This post reviews Robin L. West, “The Harms of Homeschooling” in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2009): 7-11 [Available here]

West, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, here provides perhaps the most blistering attack on homeschooling to be published in a reputable source in many years.

West begins with a very flawed historical account of the practice, asserting that prior to the 1980s homeschooling was “illegal, everywhere, and regardless of the parents’ motivations.”  (8)  This is simply not the case.  In my bookI describe in detail the regulatory climate prior to the various legislative and legal initiatives in the 1980s.  Though advocacy organizations like HSLDA have often claimed that prior to their heroic efforts homeschooling was illegal, such claims are false.  In fact, prior to the movement activism of the mid 1980s, fourteen state compulsory education statutes said nothing at all about home based education, fifteen explicitly accepted it in one form or another, and the remaining twenty-one states allowed for “equivalent instruction elsewhere” than public schools or “instruction by a private tutor.”  Responsibility for determining the acceptability of domestic education arrangements often devolved to the local school board or administrator, who might or might not be hospitable.  As I describe in my book, many homeschoolers in the 1970s were able to work within the existing systems, though there were occasionally serious problems, sometimes leading to legal action.

Anyway, West makes this flawed historical argument so that she can set up next section.  Why, she asks, would states willingly have ceded their responsibility to educate all citizens so abruptly to these well-organized homeschooling advocates?  Her answer is that the state legislatures and courts who legalized and deregulated homeschooling in the 1980s and 1990s believed homeschooler rhetoric that falsely claimed a Constitutional right to homeschool.  There is some truth to this for some states, but the reality is far more complicated than that.  Again, in my book I tell the stories of several state legislative and legal battles.  Homeschoolers did in fact make Constitutional claims (and still do), but with one important exception in Michigan, such claims were universally rejected by the courts.  It was not the Constitutional but the statutory arguments that were more effective, and that’s because, as I said already, existing state statues governing compulsory education were often more hospitable toward homeschooling than were local school officials.  In the cases where the statutes were not hospitable, homeschoolers were successful at getting new language written into the statutes.  State legislatures re-wrote these laws not because of Constitutional concerns but simply in response to the powerful grassroots organizing of homeschoolers.

All of that is to say that West’s historical case is very weak.  But let us press on.  West proceeds to admit that homeschooling, even if it’s not a Constitutional right, has done a pretty good job overall in getting at least the self-selecting kids who take tests to do well on them.  She thus doesn’t want to abolish homeschooling outright.  Instead, she just wants to regulate it.  Why?

Because, West argues, there are several dreadful consequences that result from unregulated homeschooling.  Here they are:

First, kids who aren’t regulated are at “greater risk for unreported and unnoticed physical abuse.” (9) She has no evidence of this, but she notes that most domestic abuse is noticed by school teachers, and if abused kids aren’t in school, who will notice?

Second, kids who don’t attend school don’t have to get immunizations and thus pose a public health risk.

Third, kids who attend school are loved for who they are as individuals, not for who they are as offspring.  West acknowledges that she has “yet to see studies of this” and must repeatedly describe “the ideal teacher” here, but the point seems to be that a teacher’s love is unconditional while a parent’s is contingent upon the child being his or her offspring.

Fourth, homeschooled kids (especially those of fundamentalist Protestants) risk becoming political automatons programmed by their parents to mindlessly parrot Republican talking points.

Fifth, she reiterates Rob Reich’s “ethical servility” argument that authoritarian parenting produces damaged, ethically unrealized slaves who can’t think for themselves.

Sixth, she fears (again without any evidence) that unregulated homeschooling is leading some kids to get truncated intellectual training–perhaps learning only a literal view of the Bible or maybe spending all day skateboarding.

Seventh, poor fundamentalist families living in trailer parks homeschooling their 14 children are not doing their kids any favors in terms of their future economic opportunities.

Because of these seven potentially harmful reasons, homeschooling should be more heavily regulated.  How?  Annual standardized testing, curricular review, and periodic home visits to make sure kids are getting immunizations and aren’t being abused.

I’ve already critiqued her historical component.  How about her seven harms?  Several of them have been discussed multiple times on this blog before.  For a rigorous discussion of Reich’s arguments, see my posts summarizing the debate between Reich and Perry Glanzer here, and here.  As I note in one of those previous posts, Reich himself has moved away from his ethical servility argument, largely as a result of increased interaction with real homeschoolers.

As for the political automaton thing, I should say at the outset that every homeschooling family will have its own dynamic and it is impossible to generalize.  Having said that, one of the interesting findings I noted both in Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull book (which West cites) and in Rob Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children is that even in the most conservative, most doctrinaire, most overbearing households, the kids often end up less radical than their parents.  In Kunzman’s book especially one sees powerful examples of an extremely conservative dad gradually loosening the reins on his daughters.  I might also add that I have taught several students here at Messiah College who were homeschooled for the entirety of their lives in the precise form of conservative Protestantism West is so distrustful of in this piece.  Without exception so far I have found these students to be tolerant and respectful of difference, more so in fact than some of the students I teach who came from conservative Christian private schools.  This is all anecdote of course, but it’s more evidence than West gives us, which is nothing.

As for the academic concern, I suppose it is plausible, and I have gone on the record several times on this blog endorsing some sort of evaluation of basic literacy and numeracy for homeschooled kids (West’s annual testing goes way too far in my view.  How about once when a kid turns 12?).  I can imagine some homeschoolers retorting that she should be less concerned with homeschoolers than with the tens of thousands of public school dropouts, who are far more likely to be skateboarding away their days.

