Field Guide to Home Schooling: A Practical Guide for Parents

Although I have been a government school teacher for 22 years, now (or perhaps because of it), I have become increasingly disillusioned with government schools. To educate myself on the concept of home schooling, and to arm myself for what might have been a nasty confrontation with my wife over home schooling my 6-year-old, I looked at many books on the subject and chose this one to focus on. Rather than use a highlighter, my approach to taking notes is to actually TAKE NOTES, and I filled many pages of a medium-size top-spiral notebook with gems from this book, presenting the eventual typewritten results to my wife, accompanied by my own thoughts. The same day she read the notes, she had a conversation with the elementary school principal of my son's school (right across the street from our house) and left him speechless with virtually direct quotes from this book! He didn't even try to deny the charges that this book makes so crystal clear - he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on. Even if you are skeptical about home schooling, this book will make you nervous about sending your child to a government school. I see how it stunts the intellectual growth of my students every day. It brings tears to my eyes to imagine a stunted twelve-year-old version of my son. Our lives have been changed by this book. (We are not religious. This book is very much so. That is its only drawback as far as I am concerned.)

We were considering home schooling, and I picked up this book and it helped us to solidify some of our reasons and resolve some of our concerns over home schooling. Thank you so much Christine for laying the book out so well!! I've already reccomended it to a number of other people considering home schooling.

I just finished this book and loved that the opinions and information the author provided was factual and backed up by research. Like the previous reviewer, I used up a lot of my yellow highlighter, which I typically do when I absorb a lot of good information and want to remember the basic points! Ms. Field has provided me with the confidence that homeschooled kids aren't reclusive freaks, and showed me factually how they are better socialized than their traditionally schooled peers and do better in grades and other skills than public school students. I will be confident that my son will learn better in a one-on-one situation, rather than fighting 25 other kids for the attention of one teacher, who can NOT give individual students special attention that they may need.