Raymond S. Moore, Ph.D.

In 1960, the Smithsonian Institution's journal, Horizon, published a daring three-part recipe on "The Childhood Pattern of Genius:" The first ingredient was much time  with warm, responsive parents and other adults.  The second was isolation from peers, and the third called for much freedom for children to explore their own interests.  Finally, study director Harold McCurdy applied it to families and schools:

"...the mass education of our public school system is, in its way,  vast experiment on reducing...all three factors to a minimum; accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius." [11]

To find out why, we go to one of history’s classic narrations--Russell Conwell's riveting story about 16th Century India Farmer Al Hafed and his  excitement on hearing of fabulous diamond sands somewhere in India.  Anxious to get there first, he hastily sold his Indus River farm, overlooked  carefully-researched maps and headed for the sea. He searched ocean sands for years until, exhausted and penniless, he drowned himself in a heavy surf. He was unaware that a neighbor who studied the maps, found the diamonds in river sands snaking through the farm he sold--the now legendary Golconda Diamond Mines.

From mansion  to shack, the world's quest for healthy, creative, self-directed students waits for the taking by warm, responsive parents and selfless educators. Waiting for  them is history, sound  research and common  sense and courage  to use them in confronting  tradition. Otherwise they are on a primrose path  to catastrophe. These tested answers from history and research are as handy as Golconda's maps and certain as Indus River sands. They are already restoring families and schools. I’ll try to show you how.

HISTORY

To warn against societal collapse, Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lincoln Biographer Carl Sandburg observed that we need not fear the future if we don't forget our past; for  the years teach much which the days never know. The state of the family has always been a key to survival of fading societies, and in early America homeschools were a particularly stabilizing factor. Over  the world also, many  heroes were taught at home. Germany's Johannes Kepler, England's Sir Isaac Newton. France’s Louis Pasteur, Canada's Alexander Graham Bell and America's George Washington were all taught at home. The list goes on:

A few years ago, 13-year-old  our homeschooler Joe Harrington ‘s research began  producing  three times as much gold from a ton of ore, and now cleans up factory waste water. Of course nearly all children are home taught to some degree. Moses and Christ were Jewish models. And four on this list shared leadership of World War II:  Britain's Churchill and America's Roosevelt, MacArthur and Patton all  born in the last century, and Konrad Adenauer who led post-War Germany. Since then, (1) over 90% of Americans left the farm  for the city,  (2) families submitted to mass education, (3) migration and immigration changed the character of nations, and (4) adult functional literacy ebbed to about 50% of the old American homeschool era. [1]

Californian educators tried  to legislate infants into classrooms at   21/2. But new children who had not started school until ages 8 to 14 enrolled  when  rural America enjoyed its highest literacy. Those who did go to school attended only a few hours two or three days a week, and never at planting time or harvest. School children made their way responsibly  to one--or two--room schools without busses or crossing guards.

By the end of World War II, these schools were displaced by James Bryan Conant's dream of bus-fed academic parks.  But Conant rued his dream as the Parks became educational ghettos. 

The June, 1972 HARPER'S which  raised eyebrows by publishing our research report on the perils of early schooling, was picked up by the October  READER'S DIGEST and sent as a "Springboard for Discussion" to 52,000,000 readers over the world, and later asked for a book.[2]  Its suggestion of homeschooling exploded into America’s largest proven education movement, now world wide.

Some educational agencies ignored the proven research.  America's National Educational Association says  homeschools don’t do well in math and reading. Yet in 1985, we studied the first 50 homeschool court cases--in which I had to face NEA affiliates. The court-approved  test scores averaged 80.1%. And this year in Idaho, a state that jailed home-teachers until a few years ago, legislators found composite standardized classroom tests averaging 57%.  But its homeschool scored higher than 91% of America’s public school system, with highest scores in math and reading.[3]

Homeschools don’t vow perfection, but they appreciate  public school eagerness to find out why and how home teaching does so well. Universities like Indiana and Wisconsin avidly recruit home-taught students. Many prefer students who have been homeschooled  through high school. All U.S. Military Academies welcome them. From Stanford and Melbourne to the Smithsonian and Oxford and its Rhodes Scholarships, they are prized.  For example, in Idaho, all seven university age children of a family of 11 homeschoolers receive  full scholarships from prestigious universities. Harvard Associate Dean David Illingworth calls such creative work-study-service students "a luxury." [4] 

Problems we can solve. Widespread indifference to child development and learning in our schools often creates mental health nemesis that abuses and destroys children from day-care through college. And it doesn't stop there. We emasculate education when we put them out of our homes and into institutions, barred from the care most crucial to their growth.
In bi-partisan research voluntarily funded by the U.S. congress, we found that such education becomes child abuse.  At Stanford, Colorado (Medical School), and Andrews universities, and National Center for Educational Statistics, our studies found that the United States, Japan and much of the European community rushes tots out of home into school long before they are ready.

