WHY HOME SCHOOL

Home-schooling, traditionally practised by a small group of religious conservatives, is broadening its appeal to an increasing number of Canadian families, a new report has found.

"People have a real mixed bag of reasons for doing it," said Bruce Arai, whose research, published in this month's Canadian Journal of Education, suggests it is no longer possible to categorize home-schooling families according to ideology.

More parents are choosing to home-school students with learning disabilities or those who are gifted in order to tailor curriculum to their children's needs, he said.

Parents who choose this style of education are disenchanted with traditional schooling, but not for the same reasons that home-schooling originally took hold during the 1970s and 1980s with U.S. fundamentalists, who were fleeing the liberal education offered in public schools.

Those families faced legal battles from principals, school boards and teachers unions, as well as overwhelming skepticism from the public, said Dr. Arai, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Only parents with strong beliefs in such ideas as creationism or those opposed to teaching about homosexuality at school, for example, would have been committed enough to bother, Dr. Arai said.

Ms. Appleton was taking time off from her job as a biology professor, looking after the couple's two younger children at home. "We thought, why don't we keep him home for a year? So far it's worked really well." The couple is now home-schooling their seven-year-old daughter and five-year-old son.

Dr. Arai's study is small -- he interviewed 23 families in British Columbia and Ontario -- but is among the first to examine home-schooling from a Canadian perspective. Home-schooling only took off in Canada during the early 1990s. Although the numbers are increasing, home-schooled children are still a tiny minority.

In 1979, 2,000 children were educated at home. By 1996, 17,500 students -- 0.4% of total enrolment -- were home-schooled. The most recent figures show the number has risen to 80,000 children.

The vast majority of research on the subject is American, saying that families who choose not to send their children to school are motivated by ideological reasons, from religious fundamentalism to the desire for an alternative lifestyle that promotes environmentalism and vegetarianism.

Canadian families, Dr. Arai said, are more difficult to categorize. Two of the families he interviewed began home-schooling because of the parents' own bad experiences at school.

Eight families reported that religion played an important role in their decision to home-school, but only five were fundamentalist Christians. Two families practised New Age forms of spirituality and one was Catholic.  The rest of the families did not set out to home-school, but came across the option when they became dissatisfied with public education, Dr. Arai said.

Motivations for home-schooling are broad, said Dr. Arai, but all of the families reported they stuck with the decision because it strengthened their family unit.