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Home › Articles › Academics › Are You Ready to Homeschool?

Are You Ready to Homeschool?

Leaving the System to Create Your Own

By Tara Swords

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For the most part, Erica Kasson seems to be your typical teenage kid. At 15, she hangs out with her friends, has her own telephone, and is interested in about as many things as she can get her hands on.

But when Erica hangs out with friends, they're often doing volunteer work. And as for the telephone: She built it herself.

The biggest difference between Erica and most other 15-year-olds across the United States is that Erica hasn't been to school in six years. Her family is part of a new breed of home schoolers that subscribe to a philosophy of "unschooling." It's based on the philosophy that children have an innate desire to learn, and will naturally study the subjects that fascinate them.

Reading with Mom "We pursue literally what she's interested in that day," says dad Michael. "As we come across information that we need to survive, then we go pursue that."

Public schooling wasn't completely foreign to the Kassons. They initially sent Erica to the same Denver Public School system that dad Michael had attended in the 1950s. Although she started school in a program for gifted and talented kids, she knew right away that the system wasn't meeting her needs.

"I didn't really pay attention very well and it was kind of hard to handle," Erica says. "I didn't like sitting at a desk all day and being told what to do."

So, when she was in the third grade, Erica's parents made the decision to leave the system and start doing the teaching themselves.

While requirements vary in each state, most don't require parents to have a minimum education level to teach their kids. Many states do want to keep tabs on the progress of home-schooled kids, and they do it in a variety of ways. In Colorado, where the Kassons live, parents must keep track of the child's attendance and academic progress. Every two years, kids must test into or above the thirteenth percentile of their schooled counterparts.


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