Home, Schooling

My personal experience here is very limited. We considered home schooling for a while, based on concerns about how our kid would manage the school as a social environment. I hung around some homeschooling bulletin boards, and checked out some of the options, but we eventually decided it was better to go in at the deep end. There were some problems, but it was the right choice in our case, I think.

Coming to the post, homeschooling obviously depends on having one parent free from other work on pretty much a full-time basis, and that has only ever been true for a small minority. So, it has to be thought about not as a possible replacement for public schools but as an outside option, in addition to that of private, community or religious schools. I don’t see it as particularly problematic, or at least as not raising problems that aren’t already there with the other options. For example, the problem of creaming off the most able students seems much more severe with high-status private schools, and problems with religiously-motivated home schooling seem to be much the same as with religious schools.

I’m not sure how common that view is. Most views I’ve come across are along the lines of ‘in my particular case and with my resource I can do a better job than the public system’, not that home schooling is universally superior or right for everyone.

Homeschooling is amateurish in a literal sense, but I don’t see how it’s a challenge to public education. Obviously mass teaching with classes of 25 or so kids requires professionalization and skills and techniques (like classroom management) that have to be learnt and which you don’t have to possess if you’re teaching one or two kids .

You could check out Milton Gaither, who has written a scholarly history of homeschooling in the U.S. and who has a blog that features links to various studies: http://gaither.wordpress.com/

Tedra:

Which is a really problematic presumtion, no? If we think that education ought to be universally available (which I am going to assume), then a system that explicitly or implicitly claims that parents ought to be their children’s primary (only?) academic educators has some real difficulties that need addressing: what about kids whose parent(s) did not themselves receive adequate educations? What happens to kids whose parent(s) are unable, unwilling, or uninterested in educating them? Do we believe that “proper” educations ought to be provided/available only to children whose parents are willing to make their children’s education a full-time job? What, if anything, is to be done about homeschooling parents who abuse or neglect either the children themselves or their children’s education? Is homeschooling a reproducible, universalizable system of education at all, or is it just an option that’s available to the most motivated parents? And if that latter, then what does that do or say about our sense of public citizenship?

It’s tough to bring up any of these discussions in homeschooling circles, it seems to me….

I’m going to try and be as “nice and constructive” as JP Stormcrow said I was in the Generation Game thread yesterday, and if I can’t, I’ll just stop. (That goes for as long as this thread lasts.)

But.

Every time you (Tedra) bring this subject up I start to get riled up (and you’re not the only one), to the point where last time I had to just walk away from the computer. I get riled up partly because the way you frame the issues and questions is already loaded, the value judgments are already made, and you are to some extent purporting to explain my thought processes to me, whereas I would prefer that you not assume what they are.

The fact that I homeschooled my kids without worrying a whole lot about the survival of public education in the U.S. (as if!), apparently makes me “truly bizzarre … unselfconscious … and uncritical,” and that’s a hard position from which to enter a conversation. I know you applied those adjectives to “a movement” (what is that?) and not to an individual, but those adjectives are sitting there in the background of your inquiries, and therefore before we even start the conversation I’m feeling that I’ve been put on the defensive and that I have to justify myself and my way of thinking about this to you. (This of course is partly my own psychology intruding, not just your way of framing the questions.)

This gets coupled with the other reason I end up walking away from the computer, which is that the subject is just too big and sprawling. I thought hard about homeschooling, and the relationship of education to everything else, for twenty years — from before I had kids to well on into their teen years — to the point where I thought so differently about education from everyone around me that I did eventually just stop talking about it. The effort it took to try to build a conceptual bridge over and over and over again just wore me out. And it wore me out with other homeschoolers, too, because almost no homeschoolers within my reach when my kids were growing up were doing it for the same reasons I was. They were mostly doing it for right-wing-like religious reasons … I was not. To say the least.

*****

Apologies for the long disclaimer, but the “meta” — the attitudes, unexamined assumptions, etc. — are a big part of the conversation about homeschooling, schooling, and education in general, so I feel like it’s important to set the context. All that said, I’ll try to address one of your first questions as briefly as I can, and maybe come back for more later.

You wrote: If we think that education ought to be universally available (which I am going to assume), then a system that explicitly or implicitly claims that parents ought to be their children’s primary (only?) academic educators has some real difficulties that need addressing.

I do think “education ought to be universally available.” I do not think of homeschooling as a “system that claims…” etc. In fact, I never thought of homeschooling as a “system” at all, much less did I ever think that it should replace universally available publicly funded schooling. I simply felt, and feel … (though with more reservations than I had twenty years ago, mostly because of who’s doing the most homeschooling — see how messy this is?) … that compulsory schooling on the model that has become the norm in the U.S. (and most of the world?) should not be the only acceptable option for educating children.

Because I’m already getting into the swampy complexity of the subject and my feelings about it, let me cut to a general statement of belief.

I believe that “we” — the collective citizenry — should fund, via taxes, a system of lavish support/resources for lifelong education, but without assuming that all the education has to be done in a classroom and/or via book-learning. I believe that the responsibility for educating kids should be shared by parents and the collective citizenry, as represented by some kind of system of oversight, precisely to make sure that kids aren’t abused or neglected. (We already have such a system, of course, and it is responsible for kids in school as much as for kids outside school. How well it works is another question.)

