While reading this humorous and engaging take on homeschool stereotypes by the blogger Kelly Green and Gold I started thinking about some way to track how homeschooling is represented in popular media. That’s a huge task of course. But I knew that the website HULU archives a lot of television, so I wondered if there was any way to search the site for homeschooling themes. It turns out that HULU has a very interesting “closed caption” search engine that allows you to search for any term or phrase throughout their television holdings. The limitation is that HULU doesn’t keep shows on their site forever. Perhaps there is a logic to how the site operates that I couldn’t figure out, but just from looking at it cursorily it seemed like you never really know what you’re going to get and how long it will be there.
So while a one-time HULU search for homeschooling doesn’t automatically bring up every mention of homeschooling on every show that’s ever been on TV by any means, it seems occasional searches, say once every six weeks or so, would be a good way to stay abreast of what mainstream TV is doing with homeschooling. My search on April 15 turned up four quite interesting hits. Here they are. [Caveat: our family doesn’t watch a lot of television, so I’m not a very good guide to the nuances of these shows.]
The first, and most interesting one, was from a show I’ve never heard of called The Return of Jezebel James. According to wikipedia, it premiered mid season in 2008 on Fox but was canceled after only three episodes due to poor ratings. That third episode, however, called “Needles and Schlag,” featured a homeschooling plot line. The show is about a children’s book editor named Sarah, and in this episode she has received a brilliant manuscript. Sarah and a colleague are discussing the book. Here is an excerpt of the dialogue:
-the first 20 pages are good!
-yay! You like it.
-A lot. Who wrote it?
-A 15-year-0ld boy.
-15? You’re kidding.
-Homeschool-genius type.
-I was a schlump at 15.
-He’s already graduated Harvard.
Later in the show we meet the boy and his family. The family is played for laughs, but to me it only seemed offensive. The boy’s name is Ethan. He and his parents arrive in New York from Iowa. Parents are stereotypical country bumpkins amazed by the big buildings and modern technologies like a computer printer. Ethan himself is wearing a cape and Viking helmet, running around the publisher’s library like a doofus talking about all the books on the shelves he’s read, many in other languages. Ultimately Sarah loses the contract for Ethan’s book, but not before one of her staff has been asked by Ethan’s parents if he has “accepted Christ as his personal savior.” After watching a good chunk of this show I see why it was canceled after only three episodes.
The next hit came from a show called Cougartown, season 1, episode 15, titled “When a Kid Goes Bad.” One of the female characters on the show is complaining to the main character (played by Courtney Cox) about too many neighbors being allowed into their coffee circle. To make her point, she says,
Why don’t you just invite those creepy homeschooled kids from next door? They could wow us with math skills while they stab us to death?
Though it sounds horrible out of context, the scene is actually pretty funny (at least to me). The speaker is obviously being ludicrously hyperbolic and the comedic timing and repartee is excellent. Nevertheless, the assumptions made here are unsavory.
The third example comes from the popular show Glee. On its most recent (as of this writing) episode, number 14 of season 1 titled, “Hell-O,” two popular cheerleaders are gossiping about the glee club’s unpopular lead singer Rachel. They are making fun of her clothes. One of the pair opines, “Those sweaters maker her look homeschooled.” Again, out of context this line sounds meaner than it is meant to be taken in the context of the show. The character who said it is obviously a total ditz. A few lines later she says, seriously, “Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?”
Finally, another show I’ve never heard of called Brothers and Sisters, in season 4, episode 14 titled “The Pasadena Primary” mentions homeschooling in passing. A female character isn’t going to her high school reunion. She explains why, “Remember when I lost my bid for president senior year? It was the biggest upset in the history of San Marino high school as I recall.” To which her mother (played by Sally Fields) responds, “She begged us to homeschool her for the rest of the year. ‘Send me to a convent,’ anything!”
While it would be foolish to generalize too much from these four examples, it is at least interesting that all of them easily make homeschooling seem like something more negative than positive. The Jezebel James example is the most absurd, combining as it does both the stereotype of ignorant backwoods fundamentalist and eccentric child genius. The others seem to be using homeschooling as a convenient symbol for whatever is anti-social, uncool, or escapist. Taken together, they suggest that television writers and producers would do well to attend to the comments of Kelly Green and Gold that first got me into this. Kelly writes,
I think it is important to show that home education is a “healthy” educational alternative that “emotionally healthy” people often choose. They may look and behave a little differently, but the differences are positive. We aren’t weirdos, or hippies, or religious fundamentalists, in any more significant proportions than is the population at large. Some of us are conscientious objectors to forced education who are permitting our children to learn in freedom. Pretty much all of us are simply people who believe that our children’s educational needs will be better met outside school.
Kelly may be understating the distinctiveness of homeschoolers a bit (there no doubt are higher proportions of religious fundamentalists per capita among homeschoolers), but you get the point. However, to the degree that outsiders view homeschoolers as just normal folks they are unlikely to be written into plots or laugh lines at all. Whether unflattering misrepresentation is better than no representation at all I’m not sure.
If anyone reading this knows of any other relatively recent example of homeschooling being used in TV or Film, please feel free to share. I may return to this theme in a couple of months and see if there are any new developments.
A second, fully revised edition of my 2008 book Homeschool: An American History, was published in March of 2017. 
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Great blog post! On the show on the CW called “Vampire Diaries” there is a Vampire that passes herself off to the human population as a Homeschooled High Schooler who spends her time in the library for socialization. She is on a majority of the episodes.
Thanks for the lead Abby. I’ll check it out!
