From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Home Improvement
Even in a mock trial, home-schoolers win.
When Andrea Yates drowns her five children in a bathtub, overnight a chorus of pundits, shrinks and child-care experts emerges avowing that home-schooling has obviously driven her to it. But when a team of home-schooled Tennessee teens wins a national competition that rewards thinking on your feet, nary a peep is heard, except from their hometown paper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
In recent years, home-schoolers have been disproportionately represented in spelling and geography bees. But their victory this month in the National High School Mock Trial Championship, held in St. Paul, Minn., is more intriguing still, because this contest--designed to foster appreciation for the U.S. system of law--cannot be written off as an exercise in mere memorization. As the competition's Web page states, it is based on "critical thinking, reading, speaking, and advocacy."
"When you're involved with home-schooling, the first question you always hear is [about] 'socialization,' " says Jeff Atherton, the Chattanooga attorney who coached the team to victory. "So for me the most encouraging thing was sitting at the awards banquet, when we still did not know the winner, and watching kids from all over the country come up to our team and say they were rooting for us. I believe this was a tribute to the courtesy our kids displayed both in and out of the competition."
Mr. Atherton, who heads the local home-school association, says that though home-schoolers still have their battles, "the walls are coming down." Maybe that's because the growth of home-schooling is making it harder to caricature its students. Even by the Education Department's conservative reckoning there are at least 850,000 American children being home-schooled--larger than vouchers and charter schools combined.
For years home-schooling families have endured much prejudice; recall the now infamous J.C. Penney T-shirt bearing a picture of a trailer over the words "home skooled." But this year an issue of the alumni magazine of the Ivy League's Brown University quotes a dean describing home-schoolers as the "epitome" of Brown students. "They are self-directed, they take risks, and they don't back off." Today we even have home-schooled Rhodes Scholars.
The culture is beginning to catch on. Back in May 1995, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, a Time magazine article titled "Outcasts Digging in for the Apocalypse" lumped home-schoolers in with John Birchers and other "well known elements of Far Right thought." But just last August, Time ran a cover story highlighting home-schooling's achievements, such as SAT scores that are 80 points higher than the national average. As Time puts it: "The new home schoolers aren't hermits. They are diverse parents who are getting results--and putting the heat on public schools."
Just ask the little lawyers from Chattanooga.
