Advancing by Degrees: Not Home Alone

ALEXANDRA Swann, an attractive 27-year-old who resides in Anthony, New Mexico, could qualify as the poster girl of the homeschooling movement. Twenty-two years ago, Joyce Swann, Alexandra’s mother, armed only with a high-school diploma and the Calvert School’s elementary-school correspondence curriculum, decided to be her child’s first-grade teacher. Ten years later, Alexandra, at age 16, had earned a master’s degree in history from California State University’s external-degree program. At age 18, she was hired to teach Western civilization at El Paso Community College. Today, she runs a mortgage-and-loan business with her father, John Swann.

But Alexandra isn’t the sole star of her family—seven of her nine siblings have master’s degrees. That these scholarly feats were accomplished when the homeschooling movement was barely a blip on the educational-reform screen makes the Swanns’ success all the more remarkable. “Twenty years ago we didn’t know anyone who home-schooled. There was a concern we would become vegetables, unable to function in society,” recalls Alexandra.

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Isabel Lyman

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ALEXANDRA Swann, an attractive 27-year-old who resides in Anthony, New Mexico, could qualify as the poster girl of the homeschooling movement. Twenty-two years ago, Joyce Swann, Alexandra’s mother, armed only with a high-school diploma and the Calvert School’s elementary-school correspondence curriculum, decided to be her child’s first-grade teacher. Ten years later, Alexandra, at age 16, had earned a master’s degree in history from California State University’s external-degree program. At age 18, she was hired to teach Western civilization at El Paso Community College. Today, she runs a mortgage-and-loan business with her father, John Swann.

But Alexandra isn’t the sole star of her family—seven of her nine siblings have master’s degrees. That these scholarly feats were accomplished when the homeschooling movement was barely a blip on the educational-reform screen makes the Swanns’ success all the more remarkable. “Twenty years ago we didn’t know anyone who home-schooled. There was a concern we would become vegetables, unable to function in society,” recalls Alexandra.