GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING
29 We're in the middle of moving again' An office suite on the third floor of our building became avail able, and because we are jammed to overflowing in our current space, we decided to take it. The new place has more than twice as much room, and it will be a tight squeeze on our bud get, but as John says, this may be our only chance to get more space without changing mailing addresses again. John is away right now on a week-long lecture trip to Arizona and Colorado. In the last two months, he has had more time than usual to work on stories for GWS. He has also done quite a few more radio phone inter views: New Orleans, Pinellas Park FL, Columbus OH, Boston, Madison WI, Sas katoon, New York City, Phoenix, and Grand Junction CO. He reports that the August home-schooling meetings in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Baton Rouge were very successful and en thusiastic. He has also gone to an un schoolers ' picnic in Salem, Mass; spent a "Cello Weekend" at Apple Hill in New Hampshire; and visited for several days in Maine with George and Mabel Dennison and the apple-picking crew of Arthur Harvey and Elizabeth Gravelos . In GWS #24, we asked if anyone would be interested in helping us out in the office if we could find a place for them to stay. The first to take us up on that was Phil Bradshaw, age 24, from Minneapolis, who came for three weeks in August. We surely appreciate all the help we can get; there is simply much more work to do around here than there are people to do it. We mentioned before that Yankee magazine published an excellenr-DIO= graphical article on John, with a mag nificent color photo of John and Vita Wallace (age 5) playing cello and vio lin together . We have extra copies of the article here, which we will be happy to make available for $1 each. The Education Network conference we mentioned in the last issue, which was inviting children's artwork for a special show, has been postponed until the spring of 1983. I don't know what this means in regard to sub mitting entries; it might be wise for you to check with them before sending anything in. --- Donna Richoux JOHN' S COMING SCHEDULE Oct 13, 1982: Lect·ure meeting arranged by Theo Giesy, Norfolk VA; 804-625-7558 . Oct 16: Maryland home-schoolers. Contact Manfred Smith, 9085 Flamepool Way, Columbia MD 21045. Oct 17: Conference on children, Kingston NY. Contact Dr. George wootan, 914-331-4075.
Oct 19: "Fate of the Earth" con ference, New York City. Contact Friends of the Earth, 212-675-5911. Oct 27: Universal Education Con ference, Pisa, Italy. Contact Connie Miller, phone 050-68976-68894 (date change) . Nov 4: NY State Reading Associ ation Conf., Kiamesha Lake NY. Con tact Jean Burns, 518-463-0025 or 434-1960. Nov 17: San Bernardino Valley Community College, San Bernardino CA. Contact Jack Mitchell, 885-0231. Nov 18: University of California at Riverside. Contact Jim Dillon, 714-787-5228. Please write to me directly for information on meetings and lectures. Peggy Durkee N.H. SUPREME COU RT RU LI NG From the Valley News (NH), 9/3/82: . . . The New Hampshire Supreme Court has sided with the parents of nine-year-old Justin Rice in their two and a half year struggle for the right to educate him at home. ... Attorney Robert Larsen represented the Rices on behalf of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union. Part of his argument was that the Rices' rights to "due process" were denied because neither the state nor the local board gave them written explanations of the shortcomings of their application. The court agreed that due pro cess was denied. But three of the five justices confirmed the right of school boards to deny applications for home study if a "manifest hard ship" is not shown. And the majority agreed that the Rices' 1980 appli cation did not show that Justin would receive "special benefits" from home study, as required by state regu lations. "There's a little bit in this decision for everyone," said attorney Larsen after yesterday's ruling. "Overall, I think it's a very good decision for home schoolers in New Hampshire, even though the majority took a somewhat conservative pose." Larsen said the decision touched on three points that he felt favored home schooling. "First, the Supreme Court agreed that home education is permissible in New Hampshire and that parents can educate a child at home not only when the child has some (emotional or physical) difficulty, but when the parents can set up a pro gram that offers special benefits." "The second point is that the court reaffirmed the working relation ship between local school boards and applicants" to make a home schooling project work. The third point in favor of home education is the dissenting opinion [DR: Actually a separate concurring opinion] written by Justices David Brock and Charles Douglas. "It's very, very supportive of home edu cation," Larsen said, "This is some
of the most positive language I've ever read in a judicial decision." ... Douglas said, "Home education is an enduring American tradition and right, having produced such notables as Abraham Lincoln (one year of schooling); Woodrow Wilson (little schooling prior to college); and Thomas Edison (basically taught at home by his mother)." While the state may adopt a pol icy of requiring the education of children, Douglas wrote, "it does not
have the unlimited power to require they be educated in a certain way at a certain place." About 10,000 children now are being taught at home in the country, Douglas wrote, pointing out that recently "our neighboring state of Vermont held that requiring a child to attend public school or else be receiving an 'equivalent education' could not be read to require that attendance be exclusively confined to 'approved schools. '" It took the court six months to reach and publish its decision on the case . In the meantime, the Claremont School Board was forced to make a decision on the Rice application for the coming school year . On Aug . 11, the board reversed its previous stands and approved the application. "When we won at the local board it was like something was still miss ing," Mr. Rice said yesterday. "When this happened, it was like the miss ing link was fit into place." ... TRAVELLING THROUGH EUROPE From Art Horovitch in Alberta: . .. We have spent the last ten months on an extended vacation, as ra1·t of a "sabbatical year" arrange m ~t from my job as a high school tea c her ... Our two daughters, Vivian (12) and Debbie (8), were somewhat apprehensive when we first discussed the idea of spending some time on an Israeli kibbutz, fol l owed by several months of travel through Europe. Vivian, by the way, has been home schooling for almost two years now, and enjoys it immensely in contrast to the hassles of attending the local school. ... On the plane from Haifa to Athens, I taught the kids the Greek alphabet and what each letter sounded like. They were soon busy trying to pronounce every Greek word they saw, even though the meaning often eluded us. We did find that many English words have a Greek base, so if you use the English word with a slight variation, you may be understood. The kids learned to count up to twenty and beyond, and would often listen for prices in stores or restau rants. This became an ongoing project for Vivian who learned to count to twenty in Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Spa nish, and French . .. . Vivian was the official "geo grapher" for our trip, drawing a map of each new country as we entered it, and marking our path with dates, as we wandered from one small town to the next. Both Vivian and Debbie delighted in making currency exchanges . Debbie liked Greece, where the rate was about 50 drachmas to the dollar. I told her to divide by 50 to get the price in dollars, but she had her own way of doing it - mUltiply by 2 and move the decimal. She found this much easier .. . Italian conversion was much easier with a rate of 1000 lire to $1. We just omitted the word "thou sand" to get the value in dollars . Both kids learned comparison shopping and how to live within a bud get. Debbie saw a doll near the Coli seum in Rome at a cost of about $4. Further down the road, the same item was $3 and at the large market where most of the locals shop it was only $2 . 50. We felt it was very important to give each of them a certain amount of money to spend as they wished, all the while encouraging them to think of the othe¥ countries we would be go