August 2021
After decades of focus on small, independent schools, we at Heron Books have begun a shift to include, even focus on, homeschools. This led us to an article by the National Home Education Research Institute entitled “Reasons and Motivations for Home Education,” which validated our expanded focus.
Here’s their complete list with brief comments on why we found each point of interest. [1]
• Customize or individualize the curriculum and learning environment for each child.
This is the most basic characteristic of our step-by-step learning guides for each book, which allow students to progress at their own pace, and invite thought and activity on the part of the student as an individual.
• Accomplish more academically than in schools.
All our materials are designed to accomplish more actual learning of useful information, de-emphasizing broad coverage of information to be regurgitated and forgotten.
• Use pedagogical approaches other than those typical in institutional schools.
We’ve been using the same simple, workable approach for 45 years, while the educational world tends to shift from one approach to another, year after year.
• Enhance family relationships between children and parents and among siblings.
To this point, unlike many educational institutions and curriculum publishers, we don’t consider it our job to speak to children in lieu of their parents. We have no agenda, and we consider values are the province of the family.
• Provide guided and reasoned social interactions with youthful peers and adults.
Our learning guides foster thought and interaction with others, whether peers or adults. We want students to think for themselves and we speak to students as thoughtful, able individuals.
• Provide a safer environment for children and youth, because of physical violence, drugs and alcohol, psychological abuse, racism, and improper and unhealthy sexuality associated with institutional schools.
Our materials work well in the safer environment homeschooling can provide. Additionally, we have materials that address the subjects of ethics and morals in simple, healthy ways.
• As an alternative education approach when public or private institutional schools are closed due to acute health situations such as related to disease (e.g., Covid-19, Coronavirus).
Our materials uniquely empower this. In fact, a new homeschooler armed with our materials may find teaching much easier than they might have imagined.
• Protect minority children from racism in public schools or lower expectations of children of color (e.g., black) (e.g., Fields-Smith, 2020; Mazama & Lundy, 2012).
It is core to our philosophy, and thus design of our materials, that every child has unlimited learning potential. Nothing is more certain to us, and the evidence is irrefutable.
• Teach and impart a particular set of values, beliefs, and worldview to children and youth.
We provide clean, simple, engaging exposure to the wonders of the world around us. Values are the business of the family, not schools or curriculum designers and publishers.
We enjoy developing agenda-free curriculum, and we look forward to more and more homeschoolers discovering and using it—to the benefit of children and youth thirsty for knowledge they can use in their lives.
1 Bulleted text from Research Facts on Homeschooling at nheri.org.