A similar retort could be made to her poverty argument.  If you want to talk about perpetuating the culture of poverty, it would be hard to think of an institution that has done a more thorough job of this than the urban public school.  Of course you’d want to nuance that by noting that parent SES, not schooling, is far and away the best predictor of a child’s future economic status.  In this section West offers one of her only appeals to actual evidence, from a USA Today article no less, which notes the NCES’ 2007 finding that homeschooling is increasingly an upper-class phenomenon.  The backside-scratchin’, trailerpark homeschool stereotype she plays on here is belied by her own evidence.

That leaves us with immunizations and physical abuse, which are in my view legitimate concerns.  As I have noted before, some homeschoolers do entertain conspiracy theories about immunizations.  I discuss this issue in greater detail here.  The bottom line is that we need more research about homeschoolers and immunization before we rush to craft policy increasing regulation.

Finally, for physical abuse.  Again, I have noted on the blog before that this is a serious concern.  I’m skeptical that West’s proposal for mandatory home visits would really turn up much abuse, and it would be both expensive and a scheduling hassle for all concerned.  There probably are abusive parents who hide their actions behind feigned “homeschooling.”  But what to do about it I have no idea.  I noted in a comment on a previous post that my aunt has for decades been in social service and has dealt with thousands of child abuse cases.  It is heartbreaking work that leads to a sense of hopelessness and despair.  It is delusional to think that a couple of home visits would solve the problem.

In sum, this is a very weak article.  West’s legal training and current academic position makes me certain that she could have crafted a more careful study of the issues.  What we have here instead seems a hastily compiled litany of classic anti-homeschooler talking points by a scholar who has yet to think about these issues in a sustained and rigorous fashion.  I hope this is only the first foray for West and that subsequent work will demonstrate increased knowledge of the complexities and nuances of homeschooling law, policy, and practice.

This post reviews Cynthia M. Villalba, “Home-Based Education in Sweden: Local Variations in Forms of Regulation” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 277-296.

Villalba, who recently received her PhD from the Institute of International Education at Stockholm University (Dissertation title: Home Education in Sweden), here presents an engaging summary of the recent history and current status of homeschooling policy in Sweden.  Villalba begins with an orientation.  There are currently about 100 families homeschooling in Sweden.  Swedish law allows the practice as a legal alternative to compulsory schooling, but several prominent politicians have been speaking out against it of late (seemingly because of its popularity among religious extremists).  To better understand the practice and its treatment by municipal government, Villalba surveyed 77 Swedish municipalities, interviewed 26 municipal officials, looked at numerous case documents and news articles, and observed several homeschooling families in action.

As one of her informants notes, in general Swedish law is where the United States was about 25 years ago, with local municipalities deciding somewhat arbitrarily how individual homeschoolers should be regulated.  National legislation offers no clear guidance other than a vague assent to the legitimacy of alternative educational options, and few municipalities have any formal policies.  So the individual homeschooler’s fate usually hangs on the whim of the local official, whose task it is to decide how much of the government’s regulations of public education to apply to homeschools.

As more families have applied for permission to homeschool, more municipalities are being faced with the need to craft a formal policy.  Villalba describes in some detail how several municipal school administrators have been working out effective policies.  The most formalized policies that have emerged explain what parents have to provide in an application, require standardized testing to ensure that students are up to government school standards, require home visits (typically two per term), and offer access to school resources and social activities.

Throughout the paper, Villalba makes much of the Swedish term insyn, which translates roughly to “insight” but is often associated with government oversight or surveillance.  Insyn is the technical means government employs to ensure its citizens stay within the mainstream.  It is clear from her discussion that Swedish society is concerned to a much greater degree than is the United States with ensuring that all of its citizens receive similar upbringings and educations.  If school administrators feel that a parent’s home education plan is not sufficiently mainstream, they will deny it.  Even if the plan is accepted, “continuous monitoring” including home visits and assessments are ever present to make sure that the “obligations of the modern Swedish welfare state” are met.

This article gave me a good understanding of the educational administrator’s perspective, but the voices of homeschoolers themselves were not there.  What do Swedish homeschoolers think of this very invasive regulatory regime?  How do they work within it?  What motivates the few Swedes who opt to homeschool to do so?  These basic questions were not even addressed.  I haven’t seen Villalba’s broader dissertation.  Perhaps she provides the homeschooler perspective therein.  But if you’re looking for a clear description of Swedish policies as well as some behind-the-scenes accounts of how policymakers came up with them, this article is a good guide.

As for the parallel with the U.S. 25 years ago, I’m not so sure.  It’s true that in the mid 1980s permission to homeschool was often up to the will of the local school official, whose decision could be quite arbitrary.  But at that time there was already a large and growing movement afoot.  Sweden doesn’t seem to have that crucial component.  Absent a large, vocal, and organized grassroots base, not to mention a long tradition of tolerance for minority views and distrust of big government, I don’t forsee Swedish homeschool regulations softening the way they did over here in the 1980s and early 90s.

Back on July 14,  New Hampshire family-court judge Lucinda Sadler ruled that the daughter of a divorced couple who had been homeschooled by her mother (Voydatch) must be sent to public school.  This was in accordance with the father’s (Kurowski) wishes, though the girl had resided with the mother since the divorce in 1999, when the child was an infant.  Judge Sadler’s decision was based partly on the socialization issue (which was the father’s main concern) but also at least in part on her opinion that the girl’s Christian homeschooling was too rigid, that she would be better served in life by being exposed a wider range of views than what her mother provided.  [You can read the entire court document here]

Since this case is a custody-related case, it, like the In re Rachel L. case in California, was at first not on the radar screen of the leading homeschooling watchdog groups.  It is now.  For a little over a month the story was unknown in the homeschooling world.  But on August 24 an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative Christian legal organization Voydatch had contacted for support, issued to the New Hampshire court a motion for reconsideration.  Two days later the ADF issued a news release on the case.  By the next day the story had been picked up by onenewsnow.com, and it quickly spread around the internet, abetted especially by a post on August 28 on WorldNetDaily.

