Yvonne Hollenbeck: Homeschool dilemmas

More and more parents are choosing to home-school their children, and because I no longer have school-age children or grandchildren, I became curious to understand why. Because I live in a rural area in South Dakota, close to the Nebraska Sandhills, and have friends, neighbors, and relatives involved with home-schooling, I decided to do a little personal research into the situation. As in everything, there are pros and cons to decisions, especially when it comes to our family lifestyles. As I mentioned above, I no longer have school-age children, but when I did, homeschooling was virtually unheard of, because, fortunately, there were still many country schools in operation throughout this vast agricultural area. A country school was where my children were educated through the 8th grade. In fact, when my oldest daughter graduated from college as a teacher, her first assignment was deep in the Nebraska Sandhills at a one-room country school. Although it was not specifically designated as “homeschooling”, my aunt Ruth Johnson taught her two children at her kitchen table all eight of their grade school years on a ranch northwest of Mobridge, She m...