This may be the final post I make to this particular blog.  If you have somehow stumbled upon this site and would like to read my more recent reviews, this link will take you to the reviews section of ICHER.  Thanks to everyone for many wonderful years of blogging and interacting with readers!

Milton Gaither

The new post reviews a fascinating doctoral dissertation about the legislative and legal situation concerning homeschooling both in the United States and Canada.  While the U.S. stuff is pretty familiar to most readers, the Canadian material was, at least to me, completely fresh and very enlightening.  Read the new post here.

First, a general comment about the quality of homeschooling scholarship.  Before I published my book in 2008 there was only one really good book on homeschooling in print, Mitchell Stevens’ Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement.  Now there are five.  In addition to Stevens’ and mine, all researchers should read Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children, Murphy’s Homeschooling in America, and now Lois’ Home Is Where the School Is.  The field is in a much better place now than it was when I first got started, and Lois’ book adds significantly to our overall understanding.  Here I’m going to discuss two insights I found particularly compelling and conclude with a few criticisms.

Without question the most important insight Lois provides is a total revision of the usual discussion of parental motivation.  Since the late 1980s almost all researchers into homeschooling have followed Jane Van Galen in finding a basic duality between a small group of homeschoolers who do so largely to escape pedagogical traditionalism and a much larger group who homeschool mostly to indoctrinate their children in their (usually conservative) religious beliefs.  Van Galen called these two groups “pedagogues” and “ideologues.”  Stevens called them “inclusives” and “believers.”  I called them “open communion” and “closed communion.”  Hanna’s 2012 longitudinal study found that the distinction still held.

In contrast, Lois claims that there is a more important distinction that better explains the differences between homeschoolers, and now that I’ve read her book I agree with her, but with a slight correction.  In my first post I summarized her distinction between “first choice” and “second choice” homeschoolers.  For Lois, this distinction mattered even more than religion:

When I asked mothers about their decision to homeschool, they always framed their answers in terms of their mother identities, rather than primarily as Christians or New Agers, for example, and more than anything else, tied their decision in some way to their status as stay-at-home mothers. (p. 47)

But looking at her data, first choicers were almost always conservative Christians, and second choicers were almost always not as conservative, so in that way her groupings do follow religious ideology quite well.  Other scholars have found that conservative Christians tend to stick with homeschooling longer than progressives do.  Lois found this too, but she also unearthed the reasons why: Conservative religion and unqualified commitment to full-time stay-at-home motherhood reinforce one another.  Lois’ conservative religious women had a much easier time talking themselves into homeschooling in the first place and sticking with it despite setbacks and emotional frustrations.  When their homeschooling careers reached an end they had a harder time thinking what else they might do, so fully had they essentialized their maternal identity.  Second choicers who homeschooled would speak of the “light at the end of the tunnel,” looking forward to when they could get on with their lives (p. 169).  For first choicers, homeschooling itself was the light.  There was no tunnel, and they wished it would never end.

What is it about conservative religion that helps women stick with homeschooling?  Lois notes how the “emotional epiphany” first choicers experience gives them the ideological certainty they need to survive periods of self-doubt.  As one mother explained:

I think [you can overcome burnout] if you have a clear feeling that this is what you’re supposed to do.  You know, we know why we’re homeschooling.  We know it’s the right choice for us.  And that makes all the difference.  Having a clear-cut call.  Feeling that this is what God wants us to be doing with our children.  This is what he’s called us to do.  And he’s gonna help us do what we need to.  That’s a huge thing.  Knowing that we’re not really in this alone. (p.107)

It’s as if first choicers haven’t really chosen at all.  Rather they were chosen by God to give themselves completely to the task.  After that, there’s no more choosing–no more thinking even.  The call must be obeyed no matter what. Lois herself seems critical of this voluntary surrender of responsibility, but at the same time she recognizes its emotional power.  Mothers who have given over their own wills to what they consider to be God’s will for their lives do not object when their lives get hard, when their children don’t obey, when their husbands don’t help out, when they get tired or frazzled.  They view all of these things as trials to be endured for the sake of God’s call, trusting that God will give them the resources to help them through it.  Lois doesn’t mention it, but it is no accident that Philippians 4:13 is a favorite verse of Evangelical Christians everywhere, “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.”

