangor, Me. "We're saying the parents are." She points out that there are no drugs in her bathroom, or switchblades in the hallways. "We're kidding ourselves if we think we're putting our kids in the same schools we went to," she says.

The backbone of the home-school movement is the Christian Fundamentalist community, which believes that religion is either abused or ignored in the classroom. Other parents reject public education for more conventional reasons: poor academic standards, overcrowding, safety. The most uncompromising group call themselves "unschoolers," viewing as anathema any notion of educational structure.

Good intentions do not automatically translate into solid education. Some of the many experiments could turn out to be disasters. But then, argue home schoolers, public schools already are disasters. "The assumption is that the socialization process at public schools is normal and good," says Stephen Moitozo. "I'll tell you what normal isn't. It isn't the same kids in the same room doing the same thing at the same rate in the same way to achieve the same results because they're the same age."