About this site

About Jon's Homeschool Resource Page
Origins	How this page came to be
Philosophy	Philosophy neutral - all are welcome
Technology	Pay no attention to those scripts behind the curtain

Origins top

How this page came to be

Jon's Homeschool Resource Page started, quite literally, as a single page back on June 14, 1994, in the Web's early, nearly pre-consumer days. Sure, The New York Times had already run an article or two about Mosaic, but AOL had never heard of TCP/IP or HTTP, and there weren't Mom and Pop PPP shops in every college town in the country. I was still using SLIP on a local free Unix system, and wondering what I should contribute to this new self-publishing world.

I started with a FAQ file from the home-ed mailing list and a RFC for a pair of homeschooling newsgroups, and started accumulating stuff. I just kept accumulating stuff, and people started sending me links. At this point, it's been in books, it's linked to all over the .Net, and always comes up high in a Google search for homeschooling - I couldn't shut it down if I wanted to.

Philosophy top

Philosophy neutral - all are welcome

Like most homeschoolers, I have strong opinions about the utility of various child rearing and teaching practices. I also believe that society evolves through every family doing what they think is best for their children, based on their experiences and their upbringing. As parents, we think that some of the things our parents did were right and some were wrong; we think that some things our peers do are right and some are wrong. We parent accordingly - even knowing that some of our judgements and actions are bound to be wrong.

What this has to do with a homeschooling site is that I think it's very important to support all homeschooling styles, with as little judgement as possible. That is, I try to keep my biases from showing because I want everyone to feel welcome here. I know I haven't always succeeded in being bias free, but I think I've done a decent job - if only because I often get mail assuming I have attitudes that I in fact don't.

Please let me know about any parts of my site where you think my biases are showing. And, just for interest's sake, please let me know what you think those biases are.

Technology top

Pay no attention to those scripts behind the curtain

(This section has been moved to the main Midnight Beach site - www.midnightbeach.com/Ethiopia.html.)

Jon's Homeschool Resources

About this site