The novelist David Guterson was a public high school teacher who homeschooled his own kids and wrote a book called Family Matters that came out just about when my kids would have been old enough to go to school. It was my favorite book about homeschooling in that era, because he had a “both/and” approach — he was committed to public education and he saw no reason why a system of universal public education couldn’t include home- or unschooling as well as schooling. In particular, he suggested that public education could be more like public libraries, where the patrons are ultimately in charge, but the resources are readily available to anyone. For education the resources would be teachers, books, labs, a machine shop…who knows, maybe a working organic farm, a working forest…… (I live in Maine, I have certain prejudices. :) )

I love that model. I’m not sure what I’d think of Guterson’s book if I read it now; I’ve changed my thinking (and feeling) about a lot of things in twenty years. But you might check it out if you haven’t found it already, because I think it might suggest a more nuanced, less “either/or” way of thinking about these questions, not least the idea that education should be “compulsory” somehow or other, but schooling should not.

I’ve got notes for a bunch more comments as long as this, but that’s probably not a good idea, so I’ll stop for now.

[With a prayer to the html deities…..]

I recently read Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from Consumer a Consumer Culture and while it was infuriating in almost every way (each individual family being profiled seemed to be able to “check out” of consumer culture because they were connected with enough resources — money, land, higher education, consumer-culture neighbors or family — to borrow what they needed when necessary, but there was *no discussion* about the unsustainability of such a model), there was a lot of discussion about homeschooling as a progressive political movement. The book itself was all anecdote/memoir, but I seem to remember that almost all the families profiled had websites that were listed in the back of the book. That list might be helpful to you for finding more primary sources, maybe?

I’ve long thought the main point of non-home schooling was not what they tried to teach you but what you learnt about people and systems while being socialised outside your family circle.

Tedra, you will eventually – if you haven’t already – start coming across the names of the more intellectual, secular, and ideological figures in the home school movement. I’ll spare you the googling: Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), John Holt (several books from the 60s to the 90s), John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down), and my fave, Grace Llewellyn (The Teenage Liberation Handbook). Illich was a serious intellectual worthy of reading and consideration, but definitely full of it on a regular basis. Holt is okay. Gatto is awful but his name comes up a lot and his ideology and intellectual-sounding style fits the wingnuttery of too many homeschoolers. And I genuinely enjoyed Llewellyn’s book.

Start with Llewellyn, then Holt or Illich.

I do think some things about home schooling, and some of them are not very nice. But I think pretty awful things about school too. If you were living in Canada, I’d give you my mum’s number to ask. She tutors homeschooled kids for a living.

There are naturally many things to say here; for instance, in response to the idea that evangelicals don’t think about the broader society… that’s clearly nonsense. The idea that they would like to keep their children away from bullies and drugs until the children can be a positive force in society is hardly uncaring.

The rub can, I believe, be reduced to this principle: people are most responsible for themselves, then their immediate family, then their extended family, their local community and so on in ever widening circles. There is responsibility for global humanity, the environment, and so on, but it is diluted relative to their immediate responsibilities and distributed to many other people. In this sense, then, ‘education professionals’ take the lead on reforming the public schools, supported by (hopefully) politicians, local community leaders, the parent-teacher associations and school boards, taxpayers, etc; but even the education professionals have a deeper, stronger, more immediate obligation to their own children while raising them; to educate them as best they can, regardless of whether that has a small impact further undermining an inadequate local school.

The Illich is a slim volume that can be read in a couple of hours at most (in marked contrast to much of his other work). It can be found online here:
http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html

This likely falls in the anecdotal category, but Susan Wise Bauer, who teaches at the College of William and Mary, homeschools her kids, writes material for homeschoolers, and until recently had a blog devoted to her approach to homeschooling, might be worth a gander.

Wise Bauer is a Christian whose husband is a pastor, but she’s come in for criticism from some Christians for not trying to convert everyone all of the time (see, for example, this post from her professional blog: http://www.susanwisebauer.com/blog/the-raving-writer/life-on-the-border/ ).

Not having read her books, I can’t speak to the quality of her work, but she might be someone with whom you could have a fruitful conversation.

Also, my parents, who went to US public high schools in the 1950s, have a strong assumption that the school and the community will provide what is needed. I’m not saying that they didn’t provide opportunities outside of school (they did), or that they didn’t offer things they thought were important that they knew weren’t part of school (they did). But AFAICT they had absorbed the consensus of the time that what’s necessary and sufficient for socialization is exposure to a pretty homogeneous peer group, perhaps somehow coextensive with the school, though they often disagreed with this consensus and I’m sure would want me to qualify this quite a bit.

But so anyway I think (hopefully not in a Tea Partyish way) that there is a belief out there that the school is really important and that differing with the school is really problematic.

I do not know PK or the issues that led to your screening schools and rejecting them. This may be off target, therefore, but please consider the Coalition of Essential Schools (and the substantial research behind the group) in developing a curriculum and organizing your “classes.” I was surprised that no commenter yet has mentioned the late great Ted Sizer and his work which you may find interesting (and is the prime source of the CES Movement).

This mother (a Harvard scientist), as reported in the NY Times, used the rigorous French curriculum to supplement her children’s education — even her own children (now grown) don’t know how she did it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/insights-in-human-knowledge-from-the-minds-of-babes.html
“Scaling the academic ranks, Dr. Spelke still found time to supplement her children’s public school education with a home-schooled version of the rigorous French curriculum. She baked their birthday cakes from scratch, staged elaborate treasure hunts and spent many days each year creating their Halloween costumes: Bridget as a cave girl or her favorite ballet bird; her younger brother, Joey, as a drawbridge.

‘Growing up in my house was a constant adventure,’ Bridget said. ‘As a new mother myself,’ she added, ‘I don’t know how my mom did it.’

Is Dr. Spelke the master of every domain? It’s enough to make the average mother fuss out.

 –> meant to be a smiley, transformed into who knows what.

