New Article from (Pacific) Time Magazine - School's Out Forever

http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/article/0,13673,503060417-1181679,00.html
Sunday, Apr. 09, 2006
It was several months before anastasia was born that her parents decided she wouldn't be going to school. Her mother, Katharina Russell-Head, had driven the idea, doubtful that schooling was the best way for children to learn. Without instruction, she reasoned, infants accomplish the astonishing feats of learning to walk and talk. "I wondered what would happen if you applied that same philosophy - just letting them be - to children after the age of five," she says. "Would they continue to do their job as children?" There's a twist in Russell-Head's case. A schoolteacher in Melbourne for 10 years before Anastasia came along, she might have been expected to regard teaching as a job best done by professionals. But that's not her view at all. While teacher training is worthwhile, she says, its main benefit is to prepare trainees for tutoring large groups. "Anyone can teach one-on-one," she says. "And my method wasn't really teaching, anyway. It was just being there." Academically, Anastasia seemed to thrive at home, an impression confirmed when - curious about school and keen to develop her musical talent - she started at the somewhat alternative Melbourne Rudolf Steiner School in Year 10. "She immediately excelled in everything," her mother says. "But after two weeks she came home and said, 'Mum, do you mind if I stop being top in everything? It's embarrassing.'" Anastasia is now 27 and concert manager at the Victorian College of the Arts. With her parents and sisters, she was a pioneer in a field that has grown markedly in Australia and New Zealand since the 1970s, when homeschooling reappeared after an absence of more than a century. Because a portion of homeschooling families choose not to tell authorities what they're doing, no one knows exactly how many children are involved in it. In Australia, estimates range from between 0.2% and 2% of the school-age population. Analysis of available numbers suggests the true figure is around 0.5% - or about 10,000 to 20,000 kids. Click on Title Above to read article.