Home schooling

But a decision to home-school your children does not entail cutting them off from interaction with other children. A home-schooled child can still participate in sports leagues, Boy/Girl Scouts, and other activities that provide social interaction outside of school hours. Many communities have associations of home-schooling families so that the kids can get together for museum trips and the like.

As I recall, there’s substantial evidence that spending a lot of time in the company of other children is actually detrimental to a child’s intellectual development.

I’d say that in an ideal system, all parents would have a variety of options to choose from in the effective raising and education of their children, and a great many would choose home-schooling coupled with many opportunities for diverse socialization without parental oversight.

The implication that a one size fits all strategy is even possible, much less ‘ideal’, is profoundly dangerous.

But can I rail on the position while it’s still amorphous and clay-like before it sets to stone? :)

To expand on the point, I strongly believe in the much-vindicated Popper philosophy that all human endeavors are inherently flawed, and the most sensible system is one that allows for broad choice and includes mechanisms of change, rather than one that purports to lay out the perfect system for Everybody, at the expense of Each Person.

Added to that general philosophy, in the case of child-rearing and -education in particular, overwhelming consideration should be given to the desires of the parents.

You may want to give balance to your view of home-schooling by looking at the books of John Holt (e.g., “How Children Learn”, “Learning all the time”, “Instead of education”.

Many people who encounter the home-schooled children of my acquaintance are surprised at their poise and confidence. These aspects are cultivated by the fact that most home-schooled children have a much wider range of contacts than do institutionally-schooled children. Home-schooled children do not merely sit around the kitchen table grinding through mail-order curricula (though some do). Instead, they are out in the world taking dance classes, art lessons, going to museums, the library. They are involved in projects they have chosen for themselves (and have the time to complete to their satisfaction).

As a result, instead of being segregated for up to eight hours a day with people the same age, they meet and interact with people of all ages. They are used to talking to adults, and do so, instead of staring diffidently at their toes.

I am a home-schooling parent myself. I chose to do so in order that my children could have time to explore their own interests. It is too early to tell (my oldest child is only 14), but, as yet, I have seen little to suggest that my family has made the wrong choice.

I would, in fact, turn your statement around: in the ideal world, no child would be stuck in an institution, but would have the freedom to learn in the ways that are best suited to that child.

I do not intend to demean institutional schools — they are far more successful than they are often portrayed, and they may, indeed, be right for some children at some points in their education (and such children should have the freedom to choose them). But I do not believe that they are the sine qua non of education.

But Harry, even within public schools in the US there is a great deal of segregation by social class due to residential mobility. And some religious schools in the US, Catholic schools, are more diverse than many US public schools in other respects.

Chris I fail to see what a specifically Rawlsian case for taking kids out of public schools with potentially negative peer effects is. I do however see a Rawlsian case for keeping them in on the grounds of facilitating public reason.

I’ll approach this issue from an empirical rather than a theoretical point of view. My parents chose to homeschool me until I was 12 years old; at that age I was old enough to take the decision to start at a private school, where I lasted only a few years until I turned to institutional public education for the rest of my academic career.

The degree to which I excelled in the institution is mostly irrelevant, since what’s really at issue is how much better or worse I’d have done had I not homeschooled. The only evidence I have on that point is this: when I started at public school, I made friends with other students who were about as intelligent as me. Among these peers, though, I was the only one who would reliably keep up with schoolwork and remain interested in lectures. The others had long since formed the opinion that school was dull and homework was boring. Since these things were fresh and new to me, and since my parents presented education to me as exciting and interesting rather than obligatory and dull, I had no such problem. I have to assume that if I, too, had been wedged into the school system at age six without having any say in the matter, that I would have fallen into the ‘slacker’ track myself.

I’m always amazed at the reaction of many liberals when I tell them I was homeschooled. Surprise is reasonable, but I often pick up some level of contempt. I understand disagreeing with conservative Christians who are actively opposed to “godless” public schools; but why allow these fringe folks to set up homeschooling as anathema to public education? My experience shows clearly that they can coexist happily, and even complement each other.

