June 05, 2006

Where the elite meet to tweak

Today's New York Times (free registration required or use Bug Me Not) has an article on homeschooling -- or rather, Home Schooling -- with private teachers, "In Gilded Age of Home Schooling, Students Have Private Teachers":
In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children's lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government's hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles. ...

The cost for such teachers generally runs $70 to $110 an hour. And depending on how many hours a teacher works, and how many teachers are involved, the price can equal or surpass tuition in the upper echelon of private schools in New York City or Los Angeles, where $30,000 a year is not unheard of. ...

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor. ...

Bob Harraka, president of Professional Tutors of America, has about 6,000 teachers from 14 states on his payroll in Orange County, Calif., but cannot meet a third of the requests for in-home education that come in, he said, because they are so specialized or extravagant: a family wants a teacher to instruct in the art of Frisbee throwing, button sewing or Latin grammar. A family wants a teacher to accompany them for a yearlong voyage at sea. ...

Parents say in-home teaching arrangements offer unparalleled levels of academic attention and flexibility in scheduling, in addition to a sense of family cohesion and autonomy over what children learn. To them, these advantages make up for the lack of a school social life, which they say can be replicated through group lessons in, say, ballet or sculpture. ...

From a purely academic standpoint, it goes back to a much earlier era," Dr. Snyder said. "The notion of individual tutorials is a time-honored tradition, particularly among the elite."

Think Plato, John Stuart Mill and George Washington. Philosopher kings and gentleman farmers. Because of the cost of in-home tutoring, the idea will probably not spread like wildfire, and just as well, Dr. Snyder said.

"Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," he said. "When Socrates was tutoring Plato, he wasn't concerned about educating the other people in Greece. They were just concerned about educating Plato."
Much as Tom and I are just concerned about educating just our three. Interesting, no?

As interesting in the fact that socialization/socializing/sociability or, erm, "social needs" (which puts the focus on the individual's desires rather than society's need for him or her to find his place, doesn't it?) along with "social goals" don't seem to be as much of a concern when one has money.

And if you read the rest of the article you'll learn about the English family who turned one floor of their Manhattan townhouse into a mini-Eton because they couldn't find a British school in the city. (Psst...you can do this at home, without hiring teachers at $70 an hour, if you avail yourself of Galore Park and Cambridge University Press books and programs. Seventy bucks an hour is the one thing that makes the Minimus TE look like a relative bargain.)

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