When 12-year-old Coburn Childs, of Pawtucket, spelled "pyrosis"
correctly, it was the second time in seven years that a home-schooled
student won The Providence Journal Statewide Spelling Bee.
The first time, in 1997, Rachel Hackett, of Chepachet, spelled
"lucubrate" and went on to represent Rhode Island in the national
spelling bee in Washington, D.C.
Rachel -- who lost the national championship to another home-schooler,
13-year-old Rebecca Sealfon, of Brooklyn -- is now an 18-year-old
freshman at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where she is majoring in
molecular biology.
The fact that both she and Coburn competed successfully against public
and private school students from throughout Rhode Island may not
represent a trend, or even a winning streak.
But when their victories are looked at as part of the big picture,
home-schoolers say they show that warnings about how home-schooled
children would turn into slackers and underachievers were wrong.
"They're winning awards all over the place, and they're getting into Ivy
League schools all over the place, and they're growing up,"
home-schooler Tony Esolen said.
"More people know them not as 8- or 9-year-olds, but as 18- or
19-year-olds," Esolen said. And they're impressed.
Esolen, a poet and professor of English at Providence College, is
coordinator of RIGHT, the Rhode Island Guild of Home Teachers.
In a telephone interview, he said many of the people who fretted about
the effect of home-schooling when the first home-schoolers were younger
have had their fears allayed now that they are grown up and going to
college.
In fact, about a year ago, a Brown University dean was quoted in the
school's alumni magazine as saying home-schoolers are the "epitome" of
Brown undergraduates: "They are self-directed, they take risks, and they
don't back off."
Home-schooling, which started as a trickle in the late 1970s, became
widespread after 1983, when states began to legalize the practice.
Elliot Krieger, a spokesman for the state Education Department, said
that, as of last year, 852 of the state's 184,834 public and private
school students were being home-schooled.
Pawtucket currently has 30 children being home-schooled out of a total
public school enrollment of about 10,000, according to School Supt. Hans
W. Dellith.
Dellith said he has some reservations concerning home-schooling.
"The downside I see is the lack of socialization, the lack of
interaction, the lack of other points of view which a student would get
on the same subjects in a group setting," he said.
But he said he had no doubts about the efficacy of home-schooling.
"One-on-one is always the best," he said. "The parent is the child's
first teacher."
Coburn Childs is being taught by his mother, Lee-Ann, a 1984 North
Attleboro High School graduate who spent a year studying plastics
engineering at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, then left
college to do Christian missionary work.
She also teaches her other children: Daisy, 6; Columbia, 8; and twins
Lori and Krisy, 13. The five children study the Bible, work on projects
together, read books, study mathematics and history, and pray.
Lee-Ann and her husband, Chris, are Pentecostals who say one of their
primary reasons for home-schooling their children is to shield them from
the bad influences -- sex, drugs and trashy pop culture -- that exist in
some public and private schools.
"They've never heard an Eminem song. Britney Spears -- they know of her,
but they've never heard her music. They haven't seen The Simpsons,"
Chris Childs said.
"You want to keep your kids pure and shelter them. I'm not ashamed to
use the word 'shelter,' " Lee-Ann said.
Despite the emphasis on Scripture, the children get copious, non-Bible
reading assignments. They take part in organized sports through the
Rhode Island Guild of Home Teachers; sing and play musical instruments;
attend ballets and plays.
They also study the classics. Lee-Ann said the curriculum she and many
other home-schoolers use is built around the medieval trivium, the
age-old approach to learning that emphasizes grammar, rhetoric and
logic, broadly defined.
In addition, Lee-Ann said, they have been studying Latin. "They're like
little sponges. They love being able to memorize at this age."
Coburn said he and his sisters prepared for the state spelling bee by
memorizing words in a book that was loaned to the family by Rachel's
mother, Karen Hackett. "We basically memorized the whole book."
He said knowing Latin came in handy, particularly in the fifth round of
the spelling bee. He was asked to spell "aquiline" and didn't think he
recognized the word.
Coburn asked what the word's language of origin was and was told Latin.
He remembered that "aquila" is the Latin word for "eagle" and spelled
the word correctly, A-Q-U-I-L-I-N-E.
