Homeschooling comes of age

Public Interest, Summer, 2000 by Patricia M. Lines

THE rise of homeschooling is one of the most significant social trends of the past half century. This reemergence of what is in fact an old practice has occurred for a distinctly modern reason: a desire to wrest control from the education bureaucrats and reestablish the family as central to a child's learning. Homeschooling is almost always a matter of choice. Schools are generally available, but homeschooling families have chosen not to use them.

The rapid growth of the homeschooling movement took the professional education establishment by surprise. When I estimated in 1985 that about 50,000 children were being homeschooled, one expert called it "wishful thinking, or at least artful advocacy." In 1990, as a researcher with the Department of Education, I suggested that the number had probably grown to 250,000 to 355,000 children. At the time, I based my estimate on three different sources: data from state education agencies; distribution of curricular packages for homeschoolers; and state homeschool associations' estimates of their constituencies. As state data became more reliable, I turned to that source alone. The number continued to grow, and critics began citing my estimates.

The numbers are still growing. If states with reliable information are good indicators for the rest of the country, the number of homeschoolers nearly tripled in the five years from 1990-91 to 1995-96, when there were, according to the best possible estimate, about 700,000 homeschoolers. There is evidence, such as Florida's annual survey of homeschooling filers, that the population is growing at around 15 to 20 percent per year. I know of no state where the number is declining. It is extremely difficult to predict when the growth will taper off. If it keeps growing at this rate, there would be around 1.5 to 2 million children homeschooling by 2000-01 (about 3 to 4 percent of school-aged children nationwide). For a number of different reasons, parents are losing faith in the American classroom, and homeschooling is becoming a serious (and growing) alternative.

Private schools have traditionally provided havens for those who dissent from the public school curriculum. Indeed, the competitive impact of homeschooling probably falls most heavily on private schools. Surveys suggest that among homeschooled children who previously attended a school, a disproportionate number attended a private school. A movement toward unstructured learning, strong and vigorous among some private schools in the 1960s, is now languishing, having lost many of its students to the liberal wing of the homeschooling movement and to various public school-choice programs. The Christian schools that sprung up in the 1980s have also lost students to homeschooling, but their growth curve was sufficiently strong that they remain robust. These schools also compete on a turf where public schools must not go--religious education, Still, when one might expect private schools to be growing, they are holding even. Homeschooling has taken up the slack.

The contemporary homeschooling movement began sometime around mid century as a liberal, not a conservative, alternative to the public school. A handful of families (possibly as many as 10,000) in the late fifties and early sixties found schools too rigidly conservative. They pursued instead a liberal philosophy of education as advocated by educators such as the late John Holt, who believed that the best learning takes place without an established curriculum, and that the child should pursue his own interests with the support and encouragement of parents and other adults.

Then, in the 1980s, as the school culture drifted to the left, conservative and religious families were surprised to find themselves in a countercultural position. Many turned to Christian schools while others began homeschooling. Some believed religious duty required them to teach their own children; others sought to integrate religion, learning, and family life. Both the left and right wings of homeschooling are active today, and many families have both philosophical and religious reasons for their choice. Joining them are many homeschoolers who simply seek the highest quality education for their child, which they believe public and even private schools can no longer provide.

An old idea

Homeschooling is not a new idea or practice. For centuries children have learned outside formal school settings, even when schools were readily available. Thinkers from a variety of philosophical traditions have frowned upon formal schooling for a number of reasons. John Locke, for example, maintained that the primary aim of education was virtue, and that the home was the best place to teach it. Even John Dewey expressed regrets about formal schooling:

A society is a number of people held together because they are working along common lines, in a common spirit, and with common aims.... The radical reason that the present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is because just this element of common and productive activity is absent.