Tedra, thanks, whew, I’m glad to have a chance to try to be coherent instead of just sputtering. I also totally agree with you that the question of oversight is one of the messiest parts of this subject, and I’ll try to come back to it if I can get my thoughts in order a bit.

JanieM: I think it’s telling that it’s so easy to rewrite that sentence: “…[there’s a belief out there that] heterosexuality is really important and that differing from heterosexual norms is really problematic.”

Absolutely. When you read “consensus” stuff from that era, the preoccupation with “manliness” versus some unnamed danger is everywhere once you start looking for it. Presumably they felt the same way about lesbians, but to appearances they didn’t seem very interested in girls (unless forced to write about Jane Austen or something).

In many cases, there’s a real tension between the idea that everyone should do well in school and the idea that nerdly or non-physical traits should be discouraged, either because being gay is wrong, or because kids have to learn to live with a society that supposedly uniformly believes being gay is wrong. (There was also the slightly overweight kid, about 11, who was taunted as gay in Mass. a few years ago, and the principal told his mother his problem was that he denied being gay, and refused to help.) There’s something like that w/r/t girls too, especially if you define “sexuality” more broadly, but not evenly: I get the sense that whether girls are supposed to be “girly” or “sexy” or “serious” varies from place to place.

I feel that one of the big benefits of not having been homeschooled for me was being around people interested and excited by the same things I was, and with teachers who were able to steer talented students the right way. Homeschooling isn’t always an alternative for students with needs the local schools cannot meet, because parents might not have the tools to meet them either.

Any education policy has to value giving students appropriate educations, and that includes things beyond what we expect everyone to know.

I home educated my three children in New Zealand for 11 years. Two are now at university and seem to have made the transition comfortably while the third is now in a public school for the first time at the age of 16. I can appreciate your comment that you are “not seeing anyone really interrogating homeschooling as a social, political, or pedagogical movement” and I understand your frustration that all you can find are “personal / anecdotal explanations of homeschooling.” I know that on a personal level I have interrogated homeschooling socially, politically and pedagogically almost every day for the past 11 years.

The difficulty as I experienced it is that it is hard to research home education other than on a case by case basis because families understandably don’t want to be research subjects. There are some researchers who have had a try, interestingly those I am aware of are not from USA which is really the home of the homeschooling movement. There are sections of the US home schooling movement who actively discourage any participation in research. As an example see http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/INF/FREE/free_rsrch.html

Here is a list of some material I am aware of:

The best academic research I have come across is that of Alan Thomas ( http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/PHDT/24653.html ) who appears to be presently resident at the Institute of Education at the University of London.

There is another British researcher named Paula Rothermel, but her material is less accessible.

In New Zealand I am aware of case studies by Leo Roche http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/PHDT/24653.html who concludes “more research is needed to provide an accurate picture of homeschooling in New Zealand.”

I am also aware of research by Emma Stroobant “Dancing to the Music of Your Heart:Home Schooling the School-Resistant Child”, prepared for a PhD at the University of Auckland.

Having said I was not aware of much US material I did a quick search and came up with http://www.indiana.edu/~homeeduc/ which has a long list of research articles. I think the three key points made by Robert Kunzman are very important and apply worldwide.

“1. We don’t have any comprehensive data about U.S. homeschoolers nationally: total number of homeschoolers, learning outcomes, or anything else.

The broadest set of data we have comes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), but even that large-scale study likely doesn’t provide a full picture, as many homeschoolers are strongly opposed to any sort of governmental oversight of their efforts, and therefore refuse to participate in any data-gathering attempts (the 2003 NCES survey, for instance, had a 58% refusal rate).

2. Claims that the “average homeschooler” outperforms public and private school students are simply not justified.

3. There is no such thing as a “typical homeschooler.”

In New Zealand there is probably better information because there is a legal requirement to obtain an exemption from school attendance which is complied with by most home schoolers.

It is perhaps unfair to say that “a movement that so clearly values independent research and learning is so unselfconscious and uncritical about what it’s doing.” I think that homeschoolers reflect constantly on their choice at a personal level. Discussions on some forums are often very challenging as to practice and there is also some excellent kind advice. It is however difficult to document such reflection in a conventional way. There is resistance from homeschoolers to being research subjects and there is no way to get a random sample for research as any research subjects must consent and are therefore in effect self-selected.

I concur totally with the comment ““compulsory schooling on the model that has become the norm in the U.S. (and most of the world?) should not be the only acceptable option for educating children.” My wish would be for better integration between the choices. At least in New Zealand once you make the choice “the state has washed its hands of you” and basically refuses to allow you to participate at all in publice education which seems to me a shame as each choice has a lot to offer the other.

On the question of oversight – in New Zealand we did have a review system in place until recently but it was abandoned as a cost cutting measure as home schoolers were perceived by the government as a low risk group. We now rely on a complaints based system. In practice parents want the best for their children and those who feel homeschooling is not working for them make a choice to move back to school.

Sorry my links are not live – my HTML tags knowledge is a bit rusty.

Tedra: I think one of the discomforts I have with homeschooling activism (again, based on what I’ve seen so far, which is only partial and I hope not representative) is that much of it seems to be opposed to any kind of oversight or regulation at all? Which makes me acutely uncomfortable.

JoshM: In retrospect, I feel strongly that parents’ right to educate their children according to the dictates of their conscience should not be allowed to trump the child’s right to learn truthful, accurate information about e.g. biology, geology, cosmology, genetics, ecology, US history, basic verifiable economic facts, 20th century English literature, reproductive health, etc. As a matter of public policy, I think it should be more closely regulated.

