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.
A second, fully revised edition of my 2008 book Homeschool: An American History, was published in March of 2017. 
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We are homeschooling our children primarily because we believe the school system will not give them what they need to thrive. Our 6 year old daughter has a deep seated passion for history and chemistry; topics she would have very limited access to for years. I read research, literature from several sources within the gitfted education community, and memoirs, blogs and articles from parents who were battling every day tooth and nail to get their gifted children sufficiently accomodated in institutional schools. Meanwhile their children were suffereing, manifesting behavioral issues, eating disorders, other psychological problems, insomnia, depression, etc. because their minds and spirits weren’t being nourished the way they craved for them to be nourished.
My husband and I decided we did not even want to begin to enter that fray. We have been actively homeschooling from the start and our children are thriving. They are happy and healthy and they adore learning. I didn’t need to put my child through a traumatic experience before I knew that a “customized education” was the best answer for her. That’s what she’s gotten from the start.
Winstanley nails it pretty well, based on this review. The number of gifted homeschoolers has grown tremendously over the past 5-10 years, and the population has quite a few differences from the traditional perception of a homeschooler.
To find out more about gifted homeschooling, visit http://giftedhomeschoolers.org GHF is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization that works to support, educate and advocate for families choosing alternative educational paths for their gifted children around the world.
It was our very own school district that made us consider HS’ing. DS was 4 and in their preschool program (as a peer model) and in that state, kids cannot skip Kindergarten, as they have to be 5 for Kdg and 6 for 1st grade before August 1st of that year.
The preschool teachers and my daughter’s therapists there (she attended and is multiply disabled) all said to me, “Do NOT put him in our Kdg program. He will lose everything he knows.” So our only option was HS’ing.
I initially “signed up” for HS’ing only two years because the GT program started in 2nd grade. So at the end of his “1st grade” (by age) year, we had the district test him to see if he qualified. He not only qualified, but way, way above the level any of the GT program students were performing.
So once again, in the Gifted IEP meeting, when we received his scores, they said, “We highly support you continuing to HS him, as we cannot do anything to help him.” I was so glad for their honesty. The GT director said in his his 25 years of GT ed, he’d only seen two or three other kids “like him”.
They gave us the option of an open Gifted IEP and told us that pretty much anything we asked for, we could have: science class at the middle school (not for a 7 yr old, thank you!), a National Honor Society high schooler as a mentor, admission into the high school chess club, you name it. We didn’t seek anything that year, and then….
…we moved to a state without mandated Gifted Ed. UGH! We now know we are in the HS’ing thing for the long haul, and DS will most likely “homeschool” some of his college courses. He’ll be taking them by age 12 or 13 and will graduate from all his high school courses by 13 or 14. The university system in our state will not allow admission under age 16. We have a community college, but since it’s a two-year school, there won’t be a lot of choices in classes for him.
It does drive me nuts when people assume we HS for “religious” reasons, or because we’re tying to “continue hot housing” (b/c most people think we have been all along)….nope, our son drags *us* along on his educational journey. Thankfully there are organizations available such as the Davidson Young Scholars program to help us along and allow us to connect with other parents, many of them HS’ers, who’ve “been there, done that”.
It’s such a shame that “No Child Left Behind” also means “No Child Allowed to Advance”. We need a complete overhaul of the assembly line public education in America.
We began to HS our son after a terrible experience in public school — we pulled him out at Thanksgiving his first grade year. To prepare, I read all the literature I could find on the subject of HSing, and everything from my library system (28 books cover-to-cover!). It was a move out of desperation, a plunge into the unknown. There were two groups of other HSers around us, and were of the two groups mentioned — one group was strictly Conserv.Christian, the other was very unschool-y. Neither seemed a good fit for why we were driven to Homeschool.
We have continued homeschooling the past 5 years, including other children as they have reached school age. We have had IQ and other testing done to corroborate and magnify our understanding of our children’s giftedness. We will not go back to public school, as now our son is taking high school level classes and soon community college courses. The range of coursework and levels would not fit with a traditional school environment.
It is disappointing that so many public schools are lacking in good education. I work full-time, and therefore do not have the option of homeschooling my children. I have a great idea of what I would like my kid’s education to be… fun, enlightening, and well rounded, where my kids could learn self- empowerment along with the general education. There is a school that follows this type of alternative teaching model… I actually read about it in Rick Posner’s latest book, “Lives of Passion, School of Hope.” True story about a very successful school in Colorado whose allumni [who are now adults] has turned out to be successful, responsible and lifelong learners.. This is what I would like for my kids. Too bad that not everyone could adopt this model.
Thank you for this riveting review. I myself was held back by the school system and my husband and I are determined to not let this happen to our children.
I believe most teachers do their best, but it is indeed challenging to meet set objectives for a schooling system, with large class sizes of very varied interests and talents.
Most of the other homeschooling families I know are the reverse – they are homeschooling because they have children who are having trouble keeping up within the school system, or because their children are bullied.
