Life
More African-American families opting to home-school their children
Until recently, home-schooling in the US was mostly practised by white families, but a growing number in the black community are now also turning their back on the public school system and educating their children at home. Why?
About two million, or 4 percent, of American children are home-schooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), a rough estimate, as families do not have to register with the authorities in some states.
But home-schooling has traditionally been dominated by white Christian families in the rural south, who object to what they see as the public schools’ liberal agenda on sex education and Darwinism.
The number of inner-city parents choosing to educate their children at home, for educational rather than religious reasons, has been growing for a while, but until recently few black families were thought to be among them, according to NHERI director Dr Brian Ray.
“For the African-American community there was a huge amount of pressure against it, because in America, the grandparents of today’s home-schooled children fought for desegregation of schools. They thought, ‘The public schools are going to save us,'” he says.