Homeschooling makes strange bedfellows, which is why I resist thinking of it as a “movement” at all. If what you want to do is resist state power over the lives of individuals and families, then homeschooling might be part of your program, but, as a calendar I once had said, “An idea is not responsible for the people who espouse it.” (This goes for a lot of things.) There are other ways to do homeschooling, and many homeschoolers are happy to comply with state requirements for registration and oversight. (Which of course vary wildly from state to state in the US, which is the only place I know anything about in this regard.)

I was once on the mailing list of a statewide Christian homeschooling group that sent a newsletter every now and then. I had met the woman who published the newsletter at a conference once, and she and her husband were sweet and gentle people to talk with.

There came a time when in the same issue of the newsletter there were these articles:

1) a call to arms — “let’s be the silent majority no longer” — exhorting homeschoolers to be visible and vocal in fighting the good fight against civil rights for gay people in Maine. (One of those referenda was happening.)

2) a celebration of the fact that the Constitution (citing some court case or other) gives Americans the right to run their family lives as they see fit, including the right to homeschool.

I wrote the woman an eight page, single-spaced letter pointing out that she was celebrating her right to run her family life without interference from me, while begging people to help her make sure that as a gay person I didn’t have the right to run my family life without interference from her.

Needless to say, I never heard back from her.

State power over the lives of individuals and families is a two-edged sword. Maybe I’m hyper-aware of that fact since I’m gay, but I think it’s important not to idealize what that kind of power can accomplish or underestimate the ways in which it can go wrong. (Fully recognizing that “wrong” is in the eye of the beholder, which is part of my point.)

One of my summer vacation stops used to be at the home and basket shop of Joe Nicholas, a Passamaquoddy elder who helped linguists from Harvard and MIT create a written form of the Passamaquoddy language. Mr. Nicholas told me about this the first time I ever met him, and he also told me that he and the rest of his generation had been beaten in school — by teachers — for speaking Passamaquoddy.

I don’t think “state power” as an abstraction, or the presence of some proportion of petty tyrants in schools, have changed all that much since Joe Nicholas was a kid in school. (He’s gone now, sad to say.) Kids don’t get beaten by teachers as much any more (well, except in Texas), but that doesn’t mean that teachers, administrators, or school boards are all-wise and all-knowing.

Especially in a democracy, there’s a permanent gray area instead of a bright line defining, in JoshM’s phrase, “truthful … facts,” not to mention the question of which of the infinity of “true facts” should be taught to children.

Basically: I’m all for the state having the role of a “bigger bully” in a lot of aspects of life — especially the protection of children from abuse. But state power itself can be abused, so I think it’s important to be careful and somewhat conservative in deciding how far it should reach.

Me: I wrote the woman an eight page, single-spaced letter pointing out that she was celebrating her right to run her family life without interference from me, while begging people to help her make sure that as a gay person I didn’t have the right to run my family life without interference from her.

Implied in this paragraph is of course the role of state power in giving either of us leverage over the family life of the other.

Everywhere All The Time: a New Deschooling Reader, Ed. by Matt Hern, 2008 AK Press

This is a terrific book, pro-deschooling, but relaxed about it. To be very traditional (I fit well into institutions and their habits, what can I say ;-), I’ll quote the preface (I read the book and agree wholeheartedly with the editor’s description).

“This book brings together the best writing I know of about deschooling and resisting monopoly schooling and compulsory education. It covers a pretty wide range of thinking and highlights come of the most compelling projects I know of around the world. the book is still pretty North American centric, because that’s what I know most about, but it includes a lot more pieces this time from other parts of the world: India, Turkey, Israel, Mali, Thailand, Mexico and more. As well, I have included some youth voices, writing from kids that I know, to offer their perspectives on their experiences doing something other than exclusive traditional schooling.”

I don’t see anyone on this thread claiming that everyone should be homeschooled. If you would like to see that argument made, you can look to Penelope Trunk http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2011/11/08/the-big-lie-homeschoolers-tell

(trigger warning: she’s a woman with borderline personality disorder and Asperger’s, unschooling her children in a violent marriage that she refuses to leave. If that’s going to use up all your ire for the day, don’t click. But she can be breathtakingly perceptive.)

I tend to react negatively to homeschooling probably for many reasons others do, but also because my schooling (with the exception of 7th and 8th grades) was excellent. But what does that matter to other people’s experience?

I was raised around a lot of homeschoolers, some of them did a better job than others. I absolutely don’t think you can characterize them as a “movement” because they consist of several different movements (plus quite a few isolated people who came to it for their own reasons). And the community I grew up in was rightwingers and hippies who had gone back to the land for very different reasons- thinking about homeschooling is so reminiscent of that. We could all sing “Blow up your TV” by John Prine with equal gusto- after that the Christian Identity white supremacists and the “one love” hippie dope-dealers parted company. So if you were to try to do a rigorous study of outcomes, for that community or for homeschoolers, you wouldn’t get very far.

I agree that the issue of assessment and oversight is very, very thorny. It’s thorny for child abuse as well, particularly when the state bureaucracy and the children’s culture are alien to one another. It’s that issue that gives me the most doubt of my idealistic social-welfare-state ideals- without giving me any probable vision to replace them with.

My son and his friend had a period of dungeons and dragons at that age — it was quite a craze and seemed to be mostly about constructing ideal (or idealized) characters. No game or anything. Perhaps it is a developmental stage where they are trying on traits. At any rate my son would be immersed in thing like that to the point of obsession (and parental concern) and then suddenly it would abruptly be over and there would be a new enthusiasm to take it’s place.

We did try to see that he had at least a three weeks in the summer where there would be no electronics and nothing to do but read, play cards, or scrabble, or be outdoors. He is grown up and still likes board games. This would not be so easy now that electronics are more ubiquitous.

