New Urban Trend: Homeschooling

So says Newsweek. Excerpt:

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Just over a decade ago, when our firstborn was still a toddler, we belonged to the New York City Homeschool Educators Alliance (NYCHEA).  It’s non-sectarian, and as I recall, there were many secular homeschoolers in the group. We moved from NYC when our son was only three, so we never got fully involved. Still, it’s there, and I bet it’s a lot bigger today.