The CBC reports on homeschooling

(Thanks to HomeSchoolBuzz for pointing this out.)

The second of two columns on homeschooling by Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko (of the Radio Free School Reading Room, a radio show for unschoolers)appears on CBC.ca today. (The first, with readers' responses, is here.)

Normally I'd be turned off by an article that starts out, "While home-based education may seem like a risky or experimental new venture into unfamiliar territory"--oh no, here we go again with that dark-ages-of-homeschooling stuff. But it does get more interesting, since Ekoko is a homeschooling parent herself and obviously knows better.

I found these statistics interesting, although not surprising:

According to the findings, a typical Canadian home-educating household is a white, Christian, two-parent family with a father as primary income earner. These families tend to have a slightly lower than average income because the mother usually stays home with an average 3.6 children (well above the national average of 1.1) of elementary school age. However, "mothers do contribute to the family income at a higher rate than in the past," [researcher Deani] Van Pelt notes.

3.6, huh? I knew our family was too small......or maybe Dewey counts as point six. But it seems to me I just read an homeschool-bashing article somewhere that said that people with more than two children usually opt out of homeschooling. That seemed pretty strange to me, considering all the large homeschooling families I know. Well, there we have statistics to back us up. [Update: okay, I found it, and I it wasn't meant to be a homeschool bashing article but was just meant to tell you how much somebody thinks it costs to homeschool. And it was more than three children, not two. But I still think that's a strange comment. I guess they haven't talked to the Duggar family lately...]

I liked this quote too (from researcher Dr. Bruce Arai):

According to Arai's research, some parents felt strongly that home-schooling is part of an alternative lifestyle, but "the majority of parents … felt that they were normal in all respects, except for the fact that their children did not go to school."