It didn’t occur to me that my son would eventually go to school until around six months ago.

“B-A-K-E-R-Y,” Tommy announced one night at dinner in a restaurant, looking at the antique-looking sign on the wall. “What’s that spell?”

My husband and I looked at each other, our eyebrows somewhere near our hairlines. At the time, he had just turned two.

Soon after, he was able to spontaneously identify sounds with letters, unprompted. “Door,” he’d say thoughtfully. “Door starts with ‘D.’ So does Dada and dog!” And so on.

Tommy’s a bright enough kid, and because my nerd genes are anything but dormant, I’ve had a lot of fun watching him learn every day with the intense curiosity that all children have. At a certain point, I realized that he might be getting just a bit bored with me, so I looked into local pre-schools—and quickly found that all of the ones I liked the most were way out of our price range.

I don’t live in an area where getting into the right preschool is this pressure-filled, stressful notion like I know it is in some major cities. (Check out the 2008 documentary “Nursery University” if you want to see the connection some people make between top-notch preschools and the Ivy League.) Honestly, I had never even wondered where or even when my child would go to school; I didn’t even know what school district we lived in. My brain works in interesting ways: I was all about fun meal preparation, growing vegetables in our yard and teaching Tommy to sew. But apparently I never once thought about his formal education.

I asked my mom-friends if most preschools were this expensive. It turned out that the answer was yes, and that several of us were in the same financial boat. Some e-mails flurried back and forth in one of my local parenting listservs, and someone suggested forming a home schooling pre-school co-op—we’d meet once a week for a few hours for some socializing and laid-back activities, we’d pool our resources and talents to pay for supplies and lead lessons, and (best of all), our main co-teachers had years of experience teaching school.

I don’t know if Tommy will be home schooled all his life, but we’re certainly enjoying it now.

According to a 2006 report issued by the National Center for Education Statistics, the estimated number of children being home schooled in 2003 was 1,096,000, which was a 29 percent increase from the estimated 850,000 children in 1999. That sounds like a lot of people, but the percentage of the student population being home schooled was only 2.2 percent, up from 1.7 percent in 1999.

Some news might indicate that home schooling is becoming more popular thanks to the economy. A recent Houston Chronicle article suggests that the U.S. economy is inspiring Texas families who would otherwise pay for private school to choose home schooling. The article says that a “more-than-normal” amount of Texas children are moving from private school to home school, and that paid membership in the Texas Home School Coalition had a 20 percent jump in just the last year.

Some parents might choose to home school because they want to avoid the high-stakes testing culture in a public schools, a result of the No Child Left Behind act. Under that act, National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments happen every two years in middle school reading and mathetmatics. The NAEP’s Nation’s Report Card released its findings April 28, and there was good and bad news.

The sort of good news: reading and math score for 9- and 13-year-olds are up since 1971—but not by much: the reading scores for 9-year-olds moved up 12 points while those for 13-year-olds moved up only 4 points.  In math, scores for 9-year-olds were 24 points higher than in 1971, and 15 points higher for 13-year-olds. What troubled many of the commentators of a recent New York Times analysis is that the average reading and math scores for 17-year-olds are “not significantly different from that in 1971,” says the report.

“If I were the education czar, I’d give group comparisons benign neglect for awhile, and push toward all students reaching at least a basic level of competence,” said Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in the Times article.

Along with home schooling, a new trend has emerged, one more difficult to define: unschooling, which advocates completely following the child’s innate interests and letting education happen naturally (and passionately, say followers) from there. That, too, seems to be growing in popularity—one 2006 article said that the number of unschoolers in the U.S. could be anywhere between 100,000 to 200,000, and is growing by 10 to 15 percent each year.

What does home schooling and unschooling look like? Take a look at the lives of these parents— almost all of whom currently teach or previously taught in the public school setting—who have embraced alternative education.

A Waldorf inspired co-op
Meg Hines is an assistant professor in gifted and creative education at the University of Georgia in Athens; before that, she was a public school teacher in Charleston, S.C. At the moment, her two-year-old son is part of a Waldorf-inspired home school co-op for seven children ranging in age from 2 to 4. (An older daughter attended a similar co-op in Charleston and now goes to a Montessori school; Hines also has an infant daughter).

“I’m a teacher by trade and a firm believer in public school,” says Hines. “But I felt like for my approach to parenting, I wasn’t ready to stick my 2-year-old in a program.”

Hines hosts the co-op at her house, where children gather once a week around 9 a.m. At 9:30 a.m., they sit in a circle to sing and welcome each other. The rest of the day has activities interspersed with times in which the children play as they wish. Meals are a staple grain plus supplemental snacks like cheese, nuts and fruit. Every fourth meeting they bake—quick bread loafs, maybe, or muffins or pretzels. In the winter, each child brings a vegetable to make soup. Children learn from example.

There are advantages for both child and parent, says Hines. “The children—I especially see it with older kids, the 3- and almost 4-year olds—they love to come,” she says. “They walk in my door and their faces light up. The children really need a time with other kids doing things.”

And parents can find a support network of like-minded adults who can share the load of planning, modifying, and assessing activities for a group of children.“Unless you’re superwoman, one poor mom could not do all of those things,” says Hines.

A conservancy of learning in the woods
My friend Alanna lives on an amount of property that’s tantamount to a state park in a small South Georgia town. And all of it—the yard, the woods, the lake, the swamp—is an open-air classroom for her 8-year-old daughter and almost 2-year-old son.