Harry and Chris, thanks for raising these issues. I agree that this is a complex problem, but I’m puzzled by your arguments on several grounds.

As Seth mentioned, you seem to be assuming that homeschooled children are cut off from unsupervised social interaction and development, which need not be true. I’d guess that it is usually false.

Also, if I understand correctly, your arguments largely abandon the primary (though not exclusive) mission of schooling, which is learning. Harry says, for instance, that schools are particularly important not because they are good at imparting education but because “they are controlled environments in which children can encounter ways of life quite unlike their own ways of life, and are enabled to experience something of what those ways of life are like from an insider’s perspective; this is essential for facilitating autonomy. It is not usually the school curriculum, but the school ethos and the school composition that facilitate this. …. If this is the criterion underlying compulsory education, then we can satisfy it in many ways not unique to state-run schooling. To be extreme, apprenticeship, mandatory but temporary exchange of children among households, and some form of childhood draft would all achieve this, though no one would suggest these for obvious reasons. But more practically, if schools are failing their primary mission, we could separate the content of education from the institution in charge of social development, possibly to the benefit of both goals. In a sense, that’s what homeschooling does.

Moreover, I see no reason to believe that a school provides a preferred social environment for obtaining social skills or understanding as one needs them later. A closed, single-aged peer group, forced into arbitrary social arrangements, run by purely internal norms, subject to a distant supervisory authority that is unable to prevent widespread physical violence and psychological abuse, is at best a caricature for adult society. Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I would say that prison is a closer analogue. Yes, I know that there are some excellent schools that provide good environments. But for all the reasons that Harry outlines and more, most real schools fail to live up to the ideal of children learning “a conception of the good and … a sense of justice,” let alone calculus.

We agree that it is reasonable for parents to avoid schools that provide “unacceptably poor” education or schools that provide a “dangerous and bad” social environments, but why should the administrators, elected or unelected, be privileged with defining thresholds for either criterion? On what liberal grounds does a majority rule mandate what is worth learning and what is worth doing? Should parents be forced to accept low standards for their children because that is the majority view or because that is all that the school district can afford? Should those who cannot afford a private institution be denied the opportunity to raise those standards? The schools reflect both money and underlying values about education. If I live and work in a town that would rather have good football games than good science labs or if my child goes to a school where anyone answering a question in class has to fight at recess or if the culture in the school imparts the idea that learning is boring, then there is little I can do within the system to change that in time to help my child. We can traffic in ideals all you want, but no schooling arrangement will change the underlying values or the inequities in money that dictate a school’s quality. What I find unconvincing about the argument from the ideal that Harry gives is that that ideal can ever be realized because people will always differ in their ambitions, values, and beliefs.

I might be reading in, but it seems that the implicit objection to homeschooling is that parents are free to indoctrinate their children with beliefs, such as creationism, that are contrary to established knowledge. I agree that this is a problem, but defining it precisely is difficult. Content-based distinctions cut both ways; how does the liberal framework determine what is right? For example, suppose that a majority in my state decides that creationism should be taught (it’s happened before) but not evolution. Now short of leaving the state, if homeschooling is foreclosed and I cannot afford private school, I’m stuck with what I believe is a serious problem, as is my child. Should I just give in because I have no right to impose my beliefs (that evolution is preferred to creationism) on my child? Must I follow the general will? It seems to me that we do best when we embrace individual differences and allow free choice and flexibility. It is a practical reality — which I do not want to see reversed, to be honest — that parents impart many of their values and beliefs to their children. If we bear the cost of a few parents imparting extreme views to avoid everyone else being caught in the stagnant middle, I think that’s worthwhile.

