Guest Author:  Dr. Brian Ray, Ph.D.

National Home Education Research Institute

The United States has 1,206 schools, colleges and departments of education.

Their whole purpose is about training and government-certifying teachers who are supposed to be experts.[1] [note 1] According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 176,572 individuals were conferred masters’ degrees in education by degree-granting institutions in the United States in 2006-2007.[2] [note 2] The number of these master’s degrees conferred has grown immensely since the 1990s.

But do Americans need all these government-certified experts? To what extent is the need ever seriously questioned? Are all the tax dollars taken from one citizen and given to another to become a State-approved teacher justified, in terms of children learning in government and private institutional schools? The modern homeschooling movement is an indirect challenge to the claim that Americans (and others) need professionally trained and state-certified teachers.

An Example

Consider, for example, special needs children. The number of research studies on homeschooling and these children is slowly growing. The purpose of Angie Delaney’s “…study was to describe the reasons parents give for choosing a learning environment for their child with disabilities.” (p. 5).[3] [note 3] She worked with both public school and homeschool parents. The researcher additionally “… explored the perceptions of parents of students with disabilities who homeschool, parents who have homeschooled in the past, and those who have considered but decided against homeschooling their children with disabilities …” (p. 5). Hers was a phenomenological qualitative study.

Read more here.