A few days later the story broke in more traditional media outlets.  Fox News ran a story on the case on September 1.  On September 4, The Washington Times made it the day’s lead story.  Since then coverage and commentary has exploded among Christian and conservative publications, websites, chat rooms, and so on.  While both the Fox and Washington Times stories were balanced and sensitive to the complexities of the case, much subsequent discussion has not been.  A writer for the Christian Coalition saw it as an example of Big Brother taking away Christian freedoms.  Popular conservative columnist Cal Thomas used it as an example of elites trampling on the rights of ordinary Americans.  Some Christian bloggers saw it as an example of persecution.

Other commentators, however, have exhibited more subtlety.  The engaging blogger Christine McLaughlin didn’t buy Thomas’ inflated rhetoric but found herself agreeing with conservatives that the court had overstepped its bounds.  Libertarian leaning Eugene Volokh, always worth reading, also thought that Judge Sadler overstepped her authority but had trouble coming up with a neutral principle that would allow the court to make the right decision in this case.  An editorial published in the Concord Monitor described well the tensions involved in custody decisions and concluded that the court had actually made the right decision here.

While tongues have been wagging, the gears of the justice system have slowly been grinding.  The New Hampshire Sate Supreme Court has agreed to rehear the case.  The commentary on this case is a fascinating illustration of how the same set of facts can be interpreted so many different ways.  Given such wide ranging interpretations, I’m glad the State Court agreed to hear the case and can’t wait to read what it finds.

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Understanding Homeschooling: A Better Approach to Regulation” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 311-330

Kunzman, well known on this blog as the author of the excellent study Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling, here engages explicitly the aspect of his work that has caused the most controversy.  Kunzman’s book is an in-depth profile of several Christian homeschooling families.  He only briefly mentions government regulation in it, but that small part of the book has been the near exclusive focus of homeschoolers, many of whom now see him as just another critical academic who wants to take away their freedoms.  In this article Kunzman offers a more complete presentation of his position on homeschool regulation.  Here’s what he says:  Kunzman begins by rehearsing the usual approach to the question of regulation.  Typically, philosophical arguments about how much regulation there should be describe how we must balance the interests of parents with those of the child and those of the larger society.  All three domains have legitimate claims on a child’s education.  Kunzman then explains how many homeschoolers, in folding a child’s education into the broader role of parenting, often don’t acknowledge any distinction between schooling and the rest of life–to many homeschoolers, homeschooling is a 24/7 job.

But this holistic equation of life with school has not generally been recognized by the nation’s courts.  The Supreme Court, especially in cases typically praised by homeschoolers (Pierce v. Society of Sisters [1925] and Wisconsin v. Yoder [1972]) very clearly acknowledged that the state has the right and responsibility, in the words of Yoder “to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.”

So Kunzman holds it as foundational that the state does have “the legal right to require homeschoolers to meet certain requirements.” (p.318)  The devil is in the details though.  What sort of regulations would be best for safeguarding the legitimate public needs of our democratic society while not infringing on the rights of parents?

Kunzman thinks that the usual approaches advocated by those who want to increase regulation of homeschooling are misguided.  The National Education Association (NEA), for example, has argued for years now that homeshool teachers need to be certified by the state.  Kunzman thinks this is a silly idea, for homeschooling parents aren’t doing the job of public school teachers.  He notes that State courts have consistently agreed, which is why no state requires teaching certification of homeschooling parents.

A second misguided approach tries to tell homeschoolers what material they should cover.  Some states do this only very vaguely while others spell out in detail what homeschoolers must cover and require families to keep portfolios of their work, take standardized tests, and be monitored by an outside authority (Kunzman notes that 35 states mandate specific subjects, 14 require parents to keep curriculum records, and 7 require student portfolios).  Kunzman thinks such regulations are unhelpful, for they cannot really ascertain what’s actually being taught day to day.  He gives several examples he has observed of homeschooler subterfuge (having a classical CD playing in the background count as “fine arts,” counting an episode of Little House on the Prairie as “history,” getting a church friend who is certified to sign off as the third-party evaluator without actually looking at anything, etc.).  All these regulations do is create a bunch of useless paperwork.

A third misguided approach to regulation tries to force homeschoolers to expose their children to a range of views on controverted topics like evolution or politics.  Here again, Kunzman describes how homeschoolers can obey the letter of the law (say, expose their children to evolutionary theory) while undermining its spirit (by teaching evolution as a stupid theory promoted by godless secularists).  There is simply no way government regulators can really require parents to present fairly views the parents find objectionable.

Finally, regulations advocating testing are generally misguided as well.  15 states require some form of test be given to homeschooled children, and 9 more include them as an option for evaluation.  Here again Kunzman provides examples from his research showing how easy it is for homeschooling parents to beat the system.  Furthermore, calls for more extensive testing risk turning homeschools into the same hothouse of test-craziness that has created such controversy among public school policymakers.