Many kids in the US are homeschooled because their parents believe that public schooling will expose them to propaganda which, if believed by the impressionable kids, will put their souls in mortal peril. The right of the parent to take all reasonable measures to protect their children from exposure to things which undermine their religious belief seems to me one which should be interfered with only on if there is clear evidence that the child is irreparrably harmed by a failure to interfere.

Letting the state come between parent and child is extremely dangerous, particularly in matters of religious faith.

On another note – experience in the US is that homeschooled children to better academically than children from public or private schooled on standardized tests. The idea that homeschooling is necessarily inferior, or even usually inferior, is just plain wrong. The only area where homeschoolers tend to be shortchanged is biology, and that’s pretty much the whole point for most US homeschoolers – avoid exposure to evolution until the kid is old enough to have fully accepted the parent’s values.

sorry for the disordered thought train in this comment – I’m in a rush and don’t have time to tidy it up.

harry wrote: “…in a just society no-one would feel the need to home school…”

How is that a Rawlsian argument? You would need a literally un-believable uniformity of opinion for no single family, out of a population of hundreds of millions, to want to home-school. And John “Overlapping Consensus” Rawls was, if nothing else, very much aware of the reality of political and social plurality.

I think a more properly Rawlsian view of education is that as long as parents live up to the consensus requirements on the treatment of their children — they don’t beat or starv them for missing marks, and ensure that the children learn enough to function well in society — then any form of schooling they choose is acceptable, be it home-schooling, private schools, public schools, or hired tutors. This is not a libertarian position, but it is still a liberal one.

“Well, as a liberal who went to a seriously terrible public grade school – there are many worse, but this one was below the tideline of lethal violence – I know where my hard-to-conceal liberal scorn for homeschooling comes from. “Devil take the hindmost”, eh? There may be, on the whole, an advantage to the homeschooled: but I think it’s smaller than the damage done to the rest of the children when the resource-richest kids get pulled out.”

What damage? The other kids in a school don’t take after the smart kids; the smart kids merely serve as a target.

To respond to a question loosely directed at me – I was smart and motivated enough to think of ways to demonstrate to some of my peers that brains can be useful.

No CERT notifications, though. No lockpicking, either; I’m just not MIT material.

What I really meant, though, was that my parents had two ways to spend their spare time on my education. They could have homeschooled me (and my brother). Instead, my mother spent a lot of time in my classroom, which enormously reduced the Bad Stuff that could happen to me. Not because she was hovering over my shoulder; she spent most of her time there working with other kids, who desperately desperately needed some help. If the school could have afforded more people, it wouldn’t have had to follow soul-killing Taylorist teaching methods – but with an enormous class size, it did.

One problem with the discussion of home schooling is that it’s discussed as an either/or choice rather than a matter of degree.

We live in an excellent school district and my son also recieves some Special Ed services that I could not duplicate myself.

For years, I have been doing what home schoolers call Unschooling: taking himplaces that follow up on his own interests. Up till now, we have travelled with him a great deal, much to his educational benefit. School vacations and summer vacation are really not sufficient to continue with this program, and so he will be missing many fine opportunities during this 1st grade year.

Ideally, I would like him to be about 15% home schooled. But the principal of his school does not see it that way. Unless our son is sick or someone died, if we take him out it’s an “illegal” absence.

This situation is not to my son’s educational benefit. It remains to be seen how this plays itself out.

I have been puzzling over the above passage from Rawls for about 10 years — its what prompted me to start writing about educational issues in fact. Why on earth would he limit the obligations of the state to what Chris has quoted, given the higher order interest he asserts that we have in developing and exercising our capacity for a conception of the good, which includes the capacity rationally to revise a conception of the good? I never figured out a good response, until my colleague Dan Hausman gave a completely sensible account when we were reading Justice as Fairness together (in which the passage is repeated, almost verbatim). And — here’s the embarrassing bit — I’ve completely forgotten what the account was that Dan gave. I shall ask him — but his memory for what he has said tends to be worse than my memory of what he has said, so I am not hopeful that he will be able to reconstruct it.

