Towards a Taxonomy of Homeschool Styles

Talking about homeschooling with people can be difficult because it is a very vague, general term. All it implies is that the primary instruction is happening from the caregivers rather than from a 3rd party institution - it doesn’t imply anything about the type of instruction or the values of the family. This can be a challenge when talking to people who are not homeschoolers, who may only be aware of one sort of homeschool pedagogy or common political bent of homeschoolers. Additionally, this can cause challenges for homeschoolers themselves when trying to engage or find other homeschoolers - because it is such a general term, your family may have less in common with people in the local homeschooling meetup than they would with the average family at the local school, both ideologically and pedagogically.

I propose a two dimensional taxonomy of homeschoolers - each family can be labeled by a tuple of their pedagogical style, and whatever ideology they have that bleeds into instruction (this is always present in social studies no matter what, and sometimes in science and other topics). In this way, a label like “unschooler” or “Christian homeschooler” is not sufficient to describe a family in a useful way - the former lacks an ideological description and the latter a pedagogical description.[1]

The ideologies are more well known - some pedagogical styles are:

• Unschooling
• Imitating school (with varying degrees of intensity)
• “Efficient homeschooling” / “power homeschooling” - achieving rigor with a few base topics like literacy and numeracy as quickly as possible and then allowing your kids to go deep on whatever they want
• Full Lázló Polgár style specialization for your kids

We practice efficient homeschooling and thus are going to find the most compatibility with other people that have a similar teaching ethos - families that we can learn from and trade techniques. So long as the ideology isn’t too far adrift from ours, finding similar teachers is optimal. It would be great if this had a catchier name so that it is easier to find people - taking suggestions![2]