Having rejected certification, curriculum and diversity requirements, and increased testing, what does Kunzman want?  Kunzman thinks regulation should exist if an only if these three criteria are met:

1. Vital interests of children or society are at stake.

2. A general consensus exists in society as to the standards for meeting these interests.

3. An agreed-upon method for measuring whether the standards are being met exists.

Kunzman thinks a test of basic literacy and numeracy would pass muster here.  The ability to read, write, and do basic math are nearly universally recognized as vital skills for today’s world, and there do exist tests with good track records for evaluating such skills.  He thinks that anything more than basic skills would get into controversial territory.  States would do better devoting their limited resources to “enforcing areas of widespread consensus” rather than “debatable standards.” (p. 324)  [In a footnote, Kunzman acknowledges that even this minimalist test would require that all homeschoolers in a state register with the government.]

Kunzman concludes by surmising that most homeschoolers would welcome his minimalist evaluation, for it would save many of them who reside in states currently requiring much more cumbersome evaluations a lot of busywork.  He warns policymakers that any attempt to impose more rigorous requirements not only guarantees a swift and powerful grassroots reaction but will not work in the end, for parents can easily fake forms, tests, and so on.  Best to just leave it at basic skills and be done with it.

All of this sounds reasonable, but I can imagine two lines of attack on Kunzman here.  First, he is not clear about exactly when these tests would need to be administered or what would happen if a student failed them.  By what age must a child be able to read, write, and cipher?  For some unschoolers such skills are not deliberately taught until a child wants to learn them, which could be as late as 10 or 12.  Such children would fail the Iowa test of Basic Skills, perhaps repeatedly.  What then?  Kunzman says in a footnote that failure doesn’t mean kids should be forcibly placed in public schools, for they might do even worse there.  All he says is that repeated failure shoud prompt “a closer look by the state into that particular homeschool context, the quality of instruction, and the needs of the student before deciding how best to protect his or her educational interests.” (p. 328)  This I find unhelpful and vague.  Why bother administering the test at all if there’s no clear consequence for failing it?

Kunzman could  solve these problems by declaring an age when the test should be administered and being more explicit about the consequences.  He might say that if a student cannot by age 12 pass the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, that child should be required to receive some sort of outside intervention.  I don’t know what he’d think about this possible development of his view.

A second, and much more controversial line of attack on Kunzman might come from some of the more radical homeschool elements who use the practice as a means of sidestepping the gender equality norms of mainstream U.S. culture.  Though it has not been widely studied, it is quite possible, even probable, that there are some families who homeschool their girls so as not to expose them to forms of education they believe should be engaged in only by boys.  This is especially the case for some immigrant cultures, and it’s possible that on the extreme fringes of the quiverfull movement there may be some of this as well.  In the case of a legitimate conflict between sincerly held religious beliefs that girls should not be taught to read and write and a public polity that wants equal educational opportunity for all, what should we do?  Kunzman assumes that there is consensus on the question of basic skills.  What if there’s not?

This post reviews Carrie Winstanley, “Too Cool for School? Gifted Children and Homeschooling” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 347-362

Winstanley, Principal Lecturer in Education at Roehampton University in London,  here argues that gifted children form a distinct group of homeschoolers that defy classification schemes usually employed by scholars to describe the homeschooling movement.  This article comes out of twenty years of study of gifted children, as well as a frustration that they have not been studied by previous homeschooling researchers.  Out of 189 gifted children who attended workshops conducted by Winstanley in England between Jan 2008 and Feb 2009, 27 reported being homeschooled.  Winstanley’s comments in this article derive from conversations with these 27 children and their parents.

Winstanley begins with a summary of the complexities and controversies surrounding the term “gifted,” settling on a definition that allows both for empirically verified ability significantly beyond the age cohort average and for mere parental belief that a child possesses such ability.

Winstanley next walks us through a discussion that will be very familiar to those conversant with homeschooling literature.  She describes Jane Van Galen’s venerable distinction between “ideologues” (Conservative Christians basically) and “pedagogues” (liberal unschoolers basically) and relates how Mitchell Stevens shifted the terminology to “believers” and “inclusives.”  Winstanley’s concern here is that neither of these pairs of descriptors accounts for gifted homeschoolers.  Families who homeschool gifted children are typically doing so not out of religious conviction or commitment to progressive notions of child liberation but simply out of pragmatic necessity.  It’s not so surprising, though, that gifted homeschoolers haven’t been accounted for, for they are hard to find, harder to classify, and even harder to generalize about.

Yet homeschool they do, largely because traditional schools serve them poorly.  Gifted children need academic challenges schools can’t often provide because teachers must teach to the common denominator.  They need peers on their level lest they feel self-conscious about their academic gifts or suffer teasing, which may cause them to intentionally dumb down (said differently, socialization is a big reason such families opt out of schooling).  Parents of gifted kids are often more interested in testing than schools are (and definitely more than most ideological homeschoolers are!).  Gifted kids tend to become obsessed with certain subjects, and schools can’t accomodate such peculiar fascinations.  Sometimes parents are more convinced of their child’s giftedness than local school personnel, leading to mutual suspicions.  Finally, many gifted kids develop dyssynchronously, flourishing in one subject while being average or even floundering in others, which means you can’t just advance them a couple of grades across the board.  For all of these reasons, a customized education makes sense for these kids.

Unlike many doctrinaire homeschoolers, parents of gifted children tend to come to homeschooling only gradually and reluctantly, usually after repeated frustrations with school systems.  As gifted kids get older, they grow increasingly bored with school, viewing it as “a kind of hiatus, interfering with progress and interests.” (357)  Traditional pull-out programs help sometimes, but for some gifted kids, homeschooling becomes “the ultimate pullout program.” (358)

Homeschooling is not necessarily the panacea for gifted kids, however.  Winstanley describes how some gifted kids feel isolated at home.  Some older kids miss the structured physical education [going to the park just isn't the same when you're 13].  Winstanley also discusses the potential problem for public education if the best and brightest leave in increasing numbers.  Yet for all of this, homeschooling remains the most compelling option available for many gifted kids.