25 active parents (25 families?) would be an effective bloc in the PTAs of most schools I was in. Don’t know now, as I tutor kids directly, not through the schools.

As far as I know, the schools never ran well without a lot of volunteer labor – some of it provided by the Bowling Together style o’ social status, lots and lots of it provided by women too upper-class to work, some of it probably left over from Settlement House uplift.

We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately.

“On a picky Rawls-related point, Decnava’s pointing to the priority of liberty won’t really do, because what gets priority is not liberty as such but the basic liberties . So we need an argument that establishes which rights parents have over their children are among those liberties, how those rights are to be construed and so on.”

1. What is the difference between “liberty as such” and “the basic liberties”? If you are suggesting that I am confusing negative and positive conceptions of liberty, I do not think so. I think I am adressing basic liberties: How do you balance the child’s basic liberty interest in an education with the parent’s basic liberty interest in raising their own child?

2. Suggesting that we need an argument that establishes what rights parents have over their children seems to be saying that I cannot point to the priority of liberty without first establishing that parents have this liberty. That would be valid if I suggested the priority of liberty as an ANSWER, but I proposed it as a PRESUMPTION: In the absence of such arguments, we must presume greater individual freedoms than lesser.

3. I cannot speak to the PL Rawls, as I have not read that, but the more I think about the ToJ appraoch, the more it seems to favor allowing home schooling. If I am sitting in the original position behind the viel of ignorance and do not know what my conception of the good, either as a student or a parent, and I want the best possible outcome were I to be in the least edvantaged situation, the last system I would devise would be one that would allow majories to impose their conception of the good on minorities without being able to opt out. If you frame the question as pitting the parent’s conception of the good against the child’s conception or right to develop their own conception, then according to the differnece principle you would devise a system to advantage the children. But to solve this delima by forcing children into a system that by deffinition imposes the majority’s conception of the good because it is run by the majority is to appeal to utilitarianism for a solution rather than the difference principle.

Homeschooler does not always equal right wing religious conservative. I’m a liberal and I homeschool. I want my daughter to retain her freedom, her privacy, her creativity and her passions. I don’t want her dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in any classroom setting. I want her to think for herself instead of being indoctrinated by the government thought police that run the public schools. Even if I didn’t care about any of the above, today’s Zero Tolerance policies are more than any sane person could accept and there is no way I’ll sign her up for that kind of potential abuse.

In an ideal world, people would finally stop rendering their premises meaningless with the introductory phrase “in an ideal world” …

A question for the egalitarians (communitarians?) taking part in the discussion — why do you believe that society is better served by pulling the outliers down to the mean (“… the damage done to the rest of the children when the resource-richest kids get pulled out …”)?

In our research centre we have perhaps 70 home school children in a research population of about 3000 children.
The overall impressions are that the Homer children are significantly more articulate in the presence of adults and, in a recent survey, actually outperformed their Normal-school children in 16 out 18 aspects of literacy. Interviewing those homers who have gone on to University showed that in the first year many of the Homers were shocked by the poor levels of general knowledge of the Normals.
I do however have a group of Homers who, for a range of reasons, would have been a challenge in any classroom. These children are at serious risk of never getting appropriate teaching. Parents of Homers cry out for standards by which they can guage their childrens progress. We have released our diagnostic software without charge to try and help but Homers who are struggling need support which kick-in as soon as they are identified as being at-risk.

I have just finished a debate on homeschooling with Rob Reich. The debate can be found at:

http://chn.proboards13.com/index.cgi?board=CHNFreedomForum&action=post

I am an attorney and homeschooling parent. I represent homeschoolers as individuals (pro bono) and the Connecticut Homeschooling Network. I believe I can say that I have had a role in forming homeschooling policy in Connecticut, the best state in the country to homeschool. You are welcome to come to the CHN board if you wish to read the debate or comment. I would be happy to come to your board as well. This is my second attempt at posting, and I hope this one succeeds.