Lois herself seems frustrated by these women’s self-abnegation.  But such has long been the Christian ideal.  Here’s Paul from Philippians again, this time chapter 2:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.  In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant and being made in human likeness. (Phil. 2:3-7)

The point is that the conservative, Biblically literalist wing of Christianity has long been on the side of hierarchical submission.  People should obey God and the human leaders God has placed over them.  Wives submit to husbands.  Slaves obey masters.  Children obey parents.  This is simply how God organized the world, and to fight against established authority is to fight against God.  It is of course this view of Christianity against which the tradition of liberal self-governance has been fighting and winning since the 18th century.  Lois’ “first choice” homeschoolers are some of the last remaining holdouts.  Lois finds it remarkable that some of these women have even given over their freedom to regulate their fertility, but it is only logical really.  If God  is truly in charge of every aspect of life, then He knows better than we how many children we should have.  It thus makes sense why many of the most hard-core conservative Christians have moved away from birth control.

A second empirical insight emerging from Lois’ study loud and clear is how remarkably unhelpful most husbands of homeschooling mothers are.  They don’t help with the homeschooling.  On the rare occasion that they do, they perform their tasks so sporadically or incompetently that the mothers have to either constantly remind them to do it or go back and do it again.  Nor do husbands increase their share of housework given their wives’ increased workload homeschooling.  Lois found, surprisingly, that this held for both the conservative Christian dads and the progressive dads.  Both sets of dads loved to talk about homeschooling, and they pushed hard for their wives to do it, but they seldom lifted a finger to help.  Here again, first choice conservative Christian women were better able to deal with this, for to them it’s just a natural part of the order of things that women do the cooking, cleaning, and childcare while the husband works and then comes home to read or watch TV.  Second choicers, on the other hand, responded more like many American women, with frustration that their husbands weren’t doing their fair share.  Over time that was one of the factors that led second choicers to put their kids back in school.

So the two big takeaway lessons for me from Lois’ book are that the way a woman comes to the decision to homeschool (first or second choice) is predictive of most of the rest of what happens, and that homeschooling husbands are pigs for the most part.  Let me conclude my comments with three criticisms of Lois’ work, one minor and two not so minor.

First, and minor, I wonder about Lois’ description of all of these maternal emotions as cultural constructs.  I wonder especially if the “emotional epiphany” some of these mothers reported having at their baby’s birth might have a biological basis.  Here’s an exchange between Lois and one of her subjects that suggests something more than culture may be going on:

Subject: …I didn’t have a real draw to be home until I was pregnant.  And then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, I can’t imagine not being with the baby!”  I couldn’t imagine it!  And the pull was really strong for me.

Lois:  Did it intensify when she was born?

Subject:  It really did.  And breastfeeding. (p. 51)

I am no biochemist, but I’ve read about the powerful role that oxytocin plays in mother-child bonding.  I would love to see an empirical study done of oxytocin levels in first and second choice homeschoolers compared to averages for other mothers to see if there might be a biological component to the profound emotions that lead some of these mothers to have their emotional epiphanies.

Second, a word about Lois’ methodology.  Recall that we have here a qualitative study of 24 women, selected via “snowball” sampling from one geographic region.  To what degree can we generalize Lois’ findings?  Lois herself claims that she continued her interviews until she reached what she called “theoretical saturation,”  (p. 35) the point where all her interview subjects were basically repeating what she’d heard other say with no new insights on offer.  Thus she can provide us with “theoretical generalizability,” (p. 25) meaning that her generalizations are not scientific but are at least plausible enough to serve as theoretical insights others might use to formulate scientific hypotheses.  I like this.  Lois is not claiming that her conclusions are true for all homeschooling mothers, only that they were consistently true for this sample and thus are at least worth testing on a broader or more representative group.  But for a book like this I do wish she had tried a little harder to give us a more diverse sample, especially in terms of geography.  Her snowball method means that most of her sample come from the same group of friends.  I wonder if such a limited group might have led Lois to theoretical saturation too soon.  Had she included a group of homeschooling women from, say, New York City or Atlanta would the maternal feelings differ?  Take the more secular and politically progressive homeschooling mothers who live in an urban metropolis like New York City.  Would the first and second choice distinction show up in this population?  If so would it correlate so strongly with religion as it did with Lois’ own sample?  Or take the community of African American Atlanta homeschoolers studied by Cheryl Fields-Smith and Meca Williams, whose motivations, even though religiously derived in many cases, differ so profoundly from those of white conservatives.  Would the first and second choice distinction emerge here, and if so how would it play out?  I wish Lois had had the resources to extend her hypothesis to another demographic.