This article wasn’t bad, but of all of the articles published in the special issue of Theory and Research in Education, it’s probably the weakest.  It reads more like a collection of impressions based upon brief conversations rather than the results of deep knowledge of gifted homeschooled kids.  As a first foray into the subject it does suggest a few valuable generalizations, but Winstanley or other researchers should now follow this up with deeper saturation in the lives of gifted homeschoolers, a saturation that will surely produce a more nuanced thick description of what’s going on than that provided here.

I will say that I think Winstanley is probably right in her basic argument.  When parents of gifted kids I meet find out that I study homeschooling, they without fail grow very interested in talking to me.  Whether or not they have actually pulled their children out of school, it is clear that they’ve been thinking about doing so, not because of religious or political concerns but strictly out of pragmatic interest in providing their kids with an environment that will help them live up to their potential.  Most of them want to keep their kids in school, but they worry that in so doing they’re limiting their kids.

Perhaps an interesting topic for further research would be what factors push such parents over the edge, leading them to make the big decision to homeschool.  According to Winstanley’s impressionistic data, it would likely be a particular crisis or trauma–perhaps a bullying incident or a new teacher who doesn’t get it or a testy conference with a school counselor or principal.  If anyone reading this has experiences that either reinforce or refute Winstanley’s claims about gifted homeschooling, I’d be interested to hear about them.

This post is the first in a series reviewing the recent articles published in the November 2009 issue of Theory and Research in Education.  The article under review is Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell, “Can Intimacy Justify Home Education?”

Merry, professor of philosophy of education at the University of Amsterdam and author of an important recent book on Islamic schooling, and Charles Howell, a philosopher of education at Northern Illinois University who has published many articles on homeschooling (most of them in Brian Ray’s Home School Researcher), here team up for a vigorous argument for intimacy as a guiding value in homeschooling that can justify the practice.  Here’s the argument in a nutshell: 

Intimacy is a very important aspect of healthy human relationships, especially parent-child relationships.  Intimate relationships are relationships characterized by affection, mutual knowledge, shared experiences, open communication, and trust. People who don’t have relationships like this tend toward “loneliness, increased stress and accelerated physical deterioration.” (p.366).  But people who do have intimate relationships flourish, especially children, who feel secure and enjoy healthy social development.

Now this sort of parent-child relationship assumes knowledge of what is good for the child.  Intimate relationships will be motivated by concern for the child’s well being, not by “unrestrained parental prerogatives or authoritarian parental control.” (367)

The main thesis of this paper, then, is that homeschooling tends to be a tool that will help foster just this sort of intimacy if the proper conditions are met.  One condition is that the parent is the right sort of parent.  Merry and Howell draw here on the work of family psychologists who have found over time five characteristics that make for successful parenting, or what they call attentive parenting.  Here they are:

1. Sensitivity to a child’s abilities, knowledge, beliefs, moods, etc., and a willingness to adapt parental expectations to these things.

2. Warmth, affection, and humor.

3. Clear articulation of parental expectations and justification of them so kids understand the rules and can apply them to novel situations.

4. Sincerity (by which they mean that parents don’t make kids do stuff they won’t do themselves–they’re not hypocrites).

5. Talent for helping kids think through their actions so they can learn how to make decisions and reason through the likely consequences of their actions.

Parents who are good at these 5 things are attentive parents.  Drawing on the work of Gary Wyatt (which I review here and here) they argue that attentive parents tend to be the most successful homeschoolers.  But “harsh, unyielding, insensitive, unexplained, ill-humored, unloving and over-controlling” parents tend to fare poorly at homeschooling and often quit out of frustration.

So assuming that a homeschooler is an attentive parent, the authors go on to assert that the intimacy they enjoy with their children is likely to be enhanced by homeschooling.  Why?  Two reasons.  First of all, given what was said above, homeschoolers have more opportunity for mutual knowledge and shared communication.  Secondly, public schools can actually decrease intimacy.  How?

Three ways:  Failure, bullying, and risk-taking behaviors.  In school a student may suffer a psychically damaging failure, be it academic, athletic, social, or whatever.  While this could become a positive growing experience, often it leads to a child withdrawing inward in a downward spiral that isolates him or her from the parents who aren’t privy to what has gone on in school.  So with bullying.  Merry and Howell cite empirical literature that “clearly indicates that bullying and harassment are widespread in public schools.” (371)  Again, such experiences can lead to withdrawal in children and a downward spiral that decreases familial intimacy.  Finally, the peer setting of public schools can often tempt children into unhealthy behaviors like drug and alcohol use, early sexual activity, and so on that again drive a wedge between parent and child and lead to a downward “cycle of depression, failure, and hopelessness.” (372)

But wait!  Aren’t there good things about schools that may trump this good of parent-child intimacy?  There are.  The authors mention three.  At least in theory, public education may foster 1. critical thinking and autonomy in kids, 2. equality of educational opportunity, and 3. public goods such as tolerance and mutual respect of people who are different.

The authors say that in some situations these goods may trump intimacy.  If it is the case, for example, that parents are not very attentive and the local public school is a model of integration, critical thinking, and tolerance, then their intimacy argument fails.  They are especially critical of the sort of restrictive parent who homeschools out of a desire to limit a student’s exposure to rival worldviews.

