While it's difficult to get exact figures on the number of children officially registered as homeschoolers in the U.S., it's estimated that about 2% of the population -- around 700,000 to 900,000 children [1] are learning at home with their families instead of enrolled in the public school system.
Those estimates may fall far short of the actual number of home educated children, since many families use the services of "umbrella schools," which would result in their children being counted among private schoolers, and some simply don't register with their counties at all. One thing that is clear among both experts and the general public is that homeschooling continues to grow in popularity and acceptance, even though it remains as emotionally charged an issue as ever.
However, as the trend towards home education has grown since it's inception in the early 1970s, (Ben Franklin and other venerable forefathers necessarily schooled at home notwithstanding), it's liberal foundations have become buried under an avalanche of conservative rhetoric that can make a real understanding of this educational phenomenon elusive at best, and create an historical facade of misinformation at worst.
At the heart of the commercial proliferation of homeschooling resources such as curriculum, text book and science equipment vendors are overwhelmingly religiously conservative companies such as God's World Books, Abeka and Lifepac. The most visible and outspoken of contemporary homeschooling advocates is the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a staunchly conservative collection of legal eagles who hold it is their mission (when properly retained), "to preserve and advance the fundamental, God-given, constitutional right of parents and others legally responsible for their children to direct their education..." relying on "two fundamental freedoms-parental rights and religious freedom."
Religious conservatives routinely claim homeschooling as their own, pointing increasingly to the "four pillars of homeschooling," the doubtful title of four relatively well known, largely conservative and HSLDA associated figures who have somehow come to take credit for the modern homeschooling movement.
In the provocative article, "Who Stole Homeschooling?" [2] writer and magazine publisher Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff describes the process by which the original grassroots reform movement of home education has been gradually subsumed by the religious right. The contemporary "religious" bent of home education can be traced to the sudden growth of conservative Christian homeschool organizations between 1983 and 1985, notes Seelhoff.
"These new Christian organizations had a focus which diverged markedly from the focus of most of the homeschooling organizations and leaders which preceded them. They often emphasized the rights and obligations of parents, as opposed to the education or good of children, the importance of separation from the "ungodly," and the duty of parents to control their children and to keep them from undesirable companions. They often urged that homeschoolers use only Christian curriculum and avoid association with non-Christian homeschoolers.
"...While they were aggressive in marketing and promoting their own and one another's publications, seminars and services nationally and on the state level, they rarely, if ever, made mention of long time homeschooling leaders and organizations which had preceded them, some of which were Christian, but which did not share their own perspectives or philosophies.
Because these new organizations were Christian, they often gained access to churches and church members by presenting Christian conferences and seminars which were advertised by local churches, and they then presented homeschooling as a new Christian option for Christian families without making mention of the work of non-Christian homeschooling pioneers. "
Most notably, Seelhoff laments, "...In contrast to the grassroots support groups of peers and equals which characterized homeschooling efforts in the late '70s and early '80s, today in almost every state and every county and city we have exclusive, hierarchical homeschooling groups in which membership is strictly controlled, with homeschooling itself often held hostage to group definitions. "
Seelhoff knows whereof she speaks. In the early 1990s, she became the modern day equivalent of Hester Prinn, marked for shame and reproof because of her interracial marriage, family discord and other private issues. Not only was Seelhoff confronted by the small Calvinistic church in Tacoma, WA she attended, but her popular magazine, Gentle Spirit, was targeted by national conservative home school leaders who, she said, turned her life upside-down, threatening her with financial, spiritual and emotional ruin.
Seelhoff, in an epiphynomenal departure from her own conservative roots, dug in for the fight and took several of the big-name Christian homeschool figures to court, including the publishers of the conservative magazine The Teaching Home[3], well-known Christian homeschool writer Mary Pride and Christian Home Educators of Ohio. Pride, the homeschool group and two others named in the suit settled out of court. A unanimous jury verdict in favor of Seelhoff found that The Teaching Home had illegally restrained trade, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The jury figured damages at $435,000, which are automatically tripled in antitrust suits, bringing the final amount to which Seelhoff was entitled to more than $1.3 million.
In an interview Seelhoff later gave to Helen Hegener, publisher of the secular and more liberal homeschooling trade journal, Home Education Magazine[4], Hegener commented on the lack of discussion in the national homeschool community about this precedent setting case and trial. Despite coverage of the case on National Public Radio, Seelhoff agreed the silence was deep and unsettling.
"The strangest phenomenon in my opinion is the silence that has followed the jury verdict and the final resolution of the case. In 1994, thousands of homeschooling families were made aware of the crisis in my private life within a few short weeks, yet the lawsuit which grew out of those events has remained, by and large, a secret."
Seelhoff concludes, "I believe that in many ways, I was a threat to mainline conservative Christian homeschooling leadership. I was different."