Finally, a word about Lois’ bias.  This to me is the only serious weakness of the book.  Lois is very clear at the outset that her own background made it difficult for her to understand and connect with conservative Christians.  But as I read the book I got the sense that she really didn’t like these conservative women very much.  Lois seemed much more interested in the second choicers, because they were more conflicted about their homeschooling roles (and were more like Lois).  They thus provided her with richer material with which to work.  The conservative women, in contrast, were on the whole more content with their lot.  Their homeschooling went smoother.  They didn’t complain as much even though their husbands were utterly worthless when it came to helping around the house.  They dealt with burnout by praying and doubling down.  They didn’t dream about a future where they could do what they wanted to do or yearn for self actualization.  Lois, after spending a lot of time with such women, “walked away…with a solid appreciation for homeschooling mothers’ intense and challenging work and knowing that when I did have children, I would certainly not homeschool them.” (p. 27)  It’s clear that Lois herself values women’s ability to make their own choices, and she seemed to me to be a little horrified at the mommy mush brain and servitude conservative mothers brought upon themselves when they decided to sacrifice all for their children.  It’s this bias as well that I think accounts for her lack of equating “first choice” and “conservative Christian,” though they are in her data pretty much the same thing.  Lois’ religious tin ear made it hard for her to catch the religious dimension to her own key distinction and was a barrier to her anthropological work among that group.  Her discussions of second choice complexity are thick.  Her discussions of first choice religiosity are thin.

But let me rush to say that despite such criticisms, Home is Where the School Is is a beautifully written, thoughtful book that successfully divulges the inner lives of homeschooling women, who are and have always been the key players in the homeschooling phenomenon.  Thanks to Lois’ careful work everyone can get to know who these women are, what they struggle with, and how they change over time.

Lois, a sociology professor at Western Washington University, has published two articles on the subject of the emotional lives of homeschooling mothers that I reviewed here and here.  Twelve years in the making, this book represents the culmination of this line of research for her.  Oftentimes the articles that are published prior to books contain most of what the researcher has to say.  That is happily not the case here.  The book contains a wealth of new findings and interpretations.  In this first post I’ll summarize the book’s contents, and next week I’ll make some comments about Lois’ methods, findings, and interpretations.

Lois’ book is the most extensive look at the mothers who homeschool ever published.  She began her research early in 2001 by immersing herself in the homeschooling community in Western Washington.  Though she herself was not a homeschooler and did not even have children of her own at the time, she faithfully attended weekly meetings of an organization she calls PATH (but in reality is the TPA, or Teaching Parents Association.  Throughout the book she uses pseudonyms), shadowed several homeschooling conventions, and subscribed to several leading homeschooling periodicals.  Once she felt familiar enough with the homeschooling community to engage, she tried to recruit as wide a sample as possible of homeschooling mothers in the Western Washington area.  To do this she used the “snowball” method of asking mothers who had already declared their willingness to recommend others.  She also went out of her way via public notices to recruit homeschooling fathers, secular homeschoolers, and homeschoolers of older children.  She ended up with a sample of 24 mothers (no fathers, despite her best efforts), who tracked very closely to the standard estimates of homeschooler demography.  21 of the 24 were Christian, 14 of whom were very conservative in their religious and political beliefs.  21 were white, 2 Hispanic American, and 1 African American.  Number of children ranged from 1 to 12.  Most were middle class and held 4 year college degrees.

Lois forthrightly acknowledges her own limitations as a researcher, the chief one being her unfamiliarity with the world of conservative Christianity.  Her own lack of Biblical literacy or familiarity with the nuances of Christian theology and rhetoric made interviews with the largest group in her sample somewhat awkward, especially at first.  Her subjects were also distrustful of her given the fact that (at the beginning of the study) she herself was not a mother and was a professor at a secular university.  Nevertheless, with a couple of exceptions most mothers grew more comfortable with Lois over time.  After her original round of interviews in 2002, Lois went back for a set of follow-up interviews in 2008-2009.  Because of various extenuating circumstances she was only able to obtain follow-up interviews with 16 of her original 24 mothers.

What makes Lois’ project interesting is the questions she asked of her subjects.  She didn’t care about the actual homeschooling itself–its academic or social impact on children, for example.  She cared about how the homeschooling mothers felt about their lives and the choices they were making.  She calls this subject “emotional culture,” and thinks homeschooling mothers have important things to contribute to the larger scholarship on the identity of American mothers and their emotional lives.  Much has been written about the regime of “intensive mothering” that is so pervasive in middle class American families.  Well, homeschooling mothers represent perhaps the most extreme version of this ideology, devoting their entire selves to the project of educating their children.  Lois was curious how these homeschooling mothers dealt with some of the tensions other American mothers feel between their identity as mother and other identities (professional lives, leisure activities, relationships with adults, etc.).