Tedra’s flagging of No way’s comment (currently @33) made me realize that several great comments have come out of moderation since I last checked in. (Insert ritual cursing of the numbering/interleaf-ing system.) No way said a lot of things far more eloquently than I ever could have, and I second Tedra’s appreciation of the feminism comparison.

Also, this: *Vocabulary matters; there is no such thing as mandatory education nor mandatory schooling, but there certainly is compulsory attendance.

*****

I’d quibble with Vonnegut via JP Stormcrow only insofar as I think it’s all really a continuation of middle school rather than high school.

Then again, I’m so old that I grew up before there was any such thing as middle school, at least in Ohio. So what do I know? (We had grade school, K-8, and high school, 9-12. Some places had junior high school, 7-9.)

also @purple: Your claim implies that education is the repetition and explanation of facts and nothing else. Which maybe it is, but if that’s true then you can get an awful lot of education from books, taped lectures, and internet resources, all written by people smarter than your parents. No personal experience with home schooling here, but I came of age with the internet and learned an awful lot more from that than most years of my schooling.

For the sake of full disclosure: Tedra’s post on this subject a few months ago made me realize something I had never actually thought much about: that after kindergarten I never went to public school myself until I took up linguistics as a hobby a few years ago.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother told me very seriously one day that I was going to be sent to “Catholic school” for first grade. I had no idea what that meant, but one interesting thing about it is that while my dad was Catholic, my mom was Baptist. She had had to agree to let her children be raised Catholic in order for my dad’s church to have anything to do with their marriage, but that promise certainly hadn’t included sending the kids to Catholic school. When they got married there wasn’t even a school in existence in our parish, and lots of Catholic kids in my town went to public schools.

No, the big reason she wanted us to go to that school, which was just starting out, was that they taught reading via phonics and the public schools didn’t. For her it was all about pedagogy, not about either religion or some kind of private vs. public tradeoff as such.

For college, I came down to the very last day before deciding between the University of Michigan and … a private school. But it wasn’t because I cared about public vs private, it was because I wanted to get out of the midwest, and also because I felt that I would be most at home at the place I chose.

Similarly for grad school.

The reason I bring it up is to at least partially refute the notion (which nobody has asserted in this thread) that sending kids to private schools, like homeschooling them, also “undermines” public education. Tedra lumped home- and unschooling together; I’d lump public and private schooling together. There’s one discussion that can be had about trying to ensure good tax-supported education for everyone, but that’s not the same discussion as the one about education inside vs. outside institutions. Those discussions only partially overlap.

To put it another way, a big part of my decision to homeschool my kids was a set of tradeoffs involving school as such, not public school. Most of the tradeoffs I saw us making would have been the same regardless of whether the alternative to homeschooling had been public school or private.

“if you want your kid to know no more than you”

Huh? As *much* as me would be excessive for a high-schooler. I’m certainly not rich enough to live where Latin, calculus, Shakespeare, correct French, European history – or even more than the most superficial survey of American history – etc. are offered routinely in the public schools, and anyone who does is not well-positioned to judge me on the democratic scope of my social interactions. Nor can I afford a private school. As for the subjects I personally can’t offer, I’ve got enough work privately remediating the children of rich suburbanites to keep my kid in music lessons and drama camp through high school.

Alex@59:

If you want your society to have a lot of people who (1) are unable to take up qualified jobs, (2) believe in plain nonsense and (3) consider everybody outside of their insular religious sect or ethnicity a weirdo who is to be avoided if not exterminated…

Over century of public schooling sure hasn’t prevented that so far. You’re comparing homeschoolers at their worst – insular, religious nutters – with an idealized vision for public education that has never been the norm anywhere. What jobs does American secondary education train people for? Really? Since the disappearance of shop classes, as far as I can tell the answer is “none whatsoever.” Survey after survey of public beliefs shows it has had no impact to speak of on the prevalence of belief in nonsense. And I’m not treating religion, per se, as nonsense – I mean astrology, homeopathy, birtherism, creationism, Ayn Rand… flourishing ideas that can only be qualified as non-reality-based if not purely idiotic. And as for tolerance: In so far as children learn that against the grain of their parents social circles, it’s from Sesame Street and diverse peers, not pubic education. Way too many schools simply reinforce existing social intolerance.

Frankly, public education in any country has difficulty exceeding the low standards of producing functional literacy in a common language and basic numeracy. Why do people in obscure parts of the world fight for their schools? A lot of the time, it’s because that low bar is still very important. But do you really think homeschools in the developed world are producing scads of illiterate and innumerate children?

I’m *not* a fan of homeschooling. I am especially not a fan of homeschooling as propaganda. But your reasoning here is just wrong.

This is a fascinating conversation for me because my daughter is about to go to school for the first time in September. I have some worries about that. The school is rated “Outstanding” by Ofsted, but it seems to me to be somewhat over-regimented and stiff. It has a uniform (as do all the other primary schools in the area) and is very much about the discipline. All of these factors seem more than a bit over the top for 4-5 years olds.

I like the ideals behind the type of homeschooling I’ve come across and the homeschoolers I know – the lefty hippy types. But I enjoyed school. Most of my family are academic types, and I suspect my daughter will too, so I think we’ll muddle through okay.

But here’s the main point – even if I felt strongly enough about the benefits of homeschooling and worried enough about the school she’s going to, I still couldn’t homeschool, because I’d be utterly shit at it and would hate every minute of it. I can’t be the only one.

What I’d quite like is a school that had some of the ethos of homeschooling. Also, a pony.