But are public schools really models of all of these social goods?  Some may be, but most public schools are not.  Many public schools restrict student expression and exposure to alternate ideas at least as profoundly as do some homeschoolers.  And as for equality of educational opportunity, it has been shown over and over that public schools have long been and continue to be “stratified by culture, social class or race and hence are not as heterogeneous as one may like to think.” (376)  Finally as to public goods, it is not at all clear that public education is good at producing graduates who are models of tolerance and civic high-mindedness.

In closing, the authors are clear that they are not making a generic argument that homeschooling is better than public schooling.  What they are saying is that their intimacy argument shows that homeschooling by attentive parents is better at securing the positive value of intimacy than public education, and that so long as the local public school is not really a model at fostering autonomy, facilitating bully-free relationships, or encouraging exposure to and tolerance of diversity, this intimacy argument beats arguments that would seek to curtail homeschooling liberties by appealing to autonomy, equality, or civility.

I found this a bracing and compelling argument.  Unlike most of what I review on this blog, this article is not really a piece of research.  It’s just a thought experiment.  As such things go, it’s quite good. Some homeschooling parents will not like the authors’ contention that authoritarianism makes for bad homeschooling, even though this is one of their only claims that actually does have solid empirical backing.  The irony here for authoritarian types is that their outlook is usually unsuccessful at doing what they most want to do–to make their kids in their own image.  As Merry and Howell explain, if you really want your kids to end up like you, attentive parenting is the best way to make it happen.  Doctrinaire authoritarianism breeds resentment and destroys intimacy.

The other place where this article actually had a solid empirical base was in its critique of public schooling.  I’ve found in my own encounters with colleagues at academic conferences that an initial skepticism toward homeschooling is softened considerably when I note that some of their fears about socialization or racial isolation apply at least as much to the typical public school.  Most of my colleagues (many of whom write articles and books about the history of racism, sexism, and classism in public education) quickly acknowledge this.

Merry and Howell do acknowledge that homeschooling, like private education, does have the potential negative social consequence of withdrawing the children of the best parents from the public school, which means that those children who remain will be even more likely to fall into the downward spiral of failure, bullying, and risky behaviors.  This was one of the arguments made so long ago by the architects of the 19th century common school, especially Horace Mann.  But as I point out in my book, though Mann made many pretty speeches trying to convince rich and well-adjusted Americans that it was their civic duty to put their kids in public school to help leaven the lump for everyone else, Mann himself had his wife teach their kids at home!  Today’s parents are the same way.  It may be the inescapable truth that most of us can’t help but love our own kids more than those of other people, and we’re not willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of ours for the possible benefit of those of our neighbors.  Said more simply, we don’t love our neighbors as ourselves, at least when it comes to our children.

Let me say in conclusion that Merry and Howell are NOT arguing that parents who don’t do things according to their preferred “attentive parenting” approach should not be allowed to homeschool.  All they’re saying is that such parents would not be able to justify what they’re doing by appealing to this intimacy argument they’ve concocted.  I can hear some homeschoolers retort, “well, why do we have to justify what we do anyway?”  With justification, some might see this article as a clever solution to a nonexistent problem.  But if you’re the sort that enjoys a rigiorous argument, there aren’t many pieces on homeschooling that you’ll find that are better constructed than this one.

It’s always a welcome development when a notable journal decides to devote an entire issue to homeschooling.  This has been done only a very few times.  Back in 2000 the prestigious Peabody Journal of Education devoted Volume 75, Issue 1/2 to homeschooling, running several important articles that continue to be cited frequently in literature reviews.  Highlights of this volume included articles on feminist themes in home schooling, special education and home schooling, partnerships with public schools, Richard Medlin’s survey of the literature on socialization, and a much-discussed critique of homeschooling by Chris Lubienski.

In 2003 the journal Evaluation and Research in Education devoted Volume 17, Issue 2/3 to homeschooling.  Most of the articles published in this volume focused on homeschooling in countries other than the United States, though there was an important article by Mitchell Stevens on the U.S.A. as well as another critique of the movement by Chris Lubienski.

In 2004 the Journal of College Admissions devoted No. 185 to a much-needed discussion of homeschoolers and higher education.  Important work was published on attitudes of university personnel toward homeschoolers, federal law governing homeschooling and higher education admission, performance of homeschooled kids in college, and practical advice for admissions officers seeking to recruit homeschooled applicants.

While much good work has been published on homeschooling since 2004 of course, it’s been five years since a significant academic journal devoted an entire issue to homeschooling.  This year has seen two such efforts.  A few weeks ago I reported on several articles published by TechTrends in vol. 53, No. 4.  That issue was devoted to the cybercharter phenomenon.  Some of the articles were better than others, but it was nice to see the trend recognized by a journal devoted to such things.

Now comes probably the most important special issue of a journal since the 2000 Peabody Journal release.  Theory and Research in Education is a high-profile, high quality international education journal with great cachet in the field.  As such I will be spending the next several posts reviewing the articles that collectively make up volume 7, number 3 of Theory and Research in Education, which is devoted entirely to homeschooling.  As a foretaste of what’s to come, I’ll close this post with the contents of the issue.  If you want to read the abstracts of these articles now you can view them here:

Randall Curren

Editorial
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 275-276.

Cynthia M. Villalba

Home-based education in Sweden: Local variations in forms of regulation
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 277-296.

Thomas Spiegler

Why state sanctions fail to deter home education: An analysis of home education in Germany and its implications for home education policies
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 297-309.

