Jeanne is a young but retired teacher of reading and writing in public schools; she has a working husband, boys, 4 and 7, and a girl, 10. The older two kids are enrolled in the school where Jeanne taught. She does not admire the school, and has been imagining a happier and more effective alternative for her children.
Next door to Jeanne and family is an older widower, John, who has, for twenty years, taught Spanish to neighborhood kids in after-school sessions at his own house.
Liz lives down the block. She used to teach math in a private school and has kids roughly in the age range of Jeanne’s.
Fred, a lovable elderly fellow lives two blocks up the hill. He is an emeritus history professor at the university. His children are grown.
Candy – two kids – used to teach science and lives a few blocks from Jeanne.
These five people know and like one another and, now, conspire to create a sort of peripatetic home school for these children. They live in a state that has several forms of tuition aid for unmonied parents to make these choices –charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts, etc. Jeanne and company want to be the teachers in a school consisting of these three parents, plus Fred and Steve, all teaching these ten children in succession, and often together at the five homes in this neighborhood.
The school will be inexpensive to the state. Only Fred will be paid — and he modestly. The five private homes come to the state as free as do the four teachers.
I wish my five children had enjoyed access to such a school. Stephen Sugarman and I fancied such an institution in our 1978 book, Education by Choice. It is fun today to imagine just whom among our present neighbors my wife and I would invite to consider forming such a clique of pedagogues and parents delivering math, history, writing and so forth to their own kids and mine. Which of these folks would contribute to the informal but steady learning atmosphere that all of us would aspire to; and who among us might be either too grave or too silly?
Of course, this group might want precisely an atmosphere of profound seriousness — or something else. And no doubt, in some cases parental cloisters of schooling will want to include a catechist of some species.
My whole point is simply to emphasize the practical reality of neighborhood family-based schools for those who want them.
Could such institutions prosper in the slums of our cities? Suppose the adults in our five cooperating families are all uneducated or otherwise unqualified. Professionals must then be secured who can teach all or one of the necessary courses. I see no practical barrier to their recruitment; there are many teachers able to teach one or more of a range of necessary courses — math, English, history, science, literature.
Of course, with the introduction of such professionals to the peregrine school, the cost to the public could become much greater than with a faculty of volunteers; still, it would stay on the cheap side of standard public education.
And more — the intimacy and mutual confidence among the adults and children will secure the trusting atmosphere so very difficult to provide in our government schools in the inner city, or even many a suburb.