Alex @59:

The problem with your argument is that it is contingent on certain social facts. Certainly, some homeschoolers are doing their kids a disservice. But some kids will also struggle in regular school for a variety of reasons and their parents will do a better job on their own. Whether the society on the whole benefits or suffers from allowing homeschooling depends on the population you are talking about. And Pakistan couldn’t be further from the US in this degree. I’m not sure that home schooling is a net benefit in the US, but I’m very confident it is not enough of a net negative (if it is at all) that I’d be willing to disallow parents the option. Parental choice is an important social value as well.

A friend who homeschooled one of her children for a number of years once remarked to me that homeschoolers tended to fall into one of three categories: the right-wing religious ones, the left-wing political ones, and the desperate ones who are trying to find an alternative for a child who feels tortured in school. There is no content that holds these groups together; the first is usually rejecting the curriculum as too conformist, the second is usually rejecting the pedagogy as too conformist, and the last one is usually rejecting the social environment as too conformist. All parents probably recognize some “failure” in their kids’ school in one or more of these categories on a regular basis but tolerate and/or supplement it outside of school. Homeschoolers have been pushed beyond such toleration. If they are united in anything, it’s probably in trying to save their children from what they perceive as a threat to their fundamental well-being (although they would never in a million years agree on what constitutes that threat). Ideally, all kids really should be served by their local public school system, but in practical terms there is probably not a school anywhere in our solar system that could simultaneously alleviate the concerns of all of these three groups.

Darin: Ever been to the East Coast? Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Hunter, are all fairly elitist and cost about 0 to attend. Living in the suburbs is expensive, so going to a non-elitist, non-selective public school is much less of an option for lots of people than hoping they can attend an elite school. (I went to a magnet school that included three Abbot districts in its catchment area. All of us would not have been served by our local schools nearly as well: after all, that’s why we went. But for some of us, that would not resulted in doing nearly as well)

As for the nonexistence of the education crisis, Scarsdale doesn’t have a problem. South Side Chicago does. 54% of students who enter high school in Chicago do not graduate. source
There are cheap public schools and good public schools, and I don’t think there is much in the intersection.

We have an education problem in the US. Homeschooling isn’t a solution for most of the problems people face. It can be the most appropriate solution for people, but it isn’t a solution to every problem, and the structural problems education face aren’t addressed by it.

As Tedra pointed out long ago, the parents of the children who are going to be having problems are exactly the kind who aren’t going to be helped by solutions requiring them to be involved. From this perspective the lessons we should get from homeschooling is not “people should homeschool” but “how should we educate our children?” by looking at the educational approaches parents take.

bianca @69:

I’m not trying to say you’re right or wrong, but I am really curious: if you think American schools are pushing kids too hard (I assume that’s what you’re talking about), what do you think about other countries kids’ doing better on standardized tests? Do you have an explanation for that?

The growth of homeschooling is analogous in some ways to the growth of private schooling for secular Jews. When I was growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a point of pride among Jewish parents to send their children to LAUSD public schools. Their kids tended to look at us Catholic school kids as slightly un-American. Since then, however, there has been a huge growth in the number of Jewish private schools in the San Fernando Valley, some for the new ultra-Orthodox population, but many for secular Jews in liberal occupations such as entertainment. What common denominators are behind the growth both in home schooling and in the exodus of Jewish students from the public schools?

It’s just never true—in practical terms and a practical time frame—that enough people are going to stop thinking like that.

This is an overstatement, obviously, or change would never happen at all. But I mean things like: private schools are not going to wither and die away because a small number of principled people decline to send their kids to them….

Sigh, it’s a blog comment, I’ll stop trying to plumb the depths of complexity.

He introduces the era of the Burger Court with a summary of a 1973 case called San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez

Many state constitutions, unlike the federal Constitution, do have provisions on the right to an education. That said, San Antonio v. Rodriguez was a bad decision. So was Milliken v. Bradley (US Sup Ct 1974).

What Substance said. This has been a great conversation, it would be a shame to have it taken over by

Scott Martens@60, mpowell@64,

Of course I am talking about homeschoolers at their worst, because that is what you have to take into account when you design school policies. I am not at all worried about somebody on an isolated farm 500 km from the nearest school, if they are well-meaning and find the time. But when you allow people to opt out in numbers, many who do it are religious wackos. As the saying goes, you do not design traffic laws based on how the very best drivers drive.

Nor did I mean to imply that compulsory public schooling is a sufficient condition for a good outcome; you could have an underfunded system that won’t educate well, you could have teachers who fail to teach critical thinking skills, you could have sectarian schools that keep people balkanized, etc. (And sadly we have all three.) The point is, and I stand by it, that compulsory public schooling is a necessary condition for a well educated and secular/tolerant populace; without it, you are guaranteed not to have it.

“Parental choice is an important social value as well.”

This sounds so nice … if you see it only from the parents’ perspective. Religious people are allowed to mutilate their children and keep them ignorant of all the options that should be available to them. Is that fair to those children? They are humans and not their parents’ property.

I think that’s a far more generous assessment then any I can give. Public education works very well if you live in the well-off suburbs where people can afford to pay for public services. Even if you are there most of the so-called “good schools” aren’t actually that good, because a lot of people involved with them don’t know how to teach or what to teach. Math and science are particularly hard-hit for a number of reasons: poor curricular choices, teachers are not recruited from the tracks where people who know something about it are, and school board meddling.

I once had a conversation from a math teacher whose school was not going to offer calculus anymore. Anyone in that catchment area can kiss their dreams of going to MIT goodbye.

In the schools which are having trouble, the new incentive structure focuses on those who are marginally able to pass the mandated tests. This isn’t good for everybody else. Frequently resources vanish between taxpayer and classroom: I can’t say I know anything specific, but it is suspicious that some schools in Chicago can afford nice things and others cannot. These tests are a low bar: college preparatory curricula are going to get squeezed out.