Her key finding is that it all depends on how a mother comes to think of herself as a homeschooler.  Lois identified a clear and stark distinction between mothers in her sample, a distinction that explains most of the variation between the women she interviewed on a wide range of issues.  Some homeschoolers were “first choicers,” who had either known all along or come to a dramatic realization that the only possible choice for them would be to homeschool their children.  Other homeschoolers were “second choicers” who didn’t necessarily want to homeschool but felt like it was the best option given their child’s special circumstances at the time.

The book has nine chapters.  In chapter one Lois explains her methodology and describes her sample.  In chapter two she explains in detail her distinction between first and second choice homeschoolers.  The first choicers often spoke of their decision to homeschool as what Lois calls an “emotional epiphany” (p.48) and sounds to me a lot like Evangelical conversion–an instantaneous, transformative experience.  These mothers “experienced an emotional conversion, whereby they suddenly embraced stay-at-home motherhood and rejected working in the paid labor force.” (p. 50)  First choicers who thought like this were almost always conservative Christians, and they had a hard time understanding why any other mother would not feel the same way–they tended to universalize their own experiences.  Second choicers, in contrast, had more ambiguity about their role as homeschoolers.  They “were often emotionally conflicted about staying at home, but they homeschooled because they thought it was in their children’s best interests, given limited alternatives.” (p. 63)

Chapter three describes how homeschooling mothers defend themselves against various charges leveled at them by critics, some of whom are friends and family members.  This chapter tracks closely with an earlier article Lois wrote, of which you can read my review here.

Chapter four describes how homeschooling mothers deal with all of the extra work homeschooling requires while still trying to run a household.  In short, it is hard, and mothers often experience “burnout.”  All kinds of negative emotions confront homeschooling mothers, from feelings of failure when children don’t perform like mothers hoped they would, to stress coming from an inability to keep up with cooking and household chores, to frustration with husbands’ lack of help.  Lois describes a three stage development here.  First, new homeschooling mothers feel ambiguous about their competence to homeschool.  They solve this problem by research and networking with other homeschoolers.  Second comes frustration when their children resist or fail at homeschooling tasks.  Mothers solve this problem by trying harder.  But this only leads to stage three, burnout.  Burnout is solved in two ways.  Some mothers figure out that something has to give–perhaps they lower their standards of household cleanliness, eat more prepared food, or lower their expectations for their children.  The other way burnout is handled is through prayer–relying on God gets many of these women through the rough times.

Chapter five describes how mothers deal with the lack of “me time” homeschooling creates.  This chapter is very similar to the other article of Lois’ that I’ve reviewed before.  Read that review here.

Chapters 6-8 lay out Lois’ longitudinal findings based on her follow up interviews with 16 of the original 24 mothers.  In chapter 6 she updates us on the demographics, finding that first choicers were far more likely to stay with homeschooling for the duration of a child’s education than were second choicers.  For all mothers, as children got older homeschooling got easier, though the time crunch often did not given the many extracurricular activities to which mothers had to transport children.  Mothers also felt the “sandwich generation” effect:  as their children left the home, mothers’ parents (and in-laws) grew increasingly dependent on their care.  First choice homeschoolers were typically able to handle such emotional challenges by telling themselves that this was a stage in their lives (“sequencing”) and by consciously thinking about the happiest parts of homeschooling (“savoring”).  Second choicers, however, “never achieved peace with putting their own lives on hold, and thus kept trying to find alternatives, much like many women in the contemporary United States, who feel torn between choosing work or motherhood.” (p.149)

Chapter 7 asks the degree to which homeschooling mothers feel like their efforts were successful over time.  The short answer is “yes.”  Mothers here engaged in a lot of what Lois calls “counterfactual” reasoning–claiming that homeschooling was responsible for whatever academic, social, or professional success their children attained even though there’s of course no way to prove whether students would have done just as well, better, or worse had they had a different education.  Even children who were not particularly successful in worldly terms were still deemed to be successful by these mothers, who shuddered to think what their children might have become had they attended institutional schools.

