This post reviews Ruth Morton, “Home Education: Constructions of Choice” in International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010) Available Here.
Morton, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick whose dissertation is a qualitative study of homeschooling motivations and practice in the United Kingdom, here gives us a taste of what the dissertation will contain, describing how there are three basic motivational types of homeschoolers.
In 2007 Morton interviewed 19 homeschooling families and one Local Authority official, went regularly to homeschooling meetings, and attended a week-long home educators’ camp. She says that her generalizations are based upon the experiences of “40 to 45” families. In all but two of these families the father was “peripheral or even completely absent” in terms of homeschooling decisions. (p. 46)
Her interviews and other experiences suggested to Morton that there are three basic categories of homeschoolers, though they sometimes overlap:
1. “Natural Choice”–Some parents (really mothers) choose homeschooling out of a desire to return to a pre-industrial lifestyle free from the artifice of mainstream society. These parents are often sharply critical of the capitalist structures and social conformity that they believe predominates in mainstream public schooling, and they possess romantic ideals about childhood and education.
2. “Social Choice”–Some parents do not object to formal education as such but to the negative socialization they believe their children will experience there. Many of these families are conservative Christians, many of whom would send their children to private religious schools if they could afford it. Basically, these parents didn’t want their kids mixing with other kids who might lead them morally or religiously astray.
Morton found that “social” motivation homeschoolers tended to follow a more structured curriculum (usually imported from the United States) than natural motivation homeschoolers.
3. “No Choice”–Some parents choose homeschooling only as a last resort, having exhausted other options. In Morton’s sample there were 8 families in this category. The presenting cause varied widely, from bullying to special education needs to a child’s emotional instability to personality conflicts with school officials. Most of these families had tried numerous times to “make school ‘work'” for their admittedly atypical child, and only after much frustration did they turn to homeschooling. They typically saw homeschooling as a temporary fix, but frequently after giving it a try they often stayed with it for many years.
Morton found that parents in this third category frequently transitioned over time to one of the first two categories in terms of their self-understanding.
She concludes by noting that all three of these motivational types share a basic orientation that privileges the individual child over the needs of the educational system. They all tend not to care too much about the broader social meaning of what they’re doing, nor do they spend a lot of time dwelling on how the educational system might be changed to make it more hospitable. They care mostly about their own children and think of their choice on this narrowly individual level, not about its broader social implications.
Do we learn anything new here? Not really. Morton’s terms “natural” and “social” take their place alongside other venerable dichotomies like Van Galen’s “pedagogues” and “idealogues,” Mitchell Stevens’ “inclusives” and “believers”, and my own “open communion” and “closed communion” to describe basically the same thing.
That she gives equal weight to her third category is the real contribution I think, for it takes a point that’s been made by other researchers (that special education is a significant and growing aspect of homeschooling) and turns it into a category that’s just as important as the historic categories stressing romantic naturalists and religious conservatives. For that reason if for no other I’m pleased to have this text. In this short article we aren’t told how she went about choosing her subjects so we can’t say whether her 8 “no choice” families (which is HUGE given an overall sample of 19) is typical of U.K. homeschooling or what. Hopefully her dissertation will deal with this sort of thing.
If I were to re-write my book
A second, fully revised edition of my 2008 book Homeschool: An American History, was published in March of 2017. 
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I’m interested in her comment that No Choice often transition in self-understanding in a few years to one of the other options. I have seen this in my experience with several special education families I’ve helped in litigation – while the initial impetus was frustration with the school, the reason they decide to keep on with the homeschooling within a year or two tends to migrate to a philosophical or religious basis.
Hm. I have to say I think she’s really missed out on a category: that of academic choice. A good number of homeschoolers–in the UK as well–do it primarily for academic reasons, wanting a structured, formal education that looks very different than the structure the public schools provide.
I am very glad to see that she included the “No Choice” category, though. We are getting more and more of those and it’s an important thing. Some consider it to be a temporary emergency situation and others end up staying a long time.
The fact that large numbers of children are finding schools inhospitable places deserves its own historical explanation.
It certainly deserves to be talked about. I had realized school was no place for a child by the fourth grade.
I’m mildly annoyed at having my own choice characterized as “pre-Industrial” when I’m trying to prepare my children to live in a post-Industrial world.
I agree with you, Lioness. In her tidy categorisation of “natural” home educators as neo-Marxist anti-capitalists, Morton seems to have missed out on the fact that there is a significant group of home educators in the UK who call themselves autonomous educators and follow libertarian principles.
I wonder if there will be another group as homeschooling becomes more common. I personally wouldn’t place myself in any of the above groups; we see homeschooling as one choice among many very good options. I admit to having romantic ideals about education and childhood but I’m not sure they are the driving force behind our decision to homeschool. I agree with those who suggest academic reasons as I certainly feel like we are giving our children a quality education but (again) I wouldn’t say they could not get a good education through other schools in our area.
I don’t object to the groupings but to the labeling of the groups. I would characterize them the following way.
1) “There’s something wrong with the way the local school is handling my child. They handle other children fine, but not my child.”
2) “There’s something wrong with the people running the local school. The school system is fine, but I don’t trust the teachers and/or administrators.”
3) “There’s something inherently wrong with the system. Changing the teachers will do some good for some children, but ultimately is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
It’s good to see the special education aspect addressed as well. I imagine it would be very difficult to test for this in the US where partial enrollment in a public school is generally on a district by district choice, usually a decision made by the superintendent perhaps without a school board vote.
Some special education students I have read about still receive services through the district for therapies and others do not. It’s an interesting dilemma/question of public-private partnerships related to education. (I don’t know how charter/voucher schools deal with special services)
Sports is another area in the US where we see this split. Districts that allow partial school enrollment often recruit local athletes this way–take 3 classes and we’ll let you play. Our local district further restricts which courses can be taken and that list changes at the whim of the “gate-keeper” superintendent.