My high school sends four people to MIT each year. Most schools are happy to get one person in every four years. The nature of the school curriculum we have had prepared us far more for university level sciences than our classmates, many from similarly good schools in terms of test scores. Something is missing from what most of the country regards as a science education.

If there is no crisis, why do the great metropolises of this country send so many children to university, while the smaller cities don’t? If you are from a small town at Chicago, your parents are professors, doctors, or lawyers.

Our public education system is segregated by hipness: those who know what to look for send their children to the best high schools in the country and to careers as doctors, lawyers, and professors. The rest, even if well-meaning and able to provide for their children, don’t end up doing that. And as for those with no idea that University of Phoenix and University of Chicago are two very different places, they are left to the whims of politicians who know that they don’t know anything about education.

As I expect Tedra is asleep, I’ve unapproved a bunch of comments from Steve Sailer, and also banned him from my comment threads. I expect a comprehensive ban soon, unless other CT-ers have a more charitable reading than mine. In the meantime, let’s get back to homeschooling.

Thanks for that JQ, it was most disturbing to see that crap all over the blog.

I am a homeschooled/unschooled kid, who had a three month stint in a small private school. I am now in university pursuing a degree in political theory with plans of becoming a university professor. I am not the over-achieving-whiz-kid that is often given as a justification for homeschooling, but I do, now, sincerely enjoy school, despite the trouble I have had getting into and adjusting to it.
In my experience there are significant problems with both home schooling and the public education system. Not the least of these problems is the position of privilege contained in having the option between home schooling and public education, not to mention private education. That being said, many of the individuals in my life who have chosen homeschooling for their children have done so despite significant obstacles – the list includes single parents as well as high school drop outs. My mother, the primary facilitator of my education, never finished her BSc. And my parents have both always had full-time jobs.
Another problem is, as mentioned, the belief that the current public school system is actively opposed to learning. However, I would hesitate to say that that presumption results in any sort of widespread anti-public education dogma. My experience has been that my parents, my homeschooled friend’s parents, and my friends who now homeschool are engaged in a constant discussion with their children about the whole ordeal and are often willing to, when able, try other options depending on the student’s needs and wants. For example, in my family I homeschooled myself right through high school, one of my siblings decided to go to a private high school, while another sibling tried a few different high schools before deciding that homeschooling offered her the flexibility and pace that she was most comfortable with. I don’t think my experience was too exceptional. I think most parents who choose to homeschool do so out of a concern for their child’s education, and are willing to reevaluate the system periodically to better suit everyone’s needs.
However, on a systemic level, education inequality is a serious problem that makes me angry and sad. The problem exists at every level of the educational institution from pedagogy to administration, and it frustrates me because there seem to be few tools that can be applied to making schools better for everyone.
I am forever thankful that my parents engaged in a conversation with me about my education.

@Alex, I’m fairly certain you are wrong about the justification for compulsory public schooling. It was mostly to stop people pulling kids of out school and sending them to work. In this respect it’s an excellent example of choices that should be constricted: people were being coerced into choosing not to (let their kids) attend school by the whip hand of poverty, so remove that choice from them. But once you’ve created a social norm that says kids have to study full time until they reach majority, there’s no particular reason this has to happen in school.

So homeschooling is a symptom of the success of compulsory education – that it’s no longer necessary to pull kids from their homes to enforce it.

And, reflecting on the point upthread about the ease of homeschooling a child in a country depending on the flexibility of it’s education system, I’m starting to think that homeschooling – something as a UK resident I’ve always thought about as a weird american thing – might be a rather good thing for a society to approve of.

Not because homeschooling itself is good but because an education system in which homeschooling is a good choice is one in which education is necessarily flexible and where getting into university is a matter of displaying the right knowledge, whereas in any system where success is dependent on your institutional position, with that position potentially being dependent on zero-sum competition or arbitrary factors homeschooling will be strongly disfavored.

If you have a system that penalizes kids who’ve received their education at home, purely because they’ve received that education at home, you can be pretty certain you’ve got a system that will penalize kids for coming from the wrong family or neighborhood or social group, and that will offer no second chances to those who fail at any point.

I did know a lot of kids in school who dropped out in sixth form for one reason or another, who after recovering completed some a-levels independently and went on to university. I hadn’t thought of this in terms of homeschooling before but I think it’s connected to what I wrote above. A setup which gives children flexibility in how they complete their education is surely a good thing, independent of the example of full-on homeschooling.

Harry B @ 95 — I completely agree with you about the reason. But why do we / why should we tolerate these high rates of child poverty? That they are the real problem with our educational systems is apparent to anyone with the least perception — high rates of child poverty, and, in the USA, the malign effects of outsourcing the educational curriculum to the for-profit commercial text-book industry which puts hanging on to its rents before the public welfare.

There is more to being an educated person than being an “intel semi-finalist”.

P.s. Not all “good” US high schools are located in wealthy suburbs anyway. That should go without saying.

@Harold: But do you think schools would do more evenly in whatever you thought of as education then they do in my example? The South Side of Chicago is not churning out humanists who know nothing of the sciences because they aren’t particularly interested, or are content with what they do know, and if it was I bet some students would be interested in the sciences instead. A teacher who enables his students to do interesting things is doing a far better job then one whose students merely do what is required. And the South Side of Chicago has no teachers of either type.

@LFC: Yes, I’m aware of Bronx Science and Stuy. And I can heartily concur that quite a bit rides on what we consider ‘good’. Fundamentally I would argue for a system that recognizes the plurality of educational values and offers different ideas of what education should be. But such a system would need to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to do well, which isn’t always easy in the US. The politics of gifted education and disabled education is toxic, and pretty much for the same reasons on both ends.

