Parents biting their nails over declining standards in public schools but not rich enough to send their children to private schools have found a way out – home schooling.
By all accounts, as many as 8 000 people around the country are now teaching their children at home and more families are joining their cause every day, often forgoing one salary to do so.
Why this sudden boom in home schooling? The desire for a strongly religious education, worry over big classes and children’s special learning needs are the reasons usually trotted out. All these points may be valid, but one has that familiar prickling sensation that the real reason is being artfully dodged.
It is surely no coincidence that home schooling has flourished post-apartheid, although not a single home schooler will admit to keeping their precious babies at home for racist reasons. When pressed, a couple of home schoolers interviewed said “some families they knew” had taken their children out of school after “black kids gave them a rough time”.
Leenert van Oostroum, president of the National Coalition of Home Schoolers, points out his interest in home schooling long predates 1994. He also says he knows of families of all races who are schooling their children at home, that it’s not just a “white fright” thing.
He does admit, however, that his organisation was inundated with calls in January 1994 from terrified whites whispering hoarsely down the phone about the swart gevaar’s arrival in schools. “A small percentage of families are educating their children at home for purely racist reasons,” he says. But those who are “now coming in droves” are people who “were willing to give the new system a chance but have now given up. Unlike the majority of other parents, I don’t believe the quality of education has declined greatly over the past 10 years. I believe it has always been horrendous,” says Van Oostroum, who refers to traditional schooling as “institutionalised learning”.
An educationist who gleaned most of his knowledge “from books under the desk” at school, he has little positive to say about schools and he and his wife are teaching their three children at home. He also believes the move towards home schooling provides healthy competition for the schools themselves.
The only racial dynamics he’s aware of nowadays is the flak white parents are getting for taking their kids out of school and diminishing the white population in them.
Some public schools are clearly worse off than they’ve ever been, but most of these are township and rural schools, battling teacher and resource shortages and a poor culture of learning and teaching. Many former model C schools are better off now than they were as white schools under the old regime. Parents are paying more to keep standards high, but fees are nothing like those at private schools.
My daughter’s primary school is now far better than it was when I was there, however many years ago. We white children were given a good education for next to nothing, thanks to apartheid, but there weren’t the frills there are today.
In my view, the trend towards home schooling is bad news. It strikes yet another blow to the new society we are supposed to be growing, and appears to be just another permutation of the white flight. People seem to want to lock their doors and stay at home. Even the trip to school is too hazardous.
The Human Rights Commission’s recent research into racially mixed schools highlights the tremendous difficulties schools are experiencing with racial integration. In many schools, violence and hate speech have overtaken innocent playground antics and life for young children is rough. But is crawling into the shell the solution?
The biggest criticism levelled against home schooling is the absence of proper socialisation. Home schoolers say their children mix with other kids in the afternoons, do extramural activities and grow up to be self- assured leaders. But many of these families, who follow the popular Christian theocentric education curriculum, seem to live very insular lives indeed. What society are they talking about?
There may be many positive reasons for home schooling – not least the fact that just because schools have been around for centuries doesn’t make them right.
Not all of the thousands of Americans who are home schooling are right-wing fundamentalists with large arsenals of weapons strung across their apple pie hearths. Many are in fact lefties who don’t want to put their children through the miserable process of being bullied, boxed and labelled that they went through. Technology has turned traditional notions of working and learning upside down, so it’s no surprise that schools are being challenged too.
At any rate, the government has decided to give parents the freedom to choose alternative ways to school their children. Under the Schools Act, home schooling is legal but families must register individually with the provinces. Typically, the provinces are drowning under a million other priorities and haven’t drawn up their regulations yet. Home schoolers are technically doing it “underground”.
They rather smugly point out – in an attempt to force the provinces to get their houses in order – that underground schooling is creating a climate of disregard for the law among their children. Unfortunately, they may be right.
Philippa Garson is editor of The Teacher, a sister publication to the Mail & Guardian