Picture a bright five or six-year-old boy dropped from the hopefully relaxed atmosphere of his home into a peer quagmire where little personal attention is given to his needs. UCLA Dean John Goodlad's study of 1,016 American K-12 public schools found that classroom teachers averaged a total of  seven minutes daily in personal exchanges with their students. [5] Many students don't have even one warm response for days at a time.  In contrast, our counts of daily homeschool responses average 30 to 50 for each child.

Despite our boy’s widely-acknowledged delay in maturity, we demand his enrollment in school at the same ages as girls to perform at the same level as girls who are a year or so more mature. He is much more likely than girls to fail, become delinquent, or acutely hyperactive.  There are eight boys for each girl who are  emotionally impaired, and 13 boys for every girl are in remedial classes. [6] He loses self worth, male identity, and respect for women. So,  Federal money spent for special education may relieve classroom  teachers, but it often abuses our boys. Although labeled, "learning disabled," they are  usually simply "learning delayed:"  Bright, often brilliant, but immature. Dropout rates verify this. Yet  like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and others, dropouts are often more fortunate than those who stay in school.

Our potentially bright, creative young males are pronounced "handicapped," marked for failure by teacher and student alike. State and federal laws or policy sentence them to peer derision at school and loss of family honor at home.   If they are in fact handicapped, all the more reason for home!  By the first  law of child development they must somehow have family.  And they find it--in gangs, alcohol, drugs, sex, violence or suicide. Witness America’s recent spate of shootings.

The learning tools -- vision, hearing, cognition, nervous system-- of average children who enroll at today's early ages are not tempered for structured academic tasks.  At best, rigid pressures  to read by 5, 6 or even 8 risk failure for children who are very bright, but simply late readers. Sometimes even girls are at risk, like Maggie Barker of Millersburg, Ohio, whose sister learned to read at age 4. Maggie, learned to read at 12, but became the fastest, best comprehending reader in her family. 

 Students lose  physical and mental health from 1) uncertainty from leaving the family nest,  2)  bafflement from social pressures and restrictions,  3) frustration from pressure to use their unready "learning  tools" which can’t handle the regimentation and  routine of formal lessons, 4) hyperactivity growing out of tattered nerves warring against rigid  studies, 5)  failure which flows from the episodes above, 6)  delinquency which is failure's twin, and 7) a sense of family lost, often including suicide. In a British Columbia seminar, over 500 kindergarten teachers told me unanimously that they suffered overbearing pressures to prepare tots for early reading. Over their objections, teachers are ordered to enforce laws;  judges must compel them.

Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which  Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late–  about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously  that  the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!

RESEARCH

This will not happen if we stay close to research. Note how studies tested by replicability provide  links from past to present and hope for the future.  Lets look at simple but profound reasons for declining literacy, academic failures, widespread delinquency, and malignant peer dependency and what we can do about it.

Whys of Academic Failure.  Researchers from leading schools and research institutes from Canada,  the U.S. and Europe to Australia and Japan conclude that children should enjoy the security of  warm, responsive homes at least until adolescence.  

Tufts Psychologist David Elkind  warned against student burnout which has become pervasive in American schools.[7] University of California Learning Specialist  William Rohwer, agreed, basing his conclusions in part on investigations in 13 countries by Sweden's Torsten Husen.[8] Rohwer, concerned about  early conceptual demands of reading and arithmetic, declared:

"All of the learning necessary for success in high school can be accomplished in only two or three years of formal skill study.  Delaying mandatory instruction in the basic skills until the junior high school years could mean academic success for millions of school children who are doomed to failure under the traditional school system."[9]

This solution delays school entrance at least until 11 to 13. Stanford prefers 10-14,  and Columbia and Cornell researchers made similar findings. There is no contrary replicable research.

It’s true that tots learn very fast, yet only as their cognitive maturity and environment allows .  They who are fortunate enough to combine this with 8 to 10 years or more of freedom to explore at home, develop thousands of "learning hooks" and ability to reason consistently that is impossible for younger children. Without this maturity, and a warm responsive home, and confined to classrooms, they too often may become anxious, frustrated, and eventually learning disabled.