Chapter 8 asks what homeschooling mothers plan to do with the rest of their lives once the children are all gone.  Here again a solid distinction between first and second choicers emerged.  Second choicers had clear plans and were excited about their futures as relatively independent women.  First choicers, in contrast, “often shrugged and said they had not given it serious consideration.” (p.170)  Most were not thinking about returning to the work force and spoke vaguely about volunteering at church, taking up hobbies, or especially about being grandmothers.  Some spoke about trying to have more children despite their advancing age or possibly adopting.  Lois summarizes, “The second-choicers felt excited about the next phase of their lives, whereas the first-choicers expressed more nostalgic feelings and a greater desire to extend their mothering careers.” (p. 179)

In chapter 9 Lois wraps it all up and provides some analysis.  The “emotional epiphany” that led mothers to first choice homeschooling she interprets as a way for these mothers to escape the burden and responsibility of choice itself: “choices can be wrong; ‘knowing’ is infallible.” (p. 183)  She also notes that the intensive motherhood homeschooling requires results in a “time-sensitive identity,” meaning that mothers are keenly aware that this time in their lives is only temporary, that it will end.  Some can’t wait for the day (second choicers) and others wish the end would never come (first choicers).  Regardless, all of them participate in an arrangement that “maintains the gender order…by teaching mothers to suppress their frustration and resentment and to accept their subordinate positions relative to their husbands and children.” (p.192)

And that is the book in a nutshell.  Next week I’ll share my own thoughts about Lois’ material.

Comments on “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research” by Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither, published in Other Education: The Journal of Alternative Education, 2013, 2(1), 4-59.

Homeschooling is a major line of activity in the struggle to reinvent education in a post-industrial world.  Equally important, it is the only strand of such activity that merits the label of “social movement.”  Despite this powerful backdrop and the fact there are as many homeschooled children as there are youngsters in all the nation’s charter schools combined, home education remains a seriously understudied phenomenon.  Into this gap step two cardinal figures from the community of homeschooling scholars (see especially Gaither, 2008, and Kunzman, 2009).  In a wonderfully organized and beautifully composed review, Kunzman and Gaither provide exactly the type of synthetic work so essential for homeschooling reform at this point in its history.

Kunzman and Gaither carry us with great skill and intellectual guidance across the full spectrum of core issues in homeschooling—from the inputs (e.g., demographics of homeschooling families), through the processes (e.g., the work in homeschools), to the outcomes (e.g., achievement and socialization, both broadly defined).  Remarkably, they offer a mostly downhill trip, one from which we depart considerably enriched but not overwhelmed.  We finish this excellent scholarly analysis not with a portfolio of facts but rather a comprehensive understanding of the world of homeschooling as it has evolved to date—as well as some insights about possible developments going forward.

I want to be clear, however, that our guides do much more than assemble the pieces of the complex phenomenon of homeschooling, no small assignment in itself.  They also help us see the connective tissue that holds all the dimensions and elements of homeschooling together, skillfully creating some of it themselves along the way.  They provide harmony to what are generally free-standing themes in the homeschooling narrative.  Additionally, they undertake the same service within each of the dimensions of homeschooling (e.g., homeschooling-public education linkages, or lack thereof).  They both establish some “gravity” for a fast forming universe and provide a scientifically insightful and nuanced close up of each of the planets (e.g., parental motivation for homeschooling).

Joseph Murphy, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University

References

Gaither, M. (2008). Homeschool: An American History. New York, Palgrave MacMillan.

Kunzman, R. (2009). Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling.  Boston: Beacon Press.

Record: Elizalde, M., Urpí, C., and Tejada, M., “Diversidad, participación y calidad educativas: necesidades y posibilidades del Homeschooling”[“Diversity, Parent Involvement and Quality Education: Needs and Possibilities of Homeschooling”], in Estudios sobre educación, vol. 22 (2012), pp. 55-72. [Available here]

María Ángeles Sotés Elizalde, Universidad de Navarrra

Carme Urpí, Universidad de Navarra

María del Coro Molinos Tejada, Universidad de Navarra

Summary: Elizalde, Urpí and Tejada, all representing the Universidad de Navarra in Spain, discuss in very general strokes the phenomenon of homeschooling in Spain and in a few other select countries, evaluating the issues of diversity, parental involvement and quality therein. Starting from the basic premise that education is necessary for children, especially in countries where millions of children and girls in particular have no access to basic formal education, they observe the irony that as baseline literacy needs are met in environments of material abundance, other problems arise: discipline, lack of motivation and mistreatment among students. The authors suggest that, given the transition from precarious to prosperous formal education in developed countries, the time is ripe to evaluate how homeschooling offers a positive pedagogical response and alternative that should be awarded legal credence and greater public acceptance.

