NOTE: This piece was originally published at our newsletter A Public Witness.
I will confess to harboring suspicions about homeschooling. Avoiding traditional education models seemed like an extreme way for fundamentalist Christians to shield their children from scientific truths they found inconvenient and to avoid diverse social encounters that disturbed their artificially homogeneous lives.
Some recent events in my personal life challenged these assumptions, or maybe the more accurate term would be prejudices.
I encountered a gay Christian couple who decided to homeschool their children, partly because they worried what their kids would hear about their family from teachers and students, given our current political climate, in their local public school. I have also come to understand how some parents of kids with disabilities and neurodivergencies see homeschooling as the most viable way of ensuring their kids can learn in a constructive and safe environment.
This left me intrigued by the American historian Dixie Dillon Lane’s new book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream. I approached it eager to cure my ignorance of a topic I had judged but mostly ignored. Were my skepticisms warranted or unfair?
The first task is figuring out what exactly we are talking about. It turns out that homeschooling is a fairly large umbrella that covers a range of pedagogies. Some children direct their own education under parental supervision, a concept known as “unschooling.” Others are more stereotypically taught by their parents at the kitchen table. There are collaborations with school districts, with kids enrolled in public schools and participating in extracurricular activities, but taking classes mostly at home.
“I define homeschooling,” Lane writes, “by what I consider its most important characteristic: as a form of education outside of conventional classrooms that is characterized by high levels of parental influence, direction, authority, and even control.”
Indeed, Skipping School’s overarching narrative is the struggle of parents to exert greater management over how, what, and where their children learn. The antagonists are experts who claim to know what is better for everyone else’s kids and an ever-expanding government whose cultural agenda cannot be trusted.
Fearful of these forces, early homeschoolers withdrew from mainstream education and sought to fly below society’s radar. They worried about facing legal consequences for their choices and quietly organized themselves into communities of support. Over time, they created networks, educational resources, and legal defenses that legitimized their practices in both the eyes of the state and the opinion of the broader public.
It’s a story of what was practiced in secret becoming more visible, and of what was viewed as suspicious becoming more accepted. It’s also a story of a movement that came together in the shadows of the law emerging into the legal daylight. And it’s a story of parents, distrustful of the ability of educational and governmental institutions to teach their children, forming their own increasingly complex networks and institutions to accomplish that task in their preferred ways.
(Jessica Lewis/Unsplash)
Dr. Lane does not claim to be an unbiased narrator. As a homeschooling parent, she writes as someone whose personal experience informs the story being told and as someone who finds value in an approach to education overlooked or scorned by so many in our society. At the same time, her personal experience allowed her to interview homeschooling families and leaders who may have distrusted an outside researcher, which provided valuable anecdotes and illumination. She also unpacks nuances that more distant observers likely would have missed.
Yet, her championing of the cause also limits the critical eye she brings to it. There is little discussion in the book of the racial and religious aspects of the movement that are widely viewed as animating it to various degrees. To the extent these topics are raised, it is through asides and anecdotes that seem intended to push back against these common critiques.
There is also minimal reflection on homeschooling’s wider impact, positive or negative. While Lane celebrates the progress homeschooling has made for those pursuing that educational option, there is little evaluation of what this means for society writ large. To the extent that more parents are choosing this option, is that an indictment of public education’s decline or an affirmation of a society recognizing it takes diverse approaches for all children to flourish? Is there a tipping point where too many children learning at home undermines the ability of the next generation to be connected by shared knowledge, experiences, and values?
Skipping School allows readers to see inside an experience that most will never know and many perceive as odd. In detailing the evolution of homeschooling in the United States, the book is an enjoyable and enlightening read that challenges preconceptions and invites new, more informed questions. If nonfiction books are evaluated based on whether they expertly and convincingly teach readers something new, this one definitely passes the test.
As a public witness,
Beau Underwood
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