Not much home, and even less school

By NECHAMA VEEDER
'We're hardly at home and it's nothing like school," says Sarah Natan, a homeschooler in the Jerusalem area. The term "homeschooling," which implies a structured education process, has become a source of controversy among homeschoolers, many of whom now prefer the term "unschooling." "I don't like the term unschooling because it uses school and then something negative," says Sasha Zinigrad, a homeschooling father who lives in Ariel. "We don't relate to school as something positive or negative." Instead he prefers a term he heard from another homeschooler - "limud l'ein shiur," which means both learning without classes, and also learning without measure. "We relate to kids as people of a different size. Their learning is different from regular school learning. They learn different things at different ages. We don't differentiate between learning and regular development and we don't differentiate between different subjects," he says. The common Hebrew term "hinuch beiti" (home education) "has a lot of what we like to say. Our home is where we have everything," says Dina Trachtman from Ramat Raziel. Although Natan doesn't like to equate books with education, she calls the more formal part of their learning time "workbooks" for want of a better term. The Trachtmans, who spend a lot of time driving to different activities, have perhaps thought of the most original name. "[My 13-year-old son] Josh likes to call us carschoolers," Trachtman quips. - N.V.