On Wednesday, the free paper 20 Minuten carried a story on Stefan Bachmann, a 19-year-old author living in the Canton of Zurich who’d written a steampunk novel that was doing great in the US. As I read it, the similarities to Christopher Paolini, the young author who wrote Eragon, became too obvious, and I wondered if Bachmann, like Paolini, was homeschooled.
Sure enough, his homepage confirms that, and even the online edition of the 20 Minuten article contains that information (the printed one didn’t).
Sie haben mit 19 Jahren ein erfolgreiches Buch veröffentlicht – sind Sie ein Genie?
Das kann man so nicht sagen. Ich habe einfach hart gearbeitet, im Erfolg stecken etwa 90 Prozent Arbeit und 10 Prozent Talent. Ich wurde ausserdem zu Hause unterrichtet, was mir auch sehr geholfen hat. Man wird einfach ganz anders gefördert, wenn man von den eigenen Eltern unterrichtet wird.
Translation:
You’ve published a successful book at age 19 – are you a genius?
I wouldn’t put it like that. I simply worked hard; success is about 90 percent work and 10 percent talent. Besides, I was homeschooled, which also helped a lot. When your own parents teach you, you get a completely different kind of support and encouragement.
To me, that’s burying the lead. You’ve got a 19-year-old who’s a successful published author living in Zurich, presumably paying taxes there, looking to study music there – who got there by being educated in a way that would have been de facto outlawed in Zurich. I wonder if success stories like his – if they were properly reported – would be able to shift public perception of homeschoolers in Switzerland…
And since he’s looking to study music and can use all the help he can get, I’ve put his book on my amazon.com wish list.
“I wonder if success stories like his – if they were properly reported – would be able to shift public perception of homeschoolers in Switzerland…”
That sort of thing was a huge factor here. As I recall, homeschooling burst on the national scene, as they say, with the Colfaxes as the first three homeschooled kids one after the other all went to Harvard. I always wonder “where are they now?” about people who’ve made the news years ago, and found this story about them.
As more and more homeschoolers won national spelling and geography bees, and otherwise became known in a positive light, it eventually helped the legal situation. Not by itself, but it was a very helpful factor.
But I am prevented from expounding as much as I would like by the all of breakfast….
Sorry, the last link is wrong. This should be the real “Where are they now?” link.
Breakfast over, I’ll add a little more. (Oh, that should have been “the call of breakfast” above, not the “all”.)
I believe there were three strands that led to the affirmation of educational freedom in the U.S.
One, the legal side. The Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder was a breakthrough for the Amish and based on 1st Amendment freedom of religion. Over the years, tireless legislative effort and countless court cases gradually expanded that to include those without well-established religious objections to public school. It was a bit of a tricky situation for a while, with some homeschoolers pushing for established legal legitimacy and others preferring to remain under the radar. There’s a similar debate going on among midwives in the U.S. today.
Two, research and writing. Raymond Moore published about the successes of homeschooled students, as did John Holt, and later John Taylor Gatto, Brian Ray, and others. Hard scientific data and statistics helped bolster the case for homeschooling in the courts. This is important, because the anti-homeschoolers had (and still have) big guns: public schools, some private schools, teachers’ unions, and even the national PTA (Parent-Teacher Association).
The final strand of the cord of homeschooling acceptance was public opinion. As the movement grew, thanks to publicity generated by stories like the Colfaxes’ and the multiplication of books by secular and Christian authors, more and more people were attracted to it. Thus it came to pass that nearly everyone knew someone who was homeschooling and succeeding, which greatly increased its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. This made a big difference to the legislators — and maybe to the judges, too, though they don’t like to admit it. Nowadays, it must be admitted, the movement is big enough that many people also know examples of less than stellar homeschooling, as would be expected with it expanded beyond those with a more-than-average commitment to the practice. So eternal vigilance is still the price of educational freedom.
But the legitimacy of home education has been established, and stories like this one will help maintain it!