Before the state’s first compulsory attendance statute was enacted in 1875, all education was private and much was home-based. After the statute, as industrialization and urbanization took hold in our growing country, “public schooling” and “education” came to be regarded as nearly synonymous. But the current statute (NJSA 18A:38-25), dating from the 1920s, has always permitted parents the option to cause their children to “receive equivalent instruction elsewhere than at school.”
Maureen McCaffrey Williamson examines the homeschool market and shares several resources for contacting with the homeschool market, including mailing lists of homeschoolers, periodical available for advertising, and more.
Cheryl Seelhoff discusses the controversy between her and other homeschool movement leaders.
Patrick Farenga looks at the history of homeschooling from before the founding of our country to present day. He includes discussion of the work of some important people in the homeschooling revolution.
Although HSLDA has changed over the past 30 years—in terms of the size of our membership and staff and our physical location—our original vision and purpose remain unchanged. HSLDA exists expressly for the purpose of advocating family and freedom.
The homeschool niche is unique and has its own quirks. This youtube video shares ten tips for marketing your product or service to homeschool parents.
This article, written in 1998 on the fifteenth anniversary of Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), chronicles HSLDA’s growth.
House Resolution 6 of 1994 was a reappropriations bill for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Ordinarily such bills deal with public education and would have little, if any, impact on home educators. But that year, a few small wording changes affected thousands upon thousands of home schooling families, and resulted in over a million phone calls to Congress.
An interesting list of homeschoolers from history, along with a short description of homeschooling experience.
A look at the change in the homeschooling movement from an inclusive philosophy to a more structured, compartmentalized, and politicized structure.
When Michael Farris and Michael Smith founded Home School Legal Defense Association in March of 1983, home schooling was just a tiny blip on the education radar screen. The concept of parents teaching their children at home was relatively obscure, and the families who chose to follow this non-traditional education route were fairly certain to face opposition from the educational bureaucracy and following legal entanglements, as well as from their own friends and family.
How homeschoolers interact with social media. Myths about using social media for marketing to the homeschool audience. Social media preferences for the homeschool market.
Get tips on how to understand the homeschool market, how to do market research on a home business budget, and whether or not you should buy advertising.
The right to home school is based on two fundamental principles of liberty: religious freedom and parental rights. Whenever one of these two freedoms is threatened, our right to home school is in jeopardy. Here are the battles we think home educators will be facing as we enter the next century:
Homeschoolers are actually not the easiest marketing targets in general. You might think that we are such a specific subset of the population that we basically have a marketing bullseye on our foreheads, but the truth is that people homeschool their children for such a wide variety of reasons that figuring out where we are coming from can be a full-time job in itself. The one thing homeschoolers DO have in common is their belief that by homeschooling, they are providing a customized education for their child.
Cheryl Seelhoff continues her look at the history of homeschooling by examining the influences of unschooling, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Bill Gothard, and more.
If you’re looking for a perfect niche market for your specialty toys, you might try homeschoolers. Since they are outside of the mainstream, they tend to be more skeptical about mass-marketed products and more inclined to make unorthodox choices, as a scan of homeschooling websites and a survey of five homeschooling moms revealed.
This is a great list of famous people who did their learning at home. Includes presidents, athletes, performers, scientists, artists, inventors, educators, writers, and entrepreneurs.
Steve Moitozo explains how homeschooling is parents deciding and directing the education of their children—deciding and directing the education, not doing all the educating.
This timeline highlights the important milestones in the fight for homeschool freedom in the United States.
Homeschooling was growing rapidly in the 1980s in the United States, after starting from a very small base.