When Chemists Attack

CNN has a small article on homeschooling today. It says that homeschooling is growing, a trend that I’m not really surprised at – given the current amount of fearmongering going on about the public school system.

The article makes a good point that data about homeschoolers isn’t really very available (which makes sense) – but there is a little.

In the NCES study, 31 percent said they were concerned about drugs, safety or negative peer pressure in schools; 30 percent wanted to provide religious or moral instruction while 16 percent said they were dissatisfied with academic standards in their local schools.

Even the cliche that the majority of homeschooled children are evangelical Christians is outdated, if it was ever true.

I’m not sure if I would be so quick to drop that one – at least not here in the South.

I did get curious when I read the CNN article and looked on the Internet to check out the science texts offered to homeschoolers. While homeschoolers can, I’m sure, use some of the same texts that traditional schools use, the science books I found that were exclusively for homeschoolers were all creationist books. These books systematically deny lots of important science relating to evolution, the age of the earth, etc.

I saw lots of stuff like the odious Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, which I will probably write about in detail later (I suffered under this curriculum for four years at a fundamentalist private school).

So … what do homeschoolers who aren’t religious extremists do? What books do they use? I’m genuinely curious.