The picture of homeschooling in Spain is quite different than in developed English-speaking countries. For example, the first large-scale conference on the matter was held in Spain in 2010, and there is no mention of this approach to learning anywhere within Spanish legal code; whereas homeschooling in the United States of America. is a topic of national and state legislation and has been a subject of debate for decades. In discussing diversity, the authors point out that homeschooling in the United States demonstrates a small degree of diversity in demographic (mainly non-Hispanic whites and parents with advanced educational degrees) yet a wide variety of approaches and personalized styles (cooperative learning groups, online schooling, hybridization with the public education system). Parents in the United States also report a wide range of reasons for their choice to homeschool, ranging from religious motivation and dissatisfaction with other educational options to catering to the special needs of their child. In the United Kingdom, parental motivation seems more centered on dissatisfaction with safety, quality and the social milieu of traditional schools rather than religious or political reasons. Evaluation of homeschooling in Australia poses great difficulties. While it is a known and recognized practice, there is little documentation about the degree of true homeschooling given the confusion with distance learning.

Outside the English-speaking realm, homeschooling enjoys freedom in certain developed countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark) while certain welfare states either discourage it (Sweden), ignore it (Spain) or outlaw it entirely (Germany). In Spain, the minority that practice homeschooling do so on the margin of legality, in an ambiguous state of being tolerated yet not included, consulted or valued within the national educational dialogue. There is little firm data, but most parents in Spain report pedagogical motivations behind their choice to homeschool, and very few reference political or religious reasons. When homeschooling is addressed in public discourse, the authors report that authorities attempt to pass measures that “normalize” homeschooling practices to enforce a uniform cultural identity and integration.

The authors then acknowledge the need widely recognized in general society for greater parental involvement in traditional models of schooling in order to secure the children’s success, and they offer that homeschooling can and should be seen as a positive example and response of such involvement, as opposed to a threat to traditional schooling. Based largely on a discussion of homeschooling in the United States where there are standardized online evaluation tests for homeschoolers, the authors point out that homeschooling students by and large enjoy great success in admission to respected colleges; even in Europe the competencies demonstrated by homeschooling students that go beyond their mere academic achievements are recognized and sought out by universities. Given the success of homeschool students, the authors pose, it would make sense to evaluate what exactly the parents are doing (their involvement) as they guide, support, and evaluate their students’ knowledge and competencies.

While there are standards and measures for evaluating the quality of the homeschool education itself in the United States, no such parameters exist in Spain. Attempting to apply to homeschooling the quality controls and standards used for Spanish public education becomes a ludicrous endeavor since the legal values and restrictions have nearly nothing to do with the homeschool context. Instead, the authors offer personal, cultural and labor conditions to mediate the success of homeschooling: a favorable balance between family life and parental occupation; the existence and development of parental pedagogical skills (willingness, guidance, supervision); the flexibility to personalize education to the child’s needs and abilities; and a way of rewarding, celebrating and encouraging the student. The authors further acknowledge the relational benefits that can result from the joint effort between parent and child in the homeschooling venture, a bond that simply cannot be reproduced in the traditional school setting.

In conclusion, the authors argue that, from the position of homeschooling as a legally ignored minority in Spain, homeschooling is not a demonstration of laziness. Rather, the economic, professional and personal demands it places on the parent should earn it legal recognition and public esteem such that homeschooling parents are considered contributing members of society that aid rather than diminish the greater goal of educating all the nation’s children.

Appraisal: The authors do not break ground here or shed brilliant new insights into the history, study and practice of homeschooling, yet they respectably articulate the struggles of an ignored minority in Spanish society. They are clearly biased in favor of the option to homeschool, arguing that many immigrants find that the rights and freedom they enjoyed in their country of origin regarding the education of their children are greatly reduced or entirely impeded in Spain. The authors praise the sacrifice, flexibility, dedication and hard work of parents who homeschool, thus reclaiming the value of the practice in the face of the state’s tolerance, at best, and, at worst, disdain and accusations of antipatriotism. While the authors run the risk of painting too rosy a picture of the stereotypical homeschool family (highly educated, sacrificial Caucasian parents who enjoy rewarding relationships with their well-rounded, academically successful and socially well-adapted children), they are writing in a context that places little to no value on such parental involvement in the first place. Presumably their audience needs both education on what is possible within homeschooling and encouragement for the job already being done well.