Alanna used to teach Spanish in public schools, but even before her daughter was born, she and her husband knew that they wanted to home school. Alanna realized it was already happening when she realized one day that her daughter, not quite a year old at the time, was following her in the garden, imitating her mother: “She’d come along behind me and plant seeds,” says Alanna.

For their family, school is “just living your life with your child and teaching and role-modeling,” she says.They follow a curriculum and have a structured day that begins early with simple chores for the children—making beds, dressing themselves, eating breakfast and cleaning up, carrying compost outside and caring for pets, unloading the dishwasher.

The two children share a circle time together before Alanna’s daughter launches into schoolwork. For physical education, she can canoe, cycle, or hike. In the afternoons, she’ll do service work: the girl volunteers an hour a week at the local nursing home. Last year, she called Bingo. This year, she leads an arts and crafts class there.

It would appear as though the stereotypical socialization stigma of home schoolers—the idea that home schoolers are socially stunted misfits who can’t relate to their peers—is a thing of the past, thanks to today’s online and in-person network of home schooling families.

Alanna belongs to several local and regional home schooling groups, and the children take field trips together and have play dates. (Alanna had to limit the guest list for her daughter’s latest birthday party to 30 children.) There’s even a regional home school science fair sponsored by Georgia Southern University—Alanna’s daughter won first prize for her age group with an insect collection project.

For Alanna, an added bonus is the closeness she and her children experience. “The main thing I see is the way I’ve gotten to know my children and the relationship we’re developing with each other,” she says. “It’s the sweetest thing to see your children really love each other.”

A community of unschoolers
Teri Cole-Smith is a fourth grade special education teacher at a public school in Athens, but she’s hoping she’ll soon have enough students to open the Freedom to Grow (Un)school in her home. Parents will register as home schooled with the state, and Cole-Smith will be listed as the tutor, facilitating theme- and project-oriented activities that will be “chosen organically by the students,” according to the Web site.

Cole-Smith always felt drawn to working in social justice, and when she was earning her master’s degree in education at the University of Illinois around 20 years ago, she met Bill Ayers, the Distinguished Professor of Education who became her mentor. Ayers is known for his controversial past with the Weather Underground Organization, but he is also a well-known voice in education reform.

“I followed him around and as I read more, I got more radicalized in my view of what education should be like,” she recalls. She realized she “didn’t want to be a teacher, but a facilitator.” In the meantime, she was teaching elementary school children in impoverished neighborhoods until her first son was born in 1991; then, she left her job and home schooled him.

Her eldest son is now 17 and enrolled at West Georgia University, living on campus in a special program in which he simultaneously finishes his last two years of high school and first two years of Honors college courses. Her 11-year-old son is a student at a Montessori school after attending public school classes; Cole-Smith had intended to home school him as well, but a divorce led her to working outside the home.

Her youngest likes his school, and Cole-Smith says it’s a good fit for him, even if it is different than what she’s interested in.

“Montessori is still a more structured program than I’m creating,” she says. Instead of doing prescribed activities, “with us, you go with what your child’s interest already is.”

For instance: if your child likes music, that can be a starting point for many other activities—children can learn how an instrument is made and make either their own working model or a sculpture. They might write an essay about the experience, creating instructions for others to follow. They might write poetry about music. They can learn about the instrument’s creator and country of origin, and the culture there. They can talk about patterns in music, which might lead to a math project. They can talk to adult musicians. Such a project could last two days or two months, depending on the interest of the child. Some children might want to work together on these projects; others, alone.

Cole-Smith still holds social justice causes close to he heart, and acknowledges that a choice to avoid public school might be seen as “elitist,” she says. But she says she’s purely motivated by a method of education in which she believes.

“I totally support everybody being educated to the fullest extent,” she says. “To say that I’m not going to be in that system bothers me. But the reason why I think that is so different.”

An unschooled family
After her son had a difficult school year, Ren Allen began reading the work of home schooling proponent John Holt, who founded the Growing Without Schooling newsletter in 1977.

In 1996, Allen took the leap of faith into unschooling her son, who will attend Blue Ridge Community College in N.C. this fall. Her three younger children—now aged 15, 12, and 8—have been unschooled their entire lives. (You might remember a profile on the family published in a 2006 issue of People Magazine — the same article also notes an unschooled student who later attended Harvard.)

“We started as very eclectic home schoolers and hit lots of bumps along the way, before finally realizing that when we went with the flow everything, well, flowed,” says Allen, a makeup artist who lives in Jonesborough, Tenn. “My children have been natural learners all along and were very patient as their parents figured the whole thing out! We had to remember what it was like to trust ourselves and our children. It’s an ongoing process really, remembering to trust. It gets more and more intuitive, though, until you hardly remember what it’s like to worry about math or reading or other such things that children learn so easily.”

There’s not a typical rhythm to daily learning in the Allen household; so much depends on seasonal activities (for example, Spring means gardening and all the lessons that go with it) and the children’s own interests. Allen has never used a formal curriculum, but in the early days she experimented with unit studies—“but my children showed me that even this much was too contrived, and they learned just fine without my manipulations,” she says.

For their family, says Allen, unschooling is a lifestyle. “I feel that families living this life of freedom have such opportunities for connection and bonding,” she says. “Spending a lot of time together gives you ample opportunities to creatively meet various needs and find common solutions. It means we all get to share our interests, swirling in and out and around each other’s passions…. I don’t believe my husband and I would be as connected to our children’s joy, to their dreams and daily activities the same way if we hadn’t chosen unschooling.”