Home Schooling

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Home Schooling

Home schooling is the education of school-age children by their parents, rather than full-time attendance at a campus school. While only an estimated 15,000 children were home-schooled in the mid-1970s, the movement has grown at spectacular rates since then, especially among religious conservatives. This growth is at least in part due to the religious concerns of parents about their responsibility for training and educating their children, and their reservations about public schools. At a minimum, 750,000 to 1 million children are home-schooled. During the 1990s the number of children in home schooling more than doubled.

Though research on home schooling is limited, some tentative conclusions are possible. Regional studies find that home schoolers are primarily white, middle-class, well educated, and in occupations with considerable flexibility and autonomy. At least one-third are from conservative religious traditions, such as evangelical, pentecostal, or nondenominational religious organizations, and another 25 percent are from mainline religious organizations. Other studies also find that religious conservatives dominate the home-schooling movement.

The 1996 National Household Education Survey confirms that home schooling is much more likely among whites than nonwhites. And home schooling, not surprisingly, is associated with two-parent families in which parents work fewer than the average total hours outside the home. This makes sense, given that at least one parent—usually the mother—is home educating the children. Home-schooling parents have about the same level of education and income as non–home schoolers. Home schooling is least common in the Northeast and most common in the West. Home schooling is also more common in less residentially stable areas, perhaps because of the increased problems in public schools and reduced availability of church-related schools in these areas.

On average, home-schooling parents tend to be more religious—as measured by attendance at worship services—than non–home schoolers. At the same time, significant minorities of home schoolers do not attend religious services. These findings reflect two important sources of home schooling: (1) conservative Christians, who often opt out of public schools for ideological reasons; and (2) parents with a secular countercultural or "New Age" orientation who are likely to be primarily concerned with pedogogical issues.

Among churchgoing Protestants, pentecostals and charismatics are much more likely to favor nonpublic schooling over public schooling as the best strategy for Christians. And based on a 1996 nationally representative survey of churchgoing Protestants, fundamentalists and charismatics are more likely to send their children to nonpublic schools. Even after accounting for race, income, and education, the survey found that home schooling seems, unsurprisingly, more popular among evangelicals and fundamentalists than among theologically liberal respondents.

What are the academic results of home schooling? Most studies show that home-schooled children do as well as or better than their public school peers (Ray 1997), most likely because of the higher levels of parental involvement in the learning process.

Home schooling is not detrimental to the development of children's socialization skills. And home schoolers are not socially isolated, as many opponents fear. Home schoolers have developed an impressive social and organizational network, mitigating concerns that home schoolers are withdrawn from peers, community, and nation. In fact, alternative schoolers are actually more involved in civic life than public schoolers. Home-schooling organizations, which may involve coordinating field trips to local museums or to a jointly sponsored science class for home-school children, often cross the divide between conservative Christian parents and secular counterculturalist home-schooling parents.

Still, there are divisions within the home-schooling movement. Home-schooling organizations of conservative Christians tend to be hierarchical and formalized, as opposed to the organization of secular countercultural groups, which tend to be decentralized and more informal. Also, attempts to organize home schoolers into a national constituency have often given way to separate home-schooling organizations, structured along conservative Protestant vs. secularecumenical lines.

Why do parents choose to home-school their children? Religion is a primary motive for many. But based on interviews with home-schooling parents, religious reasons are not the whole story. Home-schooling parents are not primarily driven by "secular humanism" in the public schools and generally do not demand that public schools become "Christian." In fact, some home-schooling parents are equally concerned about the teaching methods of other private schools. Nor are they attempting to unite home, school, and church into a tight web that keeps out the secular world.

Why choose home schooling? In addition to specifically religious reasons, a majority of home-schooling parents believe home schooling is a better method of education, that public schools are a poor learning environment, or that public schools are not academically challenging. About one-fourth of home-schooling parents also argue that the choice of home schooling depends on the needs of the child. Many conservative Protestants seem to move their children in and out of home schooling and other forms of schooling. Only a small minority take the position that the current organization of public schooling is radically wrong, or that home schooling is a responsibility of every Christian parent.

Many researchers interpret the home-schooling movement as a reaction to modernity and secularization. Home schooling is more likely in areas that have lost tightly knit communities and thus may be partly a response to the loss of moral order in the community. The growth of the state and of cultural diversity may lead to conflict between the organization and content of public education and the ideologies embodied in family and church. A result is a movement into alternative education, such as home schooling. Additionally, parents increasingly have the resources to take up home schooling successfully. Rising levels of education lead to a reduced sense that the "school knows best," and perhaps greater confidence in one's own ability to carry out the task of educating one's children.

Because of the demands of home schooling on parents, the rapid growth of the movement in the 1980s and 1990s may level off. But current signs point to continued growth in home schooling, especially among religious parents.

Bibliography

Burns, Patrick. "A Profile of Selected Characteristics of Arizona's Home Schooling Families." Unpublished diss., Northern Arizona University. 1993.

Lines, Patricia. "Homeschoolering: An Overview for Education Policy Makers." U.S. Department of Education. Working Paper. 1997.

Lines, Patricia. "Homeschoolers: Estimating Numbers and Growth." U.S. Department of Education. Technical Paper. 1998.

Mayberry, Maralee, and J. Gary Knowles. "Family Unity Objectives of Parents Who Teach Their Children: Ideological and Pedagogical Orientations to Home Schooling." Urban Review 21 (1989): 209–225.

Ray, Brian. Home Education Across the United States. 1997.

Sikkink, David. "Public Schooling and Its Discontents: Religious Identities, Schooling Choices for Children, and Civic Participation." Unpublished diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1998.

Sikkink, David. "The Social Sources of Alienation from Public Schools." Social Forces 77 (1999).

David Sikkink

Michael O. Emerson

Contemporary American Religion