Can There Be A Place Between School and Home?

In GWS 61, Kathleen McCurdy wrote about the Family Learning Organization of Washington’s offer to help superintendents deal with issues that involve homeschoolers. She described a superintendent who didn’t know whether to allow a mother to send her child to school two or three times a week for part-time instruction. Kathleen advised him that “this would be disruptive to the classroom and that it hardly seemed to be homeschooling if the child was in school so much of the time . . . intent of the part-time student provision was . . . not to serve as an optional babysitting service.” Jan Hunt (BC) comments on this:

I couldn’t agree more that school shouldn’t be used as a babysitting service, but in view of the fact that that is exactly the purpose it serves for most schooling families, isn’t it better that school be used for part-time rather than full-time babysitting? That is, I wonder if there might be certain circumstances in which (or certain children for whom) part-time school babysitting might serve a useful purpose, other than simply taking a specific course or two.

For instance, it might help a child who wants to homeschool but feels reluctant to make a sudden, total change. Part-time school could offer such a child a current basis of comparison (rather than having to compare present experiences of homeschooling to past memories of school), and it might help the rest of the family to make the change more gradually with regard to their schedules, their work arrangements, their information and attitudes necessary, and so on.

Suppose a single mother has shifted from full-time to part-time work to do part-time homeschooling. Wouldn’t that be a change in the right direction, and shouldn't that be rewarded by allowing part-time homeschooling, rather than insisting that the child remain in school full-time until the mother is ready to homeschool full-time?

One last thought: why are part-time students seen as disruptive? In the real world, new people are always entering one’s life. Shouldn’t children be given an opportunity to learn to meet and get to know new people in a welcoming way? If handled in the proper spirit, couldn’t it be seen as a way around cliques and fear of strangers? Victoria has had a part-time program, and it offered an ideal solution for many families. The children were given a schedule of topics and field trips available, and were free to participate in whichever program was of interest.

Why should we think of school as an all-or-nothing institution? Part-time school could be one way a family could move toward homeschooling.