School Without School

By Carrie Simmons/ Staff Writer
Thursday, May 5, 2005

On a recent spring morning, Linda Brown asked her three children to pretend they were firefighters who needed to put out a large forest fire without using any water.
At their kitchen table, Caitlin, 10, Zachary, 7, and Brittany, 4, took turns combining baking soda with vinegar in a beaker and watched it bubble onto the table. Linda held the container over a lit candle and watched her children marvel at how the flame was smothered by the gas.
Seemingly uninterested, 2-year-old Aidan continued to cut through a mound of play dough with his plastic knife in his highchair.
The Brown children, like an estimated 20,000 school-aged children in Massachusetts, are home schooled by their parents. On any given day, their kitchen table is dusted with baking soda, colored pencils are stuffed in the sofa cushions and their living room walls are papered with historical timelines and poems about the 50 United States.
"Home schooling is messy but you just have to get used to it," said Linda Brown.