Robert Kunzman

Understanding homeschooling: A better approach to regulation
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 311-330.

Milton Gaither

Homeschooling in the USA: Past, present and future
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 331-346.

Carrie Winstanley

Too cool for school?: Gifted children and homeschooling
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 347-362.

Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell

Can intimacy justify home education?
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 363-381.

The cerebral evangelical bimonthly Books and Culture just published a nice review of my book by Rob Kunzman.  You can read it here.

This post reviews Paul Theobald, Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change Its Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).  [An article that summarizes many of the points made in the book is available here]

Theobald, Woods-Beals Chair of Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College and author of two other books on rural education and community revival, here presents a wide-ranging revisionist account of the economic, political, and educational history of Europe and the United States in an effort to suggest reforms that begin in schools and ultimately will transform the U.S. into a more populist and economically stable place.  In this review I’ll summarize his main argument and then explain what it means for homeschooling. 

Chapter one revisits the history of political thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Hobbes and Locke, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of James Harrington and Gerrard Winstanley.  Unlike Hobbes, Locke, and their American acolytes who framed the baleful and possibly illegal U.S. Constitution, Harrington and Winstanley did not reduce human beings to economic actors in a perpetual state of natural war against one another.  On the contrary, they envisioned a cooperative natural state.  Hence political deliberation, not economic activity, was the primary thing.  Their views lived on in the thought of Montesquieu, whose impact on the United States was significant for a time but ultimately eclipsed by Lockean individualist economic reductivism.

Chapter two revisits the history of economic thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Adam Smith, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of Francois Quesnay, Henry George, John Ruskin, and others.  Smith’s economic reductivism and belief in the inevitability of industrial growth was accepted by subsequent thinkers like Mill and Marx, who disagreed only about the pace at which reform would and should unfold.  But Theobald uncovers for us a third alternative to the poles of industrial laissez faire or industrial socialism.  Illustrated by the many communal experiments of mid-19^th century America, by Thomas Paine, and again by Gerrard Winstanley, who Theobald thinks should be listed “among the world’s great thinkers,” (62) agrarianism has always been available as a viable alternative to the human and environmental degradation that has followed from industrial “progress.”  But the agrarian option has been suppressed and eclipsed by entrenched business interests and the ideology of Social Darwinism.

Chapter three revisits the history of educational thought.  Here Theobald for the first time reverses things.  It turns out that the winners in the world of education, at least at first, were the good guys.  Jefferson’s egalitarian agrarianism provided the intellectual grounding for the common school movement.  Its emphasis on universal, free education, organized and governed by local communities, is one of the great achievements of the brief agrarian or “communitarian moment” in mid-19^th century America.  But it was not to last.  Business interests and Social Darwinism co-opted the common schools, re-defining them not as political but as economic engines that would sort and prepare students for future occupations.  Yet this did not occur without a fight.  Again, Theobald uncovers a tradition of dissent from the dominant trends.  This time it’s Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg who tried but ultimately failed to rescue schooling from the economic reductivists.  The economic view has now achieved overwhelming dominance, as illustrated in the absurd Nation At Risk report of 1983 and, most recently, No Child Left Behind.

Such is Theobald’s historical account.  The last three chapters lay out a series of reform proposals that all in one way or another seek 1) to restore to public education a political dimension that will allow students to critique the media-industrial complex that seeks to control every aspect of life, and 2) to restore control of schooling, and ultimately the nation, to local communities.  His reforms range from the plausible but unlikely (John Goodlad’s restructuring of grades), to the highly unlikely (randomly selected local citizens serving as a school’s Board of Assessors), to the wildly fantastical (a new constitutional convention that will completely revise our form of government).  His basic idea is that since schools are historically the only beach-head for agrarian values, school reform is the best bet for eventually producing society-wide transformation.

Here’s what all of this means for homeschooling.  Theobald’s historical claim is that the common schools of the mid 19th century were qualitatively different than the public schools that emerged in the 20th.  It was of course these 20th century public schools against which critics both left and right railed in the 1960s and 70s, which critique led to the homeschooling movement.  If Theobald’s efforts to return the country to a mid-19th century agrarian society where local communities ran their own schools were successful, there would be little need for homeschooling.  It is interesting that in his three chapters dealing with school and social reform he never once mentions private education of any sort.  Theobald doesn’t want his agrarianism to be a minority alternative movement.  He wants it to take over the country.

There is an obvious problem with this communitarian utopianism.  Theobald’s historical account that celebrates mid 19th century agrarian values does not come to terms with the racial exclusivism and religious bigotry that were pervasive in those days.  Communal values work best when the population is homogeneous.  To have communion you must excommunicate dissenters.  This was the dilemma Robert Putnam never really solved in his famous book Bowling Alone, and it is not even addressed here.  Theobald’s exclusive attention to the intellectual history of American economic, political, and educational life ignores the social side of things and masks the fact that one reason progressivism did what it did in all three domains was to replace the provincialism of local communities with expertise based on scientific knowledge.  We may debate the degree to which this scientific expertise was actually non-partisan (in fact it proved in the early 20th century to be even more racist than the agrarian provincialism it replaced), but the ideal at least was to have objectivity rather than outright partisan bigotry.  Were we to return to Theobald’s idealized 19th century, the same dynamic would be with us.  Some locales would probably be homogeneous enough to create consensus for universal free schools for all.  Others though would have significant minority populations who would probably have to turn to private schools or homeschooling to escape what they would take to be the oppression of majoritarian populism.  Roman Catholics had to do this during the period Theobald celebrates.  Others would have to do it today.

