It is a wintry morning in New England.

Anne Maxson, 48, sits at a long table in her federal-style home situated on two acres in Amherst, Massachusetts. Anne, a small business owner and single parent, is savoring a mug of coffee. Her face becomes animated as she rattles off a laundry list of reasons why she has chosen to remove Richard, her youngest child, from the Fort River Elementary School in order to homeschool him.

?I didn’t like the whole language approach to teaching reading and the awkward way they teach printing. The books they assigned the children were boring, and Richard found himself correcting the third grade teacher’s math errors,? she shares with frustration.

Anne adds a complaint that would be amusing if it weren’t true. "The kids in my son’s class knew more about bead work than spelling."

The singular event that pushed Anne and Richard into homeschooling was even more absurd. It was the controversial incident that brought Richard’s school a great deal of negative publicity.

The principal of Fort River Elementary, Russ Vernon-Jones, decided to host a "blacks only" breakfast on school grounds for African-American staff and parents. Outraged by what she saw as illegal discrimination, Anne alerted the Boston Globe to the event; she was severely criticized by teachers for speaking to the press. Although the breakfast wa eventually deemed illegal by Amherst’s town counsel, the principal, to Anne’s chagrin and that of other local taxpayers, did not even receive a reprimand for his role in orchestrating the "no whites welcome" breakfast. At that juncture, Anne decided to pull Richard out of public school and teach him herself, an idea she once deemed radical.

"I couldn’t see my son going to a school where the principal had broken a federal law, and there were no repercussions," notes Anne.

Richard is enrolled in the sixth grade of the Calvert School, a popular correspondence program. In addition to spending an average of three hours a day with his mother as his main teacher, he shares a U.S. postage stamp collection hobby with his grandmother. He also earns a substantial amount of pocket money doing yardwork and plays on an ice hockey team.

?Being a widow, I feel a great responsibility to my late husband to do the right thing and give my son an education that emphasizes straightforward academics, not social engineering,? explains Anne. I, like Anne, am a traveler on the educational road less taken. My encounter with homeschoolers began in the Pacific Northwest, during my first year of married life. My husband and I were living in Bellingham, Washington. Our apartment managers, a sweet couple named Tim and Jan, were better at dispensing hospitality than fixing leaky faucets.

Over dinner and Uno games, we discovered that underneath their laid-back veneers they harbored ambitious plans. One drizzly night they told us that Matthew, their three-year-old son, would not be attending kindergarten, first grade, or any other grade for that matter. They planned to educate him at home.

I discovered that homeschooling was not really that new, but rather it was a return to the way education was before the days of common schools and compulsory attendance laws.

I also discovered that the reasons to homeschool were as diverse as the methods employed. Some parents choose to homeschool because they desire a tailor-made, not a factory-made, approach to learning. Others prefer to include religious instruction - be it the Bible, Torah, or Koran - with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Some utilize a back-to-nature approach which allows children to understand their world through experience and apprenticeship.

As I prepared for the time that "school" would begin, I realized that there is more to homeschooling than teaching a child how to write cursive, find square roots, and recite the capitals of the fifty states. I needed to be able to answer the following questions with a "yes": Was I willing to bypass a lucrative career to stay at home? Was I willing to be the art teacher, physical education instructor, dean of students, cafeteria worker, and custodian? Was I willing to seek out friends for my child?

Still, my desire to play a daily role in training my child’s mind and shaping his character was overwhelming. It seemed like there was no better use of my or my husband’s time and energies.

We began to informally teach our first-born phonics by using Scrabble blocks, and were ecstatic when Dan read simple stories at age five. My husband, the math man, had similar results with numbers. We had taken the initial step and tasted success.

In our little schoolhouse, located in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where we lived during our sons’ formative years, we made use of traditional and non-traditional curricula, as well as the perks of the modern culture. We borrowed oodles of library books, bought books on tape (from Pippi Longstocking to Harry Potter), surfed the Internet, conducted science experiments (including hatching baby chicks and dissecting a Carolina grasshopper for a television reporter), viewed umpteen videos about World War II, and even took a year off from all manner of formal learning, ad libbing whenever the need arose.

Socially we have never lacked opportunities for our sons and have exposed them to a smorgasbord of experiences. They have played on numerous sports teams, attended camps, traveled to other lands, trained in karate, sacked groceries, watched animal surgery, and taken classes with other homeschoolers.

We believe our efforts of laboring in the vineyards of the alternative educational movement are paying off. Our marriage is strong, and our sons have developed a can-do attitude that will serve them for a lifetime.

This is an excerpt from Isabel Lyman’s book, Homeschooling Revolution. Reprinted with permission.

Isabel Lyman is a longtime homeschooling advocate. She has been published in the refereed research journal, ?Home School Researcher?, by the Cato Institute of Washington, D.C. and in many other publications. Izzy can be reached at homeschoolrev@aol.com She welcomes constructive criticism, questions about home education, and invitations to drink iced cappuccino. Visit her Web Log (BLOG) http://www.icky.blogspot.com .

The Homeschooling Revolution, by Isabel Lyman can be ordered at Amazon.com or from any good bookstore. ISBN 0-9670430-6-9