Free The Schools

The middle ground

There is a really good debate about homeschooling going on over at Crooked Timber. Chris Bertram wrote:

Children have an interest in growing up with various moral capacities, including the capacity to form, revise, etc their aims in life, a sense of justice, and so on. Schools function not just as purveyors of information about maths, physics and geography but also as social environments in which individuals learn to rub along with others and get exposed to a wider range of social influences than they would at home (or perhaps than their parents judge desirable). That’s a good thing, and is a reason to be opposed to home schooling.

BUT. It all depends what the options are. In an ideal system no child would be home schooled, but faced with the prospect of unacceptably poor schools it might well be the right thing for a parent to do. The point about a broad social environment also cuts two ways. Although being exposed to those wider influences and to peer groups is valuable, in reality the peer groups that children have available may be (really and not just in the imagination of paranoid overprotective parents) be dangerous and bad.

Where I am at in Virginia, homeschooling seems popular, but it is not really “home” schooling. It is 20 to 30 parents getting their kids together to educate them. This is not really “home” schooling, this is more like a private school run on the cheap. But it is called home-schooling and the government classifies it as such.

These are parents who can not afford private schools but love the diversity and critical thinking that is fostered at private schools. They want to give their kids something like that.

By the way, despite the religous stereotype, and despite the fact that I’m in Virginia, all the parents I know who home-school are secular and politically liberal-left. Their cultural ancestors are the hippies of the 1960s counter-culture which, lets remember, had an anti-government libertarian streak.

Some of the other, to the point, comment included:

Seems to me that homeschooling also requires a good deal of unpaid labor by women. Not saying there aren’t fathers who homeschool, but the homeschoolers I’ve come across are mothers (most in a two-parent home with a male breadwinner).

and:

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.

The premise that Bertram opened the discussion with, "in a just society", seems a little utopian, but I haven't read Rawls, so I've no idea how "just society" is being defined here. Perhaps it is not utopian. However, many of my liberal friends take the line "rather than having people drop out of the public schools, why don't we fix the public schools?" and, another popular line is, "there are some very good public schools, and our aim should be to raise all schools to their level."

As I've said before, I believe there are no good public schools, because public schools are not and never can be wholly under the control of the parents who send their kids there. I speak of schools that collect their students from a fixed geographic region, and thus collect students whose interests and talents are unrelated. What's better is to have schools unrelated to geography, so that kids can choose them based on their interests. This could, theoretically, happen with government-run schools, though so far no society has ever done it. I've an easier time believing this can be achieved through school vouchers and private schools.

Home schooling is growing

Posted on: 05-27-2002 20:21

In the course of my research I came upon this article about homeschooling. Originally published in the Detroit Free Press and written by Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki. The article goes a long way towards deflating some out-of-date stereotypes about homeschooling, in particular the idea that it has to happen at home.

"Very rarely are we at home," said Jennifer Makas, mother of four. "It's more on the road. We've met people from all over the metro area. "It's more home-directed school." Once, homeschooling evoked visions of children sitting around the dining room table amid stacks of books while Mom dispensed wisdom about Shakespeare, geometry -- and probably the Bible. Other parents and educators criticized homeschooling, saying that children weren't learning social skills. But in the past decade, homeschooling has evolved into something that's often anywhere but at home, and students are rarely alone. They're seeking other home- schoolers to share resources and classes, taking field trips, traveling abroad and joining curriculum organizations and schools offering support to parents teaching at home.

Clearly, things have changed. This kind of schooling doesn't even deserve to be called "homeschooling." It would be more accurate to simply describe it as "parent directed schooling."

The article went on to offer some statistics about how much homeschooling has grown:

Homeschooling has been growing steadily. Today, there are 700,000 to 1.25 million homeschooled children. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated up to 400,000 homeschooled students as recently as 1994 and calculated that the movement is growing as much as 15 to 20 percent annually. Nationally, there are more children involved in homeschool programs than the 579,880 students in charter schools or the 15,125 in school voucher programs.

The article finished up by telling the story of the Makase family, worth repeating here:

The Makases bought a home in Dearborn because they wanted to send their children to the public schools. But a decade ago, a couple of failed millage elections led to their school district eliminating some programs. By 1992, the Makases felt their son was misbehaving in school because he was bored after programs for gifted students were eliminated. Private schools were too expensive. Then, Jennifer Makas heard of the Clonlara School in Ann Arbor, a private school that offers curriculums for homeschoolers along with teacher support and accredited high school diplomas. The cost was $500 per student. In the beginning, Chris Makas, 17, said he wondered whether he would miss meeting classmates.But that changed when his family hooked up with others. "Now I don't feel like I'm missing anything," he said. "We're allowed to move at our own pace, which we weren't allowed to do in the public school."