Theobald is something of a dreamer.  What he really wants is a new country.  He thinks the Constitution was illegally imposed on the nation and would have us go back to something more like the Articles of Confederation (but with changes–he lays out his proposals in the final chapter).  A more realistic tack he might have taken but did not would be to seek to have his agrarian ideals realized in minority communities of the like-minded.  Were he to make this switch he would probably find no Americans more open to his ideals than homeschoolers.

This post reviews Philip Marzluf, “Writing Home-Schooled Students into the Academy” in Composition Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 49-66

Marzluf, professor and director of the writing program at Kansas State University, here pens a thoughtful reflection on the challenges that arise in composition courses when conservative Christian homeschoolers enroll in them.  The attraction of this paper is not so much its empirical base as in its grounding in a more theoretical literature that seeks to understand what professors should do with ideologically narrow-minded students in classes that require exposure to and conversation with multiple perspectives.

Marzluf interviewed seven previously homeschooled students at Kansas State, six of whom identified as conservative Protestants.  He spoke with each participant four times over the course of a semester and collected and analyzed the papers they wrote for their classes.

Marzluf is very explicit that he is speaking neither as a critic of nor an advocate for homeschooling, and he is also not concerned with the academic achievement of these students relative to their non-homeschooled peers.  All he cares about here is how these students interpreted their experience in the secular university and how professors can best teach them.

He found that these Christian homeschoolers experienced a bit of difficulty at first in their writing classes figuring out how to write for a non-Christian audience.  Their early papers tended to included a lot of proof-texting from the Bible and were usually about predictable topics with predictable theses–homeschooling is good, abortion is bad, homosexuality is wrong, government should stay out of family life, and so on.  Most of these students had led fairly sheltered childhoods (all described how a major motivator for their parents’ decision to homeschool was fear of “danger lurking in the public schools.” (56))  But gradually these students figured out that the rhetorical strategies that they had always relied on at home are not acceptable in the academy.  With their professors’ help, they were able to construct new forms of argument that rely less on Biblical quotations and more on secular forms of evidence.  They did not, however, change their views on the topics they discussed in their papers, nor did they grow more hospitable to alternative perspectives.

As students grew in their awareness of secular modes of discourse, they also became adept at identifying “ideological hotspots” where they believed the university was biased toward the left.  Examples include repeated “bashing of George W. Bush” in classes, unquestioned commitment to evolution, and commitment to gender equality.  Nevertheless, these students came to embrace as their own a very thin form of tolerance.  They didn’t change any of their own views, but they did come to accept that college is about allowing everyone (including themselves) to speak their minds.  They were able to temper their need to turn every class into an opportunity to evangelize without compromising their own commitments.

After surveying his students’ attitudes, Marzluf lays out some practical advice for professors who teach such as these.  First, he counsels modesty in any attempt to “convert” such students to open-mindedness.  He notes other research that has shown repeatedly just how little most students actually change in college.  Most college students, like these homeschoolers, become adept at segregating their classroom selves from their real private selves.  Professors who feel the urge to transform their students are likely to be disappointed.

Second, Marzluf advocates that professors strike a balance between pedagogical sensitivity to their homeschoolers’ world view and the secular identity of their college classroom.  Professors will likely have better results if they enter empathetically into the Christian self-understanding of these students.  They may even be able to draw such students into a bit of self questioning by assuming heuristically some of the same beliefs these students hold and then using them to raise questions.  For example, if all people are sinful, including the student, then could not he or she be mistaken about some of his or her beliefs?  This is the only example Marzluf gives, but many more could be devised.  In my own teaching at an explicitly Christian college, my freshman writing course subject matter is the history of Church splits.  My students learn that committed Christians have disagreed with one another for millennia about all sorts of issues.  Exposure to the astonishing diversity of Christian beliefs is a very effective way to get my students, most of whom are very like the students being studied by Marzluf, to begin to question some of the beliefs they were raised with.  I think that’s the sort of thing he’s advocating, but to be able to do this well a professor would need to know quite a bit about Christianity, and I’m not sure how many writing professors in the academy would be willing to bone up on their Church history for the sake of their one or two homeschooled students.

Even as they grow sensitive to the theological orientation of their students, Marzluf reminds his colleagues that they should not feel obliged to surrender the secular nature of their classroom.  Homeschoolers do not have a right to preach or intimidate students they feel are godless or too liberal or what-have-you.  Professors have the authority and responsibility to maintain an atmosphere of tolerance and openness in the classroom, and they do their homeschooled students a disservice if they do not teach them how to discourse in secular modes.  He describes successful strategies for helping students revise their papers so that they transform their rhetoric from “sacred home situations” to “the expectations of public and secular audiences.”  (p.63)

I very much enjoyed reading this article.  Perhaps that’s because its intended audience is college writing professors, and that’s part of what I do for a living.  But surely many who are not directly involved with composition courses would find Marzluf’s thoughtful description of the tensions between conservative students and the liberal academy engaging.  I personally appreciated his sensitivity to the beliefs of these students–he has strong words to say against the occasional professor whose personal bigotry against Christians bleeds into his or her classroom.  But I also appreciated how his sensitivity did not overpower his commitment to teaching these young adults some of the skills necessary for democratic deliberation in the public square.

I would be remiss not to mention briefly that Marzluf occasionally reveals little awareness of the world of homeschooling.  He calls HSLDA the Home School Legal Defense League at one point, and he suggests in one place that racism may be a defining motive for homeschoolers [none of the many studies of parental motivation have ever found this to be the case].  But these are minor quibbles.  Though its empirical base is weak, Marzluf’s article is eloquent and wise.