Of particular note in regard to the extreme minority in which homeschoolers find themselves in Spain is the use of terminology. This article is written in Spanish. Yet throughout, the authors have maintained the use of the English-language term homeschooling, used thus in italics, even in the article title! In the first usage they offer a translation into Spanish, “escuela en casa” (“school at home”), written in quotation marks. The two Spanish homeschooling conferences referenced in the article, both held at Universidad de Navarra, are chronologically titled “Congreso nacional sobre educación en familia – Homeschooling” (National Conference on Education within the Family – Homeschooling”). That is, apparently the only organized effort at bringing together homeschooling academia in Spain combines both a Spanish rendering and a verbatim English term. The fact that there is no accepted, widely adopted equivalent term for “homeschooling” in the Spanish language demonstrates the extremely short history and limited practice of this educational approach, at least in the public, legal sense currently understood as “homeschooling.”

Gretchen Abernathy

Nashville, TN

Today’s post was written not by me but by my esteemed colleague Cheryl Fields-Smith, whose pathbreaking work on African-American homeschoolers I reviewed here.  Given her expertise, I asked her to review this new article by Mazama and Lundy on African American homeschooling.  Here is her review:

Of course making the results of research available to the public is precisely what I’ve been doing on this blog since 2008.  Given that track record, my colleagues placed me in charge of the “Reviews” section of the ICHER site.  It does basically the same thing this blog has been doing.  I have spent the past several months transferring over the great majority of my posts from this blog to the ICHER site.  The only things I didn’t bring over were the occasional forays I took into current events or representations of homeschooling in literature or on film.

Over the next few weeks I’ll continue to do weekly posts both here and on the ICHER reviews section.  But eventually I’ll stop updating here and post exclusively on the ICHER site.  As I know I have many readers who have programmed their computers to give automatic updates through facebook or wordpress whenever I post something, I want to give you plenty of warning before I stop updating on this site.  I’d ask you now to begin familiarizing yourself with the new site in anticipation of the eventual move.  Thanks!

Several months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, which is a very thorough review of the scholarly literature.  Our article is not nearly so long as Dr. Murphy’s book and thus it lacks some of the detail he provides.  Anyone interested in homeschooling research should read his book cover to cover and keep it on the shelf for frequent reference.  But despite its length and depth of coverage, there are some topics and a few key studies Dr. Murphy leaves out, and he sometimes fails to differentiate between high and low quality studies or between studies published recently and those published decades ago.  I think our article provides even more breadth and does a better job discriminating between sources.  Plus you can download it for free!  Do so here.

On November 1-3, 2012, about 170 delegates from around the world converged on Berlin to attend the Global Home Education Conference 2012.  The conference’s general tenor and feel is ably summarized by Harriet Pattison of the University of Birmingham in the Spring 2013 issue of Other Education, available here.

The conference produced a document called the “Berlin Declaration,” available here.

While the conference was largely organized by HSLDA (the Home School Legal Defense Association), it was attended by a wide range of home educators representing various pedagogical and ideological commitments.  Another summary of the proceedings can be found at the website of the far-right U.S. magazine The New American, available here.  It should be noted that there has been some criticism of this conference for being a thinly-disguised attempt by HSLDA to export its aggressive American-style political activism to other countries.  You can read some of this sort of sentiment here.

On November 29-30, the Third National Conference on Family Education/Homeschooling was held in Madrid.  As this conference was held in Spain by and for Spanish speakers, there has been scant coverage of it in the U.S., and it is difficult to find English-language information about it online.  However, Carme Urpí of the Universidad de Navarra attended the conference and graciously provides for us the following summary of the conclusions reached there:

Conclusions. Third National Conference on Family Education / Homeschooling. Madrid, 29-30 November, 2012.

1. – The legal recognition of homeschooling is simply the acceptance of the educational pluralism that should characterize a democratic and advanced society. This required recognition by the legislature must be compatible with systems of inspection or regulation implemented by the competent authority, by consensus and with respect to the reality of family education in our country.

2. – We advocate that the state protects families who choose this educational model and thus putting an end to the cases of persecution that have been carried out in the past by both the public prosecutor and the administration.

3. – Knowing that family education has proven in many countries a successful model of academic and human development and it is also a choice born of social initiative that is therefore much cheaper than state education, we offer our cooperation to the authorities for the promotion and dissemination of this educational option.

