7 Types Of Home Schooling

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Across time and cultures, children have been educated at home by family members. While this has been the way most children learned what they needed to survive and thrive in the world for most of human history. Since the beginnings of compulsory education in the United States in the mid nineteenth century, some parents have fought to educate their children on their own–even though the practice was often illegal in their communities.

Home schooling is currently legal in all 50 US states. The number of children who are home schooled has grown steadily since the 1980s. Somewhere around 2.5 million children where home schooled in 2018.

Reasons for home schooling include dissatisfaction with other schooling options, religious convictions, or to better address a child’s special needs.

Families use many methods to home school their children. Here’s a quick look at seven basic approaches:

Traditional

An approach to home schooling utilizing the general planned curriculum, schedule, and instruction model of traditional schooling.

Co-Op

Growing numbers of home schoolers are pooling knowledge, time, and other resources to cooperatively educate their children outside traditional school settings.

Tech Schooling

As broadband speeds increase and technology improves, some home school families rely heavily on technology as a learning tool.

Theorist Based

Many home schoolers build their approach on learning and developmental guidelines set out by theorists like Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Charlotte Mason, and others.

Roadschooling

Home schooling on the road. For families with parents who work remotely or travel in their work, the different locations visited become the core curriculum.

Unschooling

In unschooling, learning is tied to the child’s interests. The structures of traditional schooling a set aside in favor of a child-centered and child-led model.

Hybrid

A bit of This and a bit of That. Many home schoolers MacGyver together their home schooling process using bites and pieces of some or all of the above methods.