Don’t forget Mean Girls, the film in which Lindsay Lohan plays a homeschooled math genius girl whose scientist parents educated her in Africa until her final years of high school. The film starts out, however, with Lindsay’s character explaining how she is different from those “Rufus! Git the gun!” type of fundamentalist homeschoolers, cutting to a very offensive (and, I have to admit, pretty funny) scene portraying the common stereotype of the country bumpkin rural homeschooler you mention above.
But, you know, this plays into a lot of regional/religious and even linguistic prejudices and stereotypes. Since home education is very popular, and prevalent in the mid-west, south, and west, we do see some northeastern prejudice against this alternative in popular media (I know, I know, there are lots of homeschoolers in Massachusetts and New York, but you know what I mean). As a midwesterner who went to university in Texas, and then graduate school at Yale, I am keenly aware of these subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle prejudices in the northeast about anything emanating from those other regions. I remember being appalled once at how David Letterman made fun of a woman caller on his show because she happened to speak in the Mountain English dialect (my dad’s dialect) of the Ozarks. To me it is a tragedy that all my younger cousins, from the Ozarks, have purged their speech, and that we have lost this linguistic treasure because of prejudice against the supposedly “uneducated” sound of this dialect.
Homeschooling, I fear, is another victim of much of the regional and elitist snobbery that is destroying/has destroyed much of our American heritage and culture. (There are, of course, those who celebrate that heritage in popular culture, as well. I am a particular fan of the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother Where Art Thou because of the way in which they tie a rural, backwoods culture to the “high” culture of The Odyssey, and because of its celebration of bluegrass music.
As homeschoolers, I think we have to fight fire with humor, mostly.
My limited understanding of Hulu is that the available episodes are negotiated by the networks that produce them, so they are almost a case-by-case basis by show. The Paley Center (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in NYC and Los Angeles might have more ideas on assessing homeschooling in television or current media.
Though it’s not clear a search every five to eight weeks on Hulu wouldn’t be as appropriate as anything else.
Here’s the web address for Paley: http://www.paleycenter.org/
I was recently talking to a journalist who pleaded with me to “do something” about the terrible examples of homeschool parents on “Wife Swap.” I’ve never seen the show, but according to him, homeschool parents tend to show up frequently, and they make Green and Gold’s stereotypes look normal 🙂
So. Um. Do something. I guess HSLDA must be less omnipotent than I thought if we can’t get attention-greedy homeschoolers off the tube? 🙂
–Darren, HSLDA lawyer.
Darren, re: “do something” about the terrible examples of homeschool parents on “Wife Swap.”
Funny, I frequently get visits to my blog via google searches for “homeschoolers on Wife Swap” due to a brief comment I once made on the topic, the gist of which was “Advice to homeschoolers: Stop going on Wife Swap.” The post was accompanied by a photo of a train-wreck – and the family that pushed me over the edge were secular unschoolers, fwiw.
I vaguely remember a mention in an old episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, where she wants to be homeschooled and says something along the lines of “it’s not just for scary religious people anymore”. Can’t remember the scenario right now- maybe someone else will recognize the season/episode.
I’ve noticed some favorable mentions in popular fiction- a homeschooling family in “The Cat Who…” mystery series by Lillian Jackson Braun is presented in a positive light, as well as the young son of celebrities in “The Face” by Dean Koontz. I’m also thinking the young girl (main character) in “One Door Away From Heaven” is homeschooled… of course, her dad is a murdering sociopath and her mother is a loon… but the girl is normal! 🙂
Susan: “…an old episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, where she wants to be homeschooled and says something…”
Way back, I made a widget image with that Buffy quote (for my own secular hs’ing blog); I’m amused to find it posted on other sec hs’ing blogs from time to time. Maybe I should make a new one for homeschooling Wife Swap rejects.
I recall the line in the (recent) computer-animated movie “Horton Hears a Who” where the “bad guy” (voiced by Carol Burnett) is this cranky Kangaroo who thinks she is above everybody else. When other children try to interact with her little son (who still lives inside her Kangaroo’s pouch) she declares that they are all imbeciles, unfit for her son’s company because he has been “pouch-schooled!”
Definitely a negative stereotype there, when you consider just how evil that character is throughout the movie!
I always notice homeschooled characters when I see them – they are so stereotypical but so are all the other characters. I’m working on a middle-grades fantasy manuscript and one of my characters is homeschooled….I also fell into stereotyping him (he keeps his golden dagger in his tube socks). My own kids and most of their friends don’t fit the stereotypes at all….but fictionalized characters are always all about fitting the stereotypes or breaking the stereotypes. There are “good girl” and “bad boy” types….”pocket protector nerd types”….”dumb blonde” types, etc…..I think the fact that there are now “homeschooled types” means we’ve become just another part of American culture – and I didn’t think I’d ever see that happen when I started homeschooling 8 years ago!
Do you recall the the short lived “Promise Land” evening drama on CBS in the mid-90s featured a homeschooling family? It was a clean, decent show with Mid-west family values. The family (pretty “normal”–no prairie skirts or weird versions of patriarchy) traveled around the country and the three kids homeschooled. That’s the first mainstream homeschool reference I remember seeing on TV.
There was an episode of Law and Order SVU awhile back that portrayed homeschooling as a cover for child abuse. That one really had an impact, so much so local politicos were calling for “more oversight and accountability” for homeschoolers so this abuse can’t happen. Like home schooling had more prevalence of child abuse than those in public school.
I can’t find an email address, so I’ll leave this in a comment although the post is old. The most positive television portrayal of homeschoolers that I have ever seen was the very first episode of The Addams Family. We watched it one year on Netflix while we carved our Halloween pumpkins. We didn’t know when we queued it up what we were in for. My children were agog. We loved it. All homeschoolers should look it up.