MAKING HISTORY – Home School Researcher V. 1 No. 1, 1985
It is exciting to be making history rather than to just be a passive part thereof. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first interactive newsletter ever dedicated solely to Home Centered Learning research. Welcome to the venture and thank you for being a part! I would like to start right off by emphasizing that this is meant to be a forum for each and every person interested in such research to share ideas, information, and express ideas. It is meant to be interactive. Many of you will be called upon to give input. I hope that you do.
Allow me to begin by explaining the rationale behind such a vehicle for thought. It is common knowledge now in the U.S. that the number of people involved in home schooling is growing steadily. Estimates range from 15,000 families to multiples of that figure. Home Centered Learning (HCL) is indeed a significant form of education in our country. Articles abound in professional journals, popular news magazines, and newspapers which contain various opinions and a few facts about the HCL “movement.” However, the results of experimental or fact-finding research are barely trickling into the body of educational information. This brings us to you and me.
You are either: (1) conducting research involving HCL, (2) planning to do such research in the near future, or (3) interested in research that has been done or will be done. If you belong to another category, let me know. The more each researcher can know about HCL, the more effective his or her endeavors will be. It has come to my attention that one of the best ways to learn a lot fast is to talk, or otherwise communicate, with folks who are learning about the concepts in which I am interested. They don’t always give all of the facts or all of the facts accurately, but they do get me moving quickly toward information that I can utilize. For example, I daresay that if I were to pool the literature I have found from tens of hours of manual searching and thirty-three dollars worth of a Library Information Retrieval Service computer search with the literature each of you have unearthed we each would have more than any one of us had at the beginning. And, what might be even more important, by providing this to future researchers of HCL we could save them time and resources that could be better spent on generating new and helpful information for the enterprise of education.
Now lest I appear to be acting as if I will gain nothing from this, let me say elsewise. I know that I have much to gain from your sharing and I eagerly look forward to the help that I will receive from association with you.
HAPPY SPRING!!
Brian Ray