Tying it back to the topic, homeschooling depends on being able to access a lot of resources individually. With history there is a lot that can be done from books, and same with literature, but foreign languages would be tough, and the sciences would depend on some creativity. Mathematics, if your grasp on it is not that good, is a nightmare to teach: like music it requires practice by the student and judgement by the teacher. Tutoring can help but is expensive compared to classroom instruction. Maybe the internet will make it possible for some enterprising entrepreneur to create good resources for some of these, but it’s a tall order. On the plus side, if it encourage students to develop the skills to learn independently it might do significantly better.

Tedra: You know, I think this is key. And part of the problem with the school-based system of education is that we seem to think that’s a conversation that the students themselves don’t need to/shouldn’t be allowed to engage in.

100% agree on this, and I’d go even further and suggest that there’s a “we” that seems to think that’s a conversation that the parents really don’t need to/shouldn’t be allowed to engage in either. Leave it to the experts, keep moving, and especially, don’t step out of line….

But it’s another thorny, complex, and tangled question, as every last question about education seems to be. On the one hand, schools have taken over more and more of the tasks (?) involved in getting children to adulthood (school-based clinics, sports and extra-curriculars, pre-schools so that kids are in an institutional setting at younger and younger ages, the list goes on), yet we also have a whole meme (and reality) of the “helicopter parent.”

I’d like to say more about stepping out of line; maybe later, when I have more time.

Also, it would be interesting, and I think quite educational, if every time we — or “we” — used the word “we,” we stopped to think who we meant. ;)

Drat the html. The middle paragraphs shouldn’t be doubly indented.

And I wanted to add my own afterthought, to tie it back to the topic at hand: Of course, if we knew very much about getting along with one another we might make teaching something about it a higher priority in the schools, too. And I might even have learned to be a little less learning disabled about social politics.

(If I didn’t close all the tags in the previous comments, my apologies. This comment should tell the tale.)

Tags lose their effectiveness with every paragraph break.

I’m not complaining. Thanks!

This is less than helpful, and nothing but anecdote, but the Trolls With Wooden Spoons forums include, among their many — well, mean, that’s what they are over there– threads several detailed critiques of particular homeschoolers who post to MDC. Often they take particular note of the apparent lack of education and/or borderline abuse on display.

Most of the posters are MDC refugees themselves, so not exactly un-crunchy or pro-mainstream.

@Mercy #99 “@Alex, I’m fairly certain you are wrong about the justification for compulsory public schooling. It was mostly to stop people pulling kids of out school and sending them to work. In this respect it’s an excellent example of choices that should be constricted: people were being coerced into choosing not to (let their kids) attend school by the whip hand of poverty, so remove that choice from them. But once you’ve created a social norm that says kids have to study full time until they reach majority, there’s no particular reason this has to happen in school.”

Absolutely. If school became optional tomorrow in the developed world I am sure the vast majority would still choose to attend. Most would still want their children to be literate and numerate because that is what is required to be functional in the 21st century.

Tedra, re your comment at #108, the problem you’ve observed with “good schools” is one that other parents have run into as well. In particular, the third group that curious monolith (comment #66) mentions sometimes finds that highly rated schools are more inflexible in dealing with outliers than somewhat less highly rated schools. (This was the group of parents desperate to help their kids who feel tortured by school. I’m assuming this is your group. I’ve been in this group too, though not there at present.)

I’m not sure why you have difficulty with the decision to homeschool. You’re doing it because it is necessary for the emotional well-being of your child, you have even been told so by experts. The school options that you had were not acceptable for your child, but that doesn’t mean that they are unacceptable for other kids, so there is not necessarily any benefit to those other kids if you stay in the public school system and attempt to change it to meet your child’s needs. ( Of course the school options are bad for all in some places, but apparently not where you are. )

I used to be uncomfortable with homeschooling, but then I met several people who homeschooled when it was needed and returned to the schools when it wasn’t. You’re allowed to change your mind later.

Harold, let’s say we do as you say and leave the 97% without calculus. Don’t you think we have a fairness problem? If we say that learning about society should be left to those who will be payed to do it, then suddenly we’ve left the majority of people without a means to reason about their social environment, in a democracy. Workmen also deserve to think!

I do have to wonder about the gender politics of homeschooling. We have had long struggles to get enough affordable kindergartens, both because they are considered pedagogically and socially valuable to children, and because they give women more opportunities to participate in the workforce. It would be sad and odd if women would have to go back to the kitchen when their kids get to school age. For both economic and cultural reasons it will mostly be mothers who will stay at home teaching their kids, so it’s perhaps not so great when seen through a feminist lens?

km said

I used to be uncomfortable with homeschooling, but then I met several people who homeschooled when it was needed and returned to the schools when it wasn’t. You’re allowed to change your mind later.

We homeschooled our middle-school aged son for a gap year when we were moving. He was a very shy kid and it seemed the ultimate cruelty to put him in an 8th grade class of all new kids, then move him to another new school with all new kids for 9th grade. We talked with him about it first and he decided that h.s. was the best idea for that one year — we offered him the option after that year, but he decided to head back to “regular” school. But we enjoyed that one year tremendously. Since we thought he would probably be going back into school we tracked the curriculum so he wouldn’t be behind in math or science and covered the same areas being covered in history. But he read! And read. And read. My husband schooled him in Latin and I handled the other stuff. If he’d gone on for more homeschooling I would have had to farm out the math and science because I’d reached the ends of my abilities. We both remember that year very fondly…and it WAS the year that he learned to write an essay and discovered LOTR.