Teens - especially high school students - are taking their educational futures into their own hands and turning to homeschooling without parental or adult prodding.

Our offices regularly receive phone calls, emails and ?walk-ins? from inquisitive young people asking how they can start homeschooling. The discussion inevitably unlocks the fact that their decision is based on first-hand knowledge of teen-aged friends, neighbors or relatives who have found an educational ‘secret’ that seems to move seamlessly between classrooms and a variety of learning environments. Suddenly, the grass looks awfully green on the other side of the traditional schoolyard fence.

These inquisitive young people have not read Grace Llewellyn’s Teenage Liberation Handbook, and not one has even heard of John Holt or John Taylor Gatto.

They’ve simply been quietly watching their cousin John or the homeschooling family two doors down. They’ve begun to notice that some students in their Advanced Biology class only show up at school for that particular course taught three days a week. Upon further investigation, they’ve discovered, with a mixture of surprise and delight that these students’ secret is ?homeschooling? and they are allowed to come and go quite independently. Then they find out that this is actually legal and maybe, after all, homeschooling’s not just for ‘oddballs’.

Emboldened by new discoveries they look further and find that not a few of these homeschooling high schoolers are also taking a course or two at the local college, are working 20 or so hours per week, (therefore earning money - a real ‘plus’), are taking some classes over the internet and still have time to enjoy extracurricular activities like sports or the arts. They’ve found a ?secret? and are wondering why their high school advisor or a teacher has never mentioned this opportunity before. So they call us.

I’m convinced that more government regulation, standardized tests and learning results will not reform our schools. These notions are idealized and limited. As students draw close to high school, their paths seem already to be determined (or that is what they believe.) At this level, the true education consumer is the student himself. And there are plenty who have not lost the ability to think and are desperately searching for alternatives to the archaic methods that have become unsatisfactory. These students and their parents are educational entrepreneurs. They are making inroads and changing the rules of education just as business entrepreneurs create new enterprises and challenge economic stereotypes.

Author Daniel H. Pink describes a growing socio-economic phenomenon in his book FREE AGENT NATION: How America's New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live, 2001, published by Warner Books Inc., New York, NY. Read Daniel Pink's School's Out article at Reason Magazine (October 2001) online: http://reason.com/0110/fe.dp.schools.shtml

Pink says, “Home schooling is free agency for the under-18 set. And it's about to break through the surface of our national life . . . . . The similarities to free agency -- having an "unjob" are many. Free agents are independent workers; home-schoolers are independent learners. Free agents maintain robust networks and tight connections through informal groups and professional associations; home-schoolers have assembled powerful groups ...to share teaching strategies and materials and to offer advice and support. Free agents often challenge the idea of separating work and family; home-schoolers take the same approach to the boundary between school and family. Perhaps most important, home schooling is almost perfectly consonant with the four animating values of free agency: having freedom, being authentic, putting yourself on the line, and defining your own success. (to read an excerpt from Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation - go to the Web Site of Reason.com: http://reason.com/0110/fe.dp.schools.shtml

The teens I talk to aren’t immediately aware that they are joining an educational reform movement... they just want someone to take them seriously and give them some guidance with their goals AND they want to take much more control of their life, learning and future.

They recognize the obvious benefits of being free to make more choices than they currently have. It’s not that they actually blame the school - they seem to understand that the system is doing the best it can - but that ?best? does not quite meet their needs. These young educational entrepreneurs or ‘free agents’ or independent learning types . . . might just help catalyze a revolution.- as they insist, like any good consumer, on variety and competition in their marketplace.

Daniel Pink says it well, “The next few decades will be a fascinating, and perhaps, revolutionary time for learning in America. The specifics will surprise us and may defy even my soundest predictions. But the bottom line of the future of education in Free Agent Nation is glaringly clear: School's out.”

And it’s no secret any more.