Homeschooling and the Creative Class

My son Slater was included in this week's BusinessWeek piece on home-schooling. Some nice phrases:,

• vowed he'd never put his kid through the eye-glazing lectures he endured in school

• done by a growing number of creative-class parents

• No longer the bailiwick of religious fundamentalists or neo-hippies looking to go off the cultural grid, homeschooling is a growing trend among the educated elite

• The No. 1 motivation, research shows, is concern about school environments, including negative peer pressure, safety, and drugs. In some circles homeschooling is even attaining a reputation as a secret weapon for Ivy League admission.

• conventional education: a mass-production institution that is failing to adapt. Schools, critics say, are like old industrial assembly lines, churning out conformists who could function well in rote factory jobs or rigid corporate hierarchies but not in New Economy professions that demand innovation and independent thinking

Evolving the formal learning model is incredibly difficult and complicated. Everything needs to change, from curricula to expectations to content providers to role of parents and businesses to teacher training and promotion to lawmakers.

As I have mentioned here, when a SimuLearn team went to China to begin the localization process of Virtual Leader, they were invited as guests of the State by the Ministry of Education, and put up in the same suite that is used for Presidents and other Heads of State.

When thinking about the revolution, I sometimes think that, a la Quality, it will happen overseas first, and then after ten years of economic pounding, the US would be forced to respond. While I still think that is the probably scenerio, movements like this one, and people who are dedicated not at an intellectual level but a lifestyle level, give me hope that it can not only start but also happen at home.