4. – We reject the criticism leveled at homeschooling as an obstacle to socialization. Schooling at home, however, fosters group and community participation in sports, solidarity and cultural associations, as it is well demonstrated by studies and field work carried out. These studies also show that the profile of families who educate at home is plural and is identified with the average household in the state.

5. – We believe that this criticism springs from either those longing for educational monopolies or those who aspire to instrumentalize education to achieve ideological achievements. Homeschooling, on the contrary, puts as its primary objective the wellbeing of infants and youth and protects the right of parents to choose the educational option they want for their children.

6. – Homeschooling is perfectly compatible with other forms of education and does not represent any criticism to state schools or those carried out from civil society, other than the desire to uniform people by some of its defenders. Many parents who choose family education they do not do so for all their children. Homeschooling, on the other hand, with its achievements and peculiarities, serves as an incentive for improved flexibility in the traditional schooling system.

7. – We argue that the recognition of homeschooling in Spain is certainly a step forward in the way of progress to secure better mental, psychological, social, and academic achievement for future generations. The future seems to demand ever greater levels of creativity, diversity and excellence, and family education is a tool that can effectively contribute to achieving those goals.

In Madrid on December 1, 2012.

Other contents of the conference were

• The educational function belongs to the mission of the family. In the family humans discovers themselves as a persons. The irreplaceable responsibility of families in the education of children occurs in three dimensions: the upbringing, socialization and personalization ethics. Parents are the first teachers and educators. Parents educate, and in doing so also educate themselves.

• Children find in family individualized attention. Attention, affection, support, active surveillance and protection, are the pillars on which to build the relationship with children. The mere academic instruction received in school often does not provide the personal attention that every child needs to develop her or his potential and capabilities.

• Values education. In this society that instills countervalues and in which principles seem not make sense anymore, family education is as important as the work of the various professionals for the treatment of abnormal behavior of children.

• Education is a preparation for life, not just a prelude to working life. Parents, family and the community where the individual is inserted, are the primary agents of such education. They are the most interested to commit the best of themselves, to meet the needs of the young and assist in their particular perfection which in turn would lead to the good of all.

• All education should avoid totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not only a state problem, parents should educate their children to be good citizens, instilling constitutional values such as freedom, justice, equality and respect for pluralism.

• Homeschoolers do not respond to an archetype. There is a widespread belief in our society that homeschoolers are part of a monolithic group with a single thought and the same sociological composition. This is simplistic view. The homeschooling movement has nothing to do with that vision.

• The constitutional court has restricted the right of parents choosing a narrow interpretation of the freedom of parents to educate. Nevertheless homeschooling is a parental choice, and the legislature is called to act to grant it. It is not true that only through the establishment of independent schools or the attendance to public schools may this freedom be protected. This thought is based on a narrow concept of socialization that are inextricably linked to the school system only.

• There are nevertheless new European guidelines. There is a new perspective of the Council of Europe: resolution 1904 (2012) “the right to freedom of educational choice in Europe” that defends freedom of parents to follow their religious, moral or teaching convictions in the education of their children. This has impelled the countries of the old eastern bloc to regulating homeschooling and thus allowing educational freedom and plurality.

• We claim the state as a rights guarantor. We must overcome the prejudices against the state as a regulator. Public power placed under suspicion means pushing people to work outside the system. Logically, this position must be overcome by the invocation of a system of personal rights that take precedence upon state action. It is necessary to collude the interest of the child, parental rights and the mission of the state, to overcome confrontation upon family education. Something very possible since democracy and law are founded on social values as freedom.

• The is no justification for criminal or civil actions against homeschoolers. The lack of attendance to school of children homeschoolers is not the result of passive or nonchalant attitude of parents towards their children, there is no fraud or negligence, but on the contrary, an excess of zeal and care in the course of duty to educate. The criminal penalty, a last resort, applied against family education, is denatured. There is no here disrespect or disobedience nor criminal intent.

• School is not the only option to exercise the right to education. Homeschooling is not against other forms of schooling. Furthermore, family education recognize the right that protects the state to propose some specific content in the educational curriculum. We remind that education is instrumental and thus can be diverse and plural. Diverse options may be at hand to educate children without causing neglect or damage while being subject to civil liability.

• We advocate for more educational flexibility in Spain. Following the most recent recommendations of the OECD to improve the quality of education, in Spain is needed an education law that allows for greater levels of flexibility and for organizational and management autonomy for both schools and families, in order to provide effective care to diverse educational needs, including homeschooling.