As we had no previous history of homeschooling ourselves, we had to put in a lot of research to make sure that we were doing the right thing. You can access this information on how to get started in homeschooling at http://www.yourhomeschoolcommunity.com/.
Thank you so much for your articles 🙂
As Winstanley concludes, we are neither ideologues nor pedagogues (that is, our Bible is neither The Teenage Liberation Handbook nor…well, the Bible), but unlike some other parents, we didn’t arrive at our decision gradually and reluctantly, exactly, but fairly decisively.
Partly, the reason is this: I am a teacher. I know quite well the sound of an administrator trying to sell snake oil. I know that although there are, thankfully, many teachers out there who are professional and dedicated, they’re also hamstrung by NCLB concerns into focusing their primary efforts to help the kids who are barely passing. Too many teachers hold essentially negative or at least erroneous beliefs about gifted children, and these too can stand in the way of a child receiving an appropriate education.
When it was very evident to us that the school for which we were zoned essentially had little reason or desire to accommodate beyond handing out an occasional Sudoku puzzle or logic game, the choice was a pretty easy one. We are also very fortunate in being able to make this work. My concerns lie with those parents who are not so fortunate, but who are effectively in the same position we are.
Yes! But this does NOT apply only to gifted homeschoolers. This is what many homeschoolers have been trying to say about researchers’ and historians’ insistence on dividing us into the “two kingdoms” (literally, see Kingdom of Children). Like scientists who once could taxonomically only see Plants and Animals, many nonhomeschoolers persist in labeling us as either/or. It just is NOT so. Homeschoolers move fluidly between these worlds in a vast middle – homeschooling for pragmatic reasons. I know too many liberal-minded school-at-homers and too many conservative unschoolers to do this myself, and I don’t understand why researchers don’t get past this “two-types-of-homeschoolers” stereotype. It is funny that this is first seen in “gifted” homeschoolers — many of us find that schools have special programs for “gifteds” and for “slow” students – but our many average children wallow in mediocrity. And thus we bring them home. Not because we are idealogues OR pedgogues, but because we love our children and find we can meet their needs better than institutions.
I agree completely that the “two kingdoms” doesn’t capture the full complexity of the homeschooling world, but it must be acknowledged that in the 1980s and 1990s, especially at the level of state and national organizations (and many, many local support groups as well) there really were, and in many cases still are, two basic camps of homeschoolers–Conservative Protestants and everyone else. One of the central themes of my own scholarship has been to argue that this dichotomy is increasingly irrelevant as homeschooling has grown more mainstream. But please note that historians and other academics did not invent this dichotomy. Homescholers did in the 1980s when they split into rival camps.
Your last sentence in your comment belies what happened. Homeschoolers did not “split into rival camps” so much as several self appointed conservative homeschool leaders led a large homeschooling organization and many statewide orgs to exclude anyone who did not meet their litmus tests. Many homeschoolers never bought it. However, the public face of homeschooling became one of “split-ness.” In truth, we were in the same kitchens as always.
That’s true. Chapter six of my book tells the story of how the conservatives did this in great detail.
Her article had several things right in that as a parent of a gifted homeschooler, we did NOT want to homeschool. It was our last option and we were forced into a corner. We attempted a private Montessori program…not a good fit, we attempted public school – twice…first time we were told our child needed a double grade skip and they just didn’t have the resources to meet his needs (he is Highly Gifted and has Dyspraxia so is considered 2e- twice-exceptional)..the second time he was quickly lost in a collection of 27 other first graders…he was not allowed to work at his level (which through achievement tests showed he was several grade levels ahead)..so he was told he had to sit and do A is for Apple or else even though he was reading on a 5th grade level. His teacher said she simply could not give him a different curriculum level so his behavior went into the toilet and he quickly learned that if he acted up he would be removed from the classroom – which is what he wanted in the first place. Our county’s gifted program consists of a one day a week/3 hour pull out program that in most cases is filled with busy work…gifted kids are gifted 24/7 not just for 3 hours/one day a week.
Our son within the first 6 weeks of school had been so beaten down by his teacher and the administrator that he began wetting his bed (he has been potty trained for many years) and having horrific nightly nightmares and then would be absolutely frantic in tears begging us not to take him into school in the morning. We kept telling them that no matter how hard they tried they would not succeed in smashing my little guy into a box….he is an out of the box thinker and you can not put a square peg into a round hole and they had better hurry up and figure out something or we would pull him out. He has an IEP since he has a learning disability and he gets speech/OT services and we could have taken them to court demanding they meet his needs but we quickly figured what was the point..the principal and the guidance team showed us over and over again that they just didn’t care and there was no point in fighting if we didn’t have some kind of support in the school! So we are on our second year of homeschooling….not what I really want but through EPGY online we are getting his math needs met and he is allowed to move at his own pace…but we sure wish there were better options for him
[…] kids. For examples, see previous reviews I’ve done on this topic here (Lisa Rivero) and here (Carrie Winstanley). Most notable are the recurring theme that for children with special needs, the “push […]