I'd say the thesis of the article is that homeschooling will become more popular and have a large impact on the development of instructional methods in public schools in the future. The first may be true, the second is not.
The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.
Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students.
Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century.
And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind.
Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.
There won't be any policy-driven change in the education system of the kind that TED speakers would love to see.
The system won't change meaningfully until the world around it changes first. That is to say, until private sector alternatives/supplements start making an impact in education without the help of the state. But that's entirely possible.
The issue is that nobody has really built anything all that special for the education sector yet. The best we have are MOOCs, which are, for all their production values, just static resources and not a new way for a child to learn.
> That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.
Elizabeth Warren has written an excellent book describing the pitfalls of two-income families that send their children to public schools. It's called "The Two Income Trap".
In it, she demonstrates that having two incomes isn't the advantage that you might intuitively think it is. Actually, having a single income and homeschooling (or outschooling) can make a family more resilient and flexible, for two main reasons:
1. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out.
2. Location. If the family doesn't enroll their kids in a public school, they are free to live wherever they want, so long as the breadwinner can still commute. This cuts expenses way down. No longer do they have to compete with two-income earners for homes in a particular school district.
So, while having a parent remain at home is certainly a different lifestyle, it isn't clearly something that can only work for the wealthy. I know many homeschooling families who would not be described as wealthy.
> 1. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out.
That's a very specious statement. The second income earner would have to begin a job search at a point when their secondary social network is weakest for that task.
In addition, the primary income rarely goes down due to accident. It is more likely that the primary income goes down due to a area effect: big employer goes under, depression in the general economy, etc. These will make it even harder for the second income to come online.
The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.
Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students.
Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century.
And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind.
Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.