First, two students among many are especially noteworthy in supporting, led by Carnegie Foundation and others, researchers compared 1500 8th grade graduates from conventional classrooms with 1500 who learned in flexible programs or who were not taught at all.  Youth were paired by age sex, social ambience, aptitude test scores, vocational interests, etc., and followed for over eight years. On all variables, such as high school and college grades, honors, leadership, attitude on the job, the children from the flexible classes significantly outperformed pupils in conventional classrooms.  But those who were not taught at all had the highest scores of all. [10]

Second, when we visited with Piaget  twenty years ago, he was estimating that American youth reached formal cognition between ages 15 and 20, although his tutored Paris children reached it between 10 and 12. Yet recent University of Oklahoma study found that most children reared in warmly responsive homes from birth, usually achieve adult-level reasoning by ages 8 to 12. [11] Such early cognitive  maturity supports both the 8-year Study and the Smithsonian in the value of parents as teachers, and  sees discipline as a fine art of discipleship, modeled by parents.

This research remarkably aligns with the bat mitzvah and bar mitzvah–ages 12 and 13 respectively for boys and girls--of  today's orthodox Jews, and Ancient Israel's brilliant children. These were  target ages of maturity and responsibility for girls and boys. Note again the later maturity of boys. 

Further confirmation comes from the late dean of American psychiatrists,  J.T.Fisher, who started school at 13, unable to read or write.  He thought he was a genius when at 16 he graduated from a Boston high school until he found that any normal child can do it.  He said, "If a child could be assured of a wholesome home life and proper physical development, this might provide the answer to...a shortage of qualified teachers."[12]

Over a century ago, John Dewey warned that enrollment age 8 was minimal. [13] A half century later, Harold Skeels proved that loving, though retarded, teenagers brought up deprived orphans to live a normal life.[14]  After another quarter century, Marcelle Geber found that mothers in the African bush brought up children who were more socially and mentally alert than youngsters of elite families who could afford preschool.[15] Parental warmth was the key.  Still later, Mermelstein proved that, until ages 9 or 10, children did no better than those who stayed home.[16]

COMMON SENSE

Thousands of mothers–physicians, attorneys,  judges, engineers, secretaries, et al–are renewing their families by returning home and developing family industries and services with their children.  Homework should be eliminated for the first ten years or so in favor of profitable work at home.

In the home school movement, hundreds of thousands of parents are  re-evaluating their child-rearing roles and are studying to study warmly their children's developmental needs.  The  result is higher achieving, better behaving, self-directed children. Even HEAD START founders Benjamin Bloom and Glen Nimnicht conceded its failure long ago, and praised the home as the best learning nest. [17]  In physical health and behavior  both--in exposure to disease  [18] and to negative aggressive acts--the home is 15 times as safe as the average day care center. [19]

Sociability. The question most often asked is the easiest to answer.   "What about  sociability?"  Cornell’s Bronfenbrenners famed research on the influence of parents versus peers, found that when children spend more time with peers than parents until near junior high school they peer dependent.  This in turn causes losses of  self worth, optimism, respect for their parents and even trust in peers. Yet the most parents and school officials insist peers are the best socializers. [20] 

A nationwide  joint university study using a scale approved by most public schools, found that 77.7%  of America's homeschoolers rank in the top quartile in sociability. [21]. This is not hard to explain when you realize that the best of homeschooling or the best of any schooling teaches children how to relate to others in business and in services to others.

Legal defense. The second most frequently-asked question about legal defense. We have quite favorable laws in all 50 states. Next  I turn to attorney Steven Graber. With him in court we have never lost a case. I believe his overall plan is the best way  to develop the finest legislation and to reduce such defense needs to a bare minimum.

  First be cautious about " National or international" legal defense organizations. They are (1)remote and myopic in focus, (2)far more likely to have to go to court than with ombudsman groups (3) less able to discern the local environment in court (4) more legalistic than empathetic (5)impersonal on issues,  (6)dependent on locally licensed legal counsel  in matters that end up in court  (7) financially controlled by centralized office with no accountability to local members.  (8) unwilling or unable  to follow through  to conclusion intensely litigated cases, such as single  mothers whom they exclude despite great needs. Thus these agencies are of limited value because the strongest attacks on home education are in local areas with which they tend to be at arms-length.  Such agencies  often compromise instead of settling only in the best interests of home educators when the law has invasive controls and inroads into precious constitutional privileges.

"Contrast this large central organization approach to the far more effective local ombudsman system which is welcomed by judges who from previous experience respect the wisdom and principles of the ombudsman group and usually keep homeschoolers out of court. Working out issues in the spirit of community effort is far superior to legally focused controversy by a distant agency."[22]

In conclusion, I remind you that, the best homeschools have learned lessons from history, research and common sense that have returned American literacy percentages into the 90%s and produce  test scores range of  25% to 30% higher than most classrooms, and earn the admiration of our leading universities.

Some educators and parents may think such ideas outdated or dull, or like the backyard Al Hafed left.  Yet, everyone likes diamonds, and using well-researched maps, that backyard can be an exciting place.  Anything else may be more child abuse than education.