The surprising Covid legacy for America’s homeschoolers
The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
It was mid-morning, midweek and midwinter in the remote Badlands National Park of South Dakota — about as far as one could get from a schoolhouse. Yet throughout this surreal Midwestern moonscape of rainbow rock formations, I repeatedly ran into families with school-aged children. Why weren’t they in class? The reply was always the same: This is our classroom. We are homeschooled.
While many of the world’s children are back to the old routine — and many parents are horrified at the idea of ever having to teach them at home again — an estimated 3.7mn US households are home-schooling children. The proportion of homeschooled children in the US nearly doubled from 2.8 per cent before the pandemic to 5.4 per cent in 2020-21, according to the US Department of Education.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Patti Waldmeir