Yet homeschooling is first and foremost a humanistic endeavor, conceived of by early education reformers in the 1960s who were quite "different" from today's charismatic homeschool celebrities, and with no motive other than that of decentralized, uninstitutionalized learning. It is, at its source and as humanism has been called, an ideology of modernity. In the early days of the home education movement, Cheryl Seelhoff would never have endured the ostracism and disruption of her perfectly normal human life that she experienced in 1994. Indeed, the focus of 1970s education reform leaders was not orthodoxy and obedience, but freedom of thought and learning.
Early reformers, principally Ivan Illich who was one of homeschooling legend John Holt's main inspirations, repeatedly argued that no true education can take place in an environment of conformity and regimentation. To equate equal educational opportunity with obligatory schooling, said Illich, "is to confuse salvation with the church."[5]
"The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," Illich declared, "'The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.' There shall be no ritual obligatory for all."
Ivan Illich, a multitalented Viennese scholar who earned his doctorate in history at the University of Salzburg before coming to the U.S. in 1951, has run the gamut from theology to politics. He was vice-rector to the Catholic University in Puerto Rico, became co-founder of the controversial Center for International Documentation in Cernavaca, Mexico, where he directed research on "Institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society" and was writing and teaching (at the University of Bremen) well up into the 1990s. A polymath who speaks six languages and writes fluently in three, he has been called a "radical anarchist." His views are distinctly humanist, devoted to the betterment of humanity through individualized freedom of learning.
It was Illich's book, "Deschooling Society," that virtually laid the groundwork for homeschooling in America. In this collection of essays, Illich set forth the premise that "the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery."
However grand the American vision for "education for all," and however noble the contemporary educational battle cry, "Leave no child behind!" Illich pointed out in his first essay in the book, Why We Must Disestablish School, that "the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning. All over the world, the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution that specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane and frequently almost impossible task."
Public schools also polarize society, Illich maintained, by creating a sort of international caste system, where "educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating that is closely related to the per capita gross national product, and much more painful."
Illich's academic vision called for "skills centers" where individuals could go to learn from others who shared their own skills and talents in the community. This, he says, will result in real learning -- the useful acquisition of new skills or insights -- as opposed to promotional education, which is dependent upon opinions formed by others of the student's abilities.
But it was statements like these that caught at the imagination and interest of other early education reformers and helped turn sights toward homeschooling as a viable option:
"Most learning happens casually," Illich wrote. "And even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them." There is some need for drill and pointed instruction, Illich agreed, but it had to be balanced by interest and focus.
"The deschooling of society implies a recognition of the two faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math and class attendance to the right to use the playground. "
Other reformers took up the cry. In two books, Compulsory Miseducation" and "Growing Up Absurd,"[6] written at around the same time as Illich's work, author and political theorist Paul Goodman, pointed out that public education was a waste of youth. Education, he said, should be a community effort and not an institutional one.
John Holt, almost universally acclaimed as one of homeschooling's most influential and well-regarded founders, took this thinking even further. He spoke with Ivan Illich at length about his theories and was particularly intrigued with Illich's conviction that schools polarized societies. Originally, Holt's interests lay in pure public education reform, and he called for new ways of looking at learning and education. By 1972, however, in his book "Freedom and Beyond,"[7] Holt had decided his initial thought of bringing greater freedom into the classroom environment was not the answer to America's growing educational ills.
"People, even children, are educated much more by the whole society around them and the general quality of life in it than they are by what happens in schools. The dream of many school people, that schools can be places where virtue is preserved and passed on in a world otherwise empty of it, now seems to me a sad and dangerous illusion. It might have worked in the Middle Ages; it can't work in a world of cars, jets, TV, and the mass media...."
By 1977, Holt was won over to the idea of home education. In August of that year, he published the first issue of Growing Without Schooling (GWS)[8], considered the world's first homeschooling magazine. Like Illich, Holt felt strongly that "certification" did not equal ability to teach. He felt that any interested adult could teach any interested child.
"Trained teachers, "he wrote, "are not trained in teaching, but in classroom management, i.e., in controlling, manipulating, measuring, and classifying large numbers of children. These may be useful skills for schools, or people working in schools. But they have nothing whatever to do with teaching -- helping others to learn things."
He further developed his ideas into the concept of "unschooling," by which he meant that learning at home should not be considered merely a duplication of the public school environment at home, which the phrase "homeschooling" seemed to conjure. Holt felt that "learning by living" provided the best education.
In his book," Teach Your Own,[9]" Holt maintained, "What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make `learning' happen and in which nothing except `learning' ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution; one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other human institutions."
Although John Holt died in 1985, at age of 62, his unschooling movement remains one of the largest of the homeschooling venues in the country, with over 2000 members, and Growing Without Schooling continued to be one of the most popular homeschooling periodicals in existence until it ceased publication in 2001.
With the hallmark thought of "learning as living," Holt and other education reform luminaries changed the emphasis from overhauling the public education process to something much more intimate, suggests GWS writer Patrick Farenga. They were talking, said Farenga, "about changing social relationships between children and adults, work and school.[10]"
"Teaching and learning outside of school does not have to resemble teaching and learning in school. Cultural experience can be the basis for learning at home and in one's community throughout one's compulsory school years. People can successfully do things differently than schools."
And in a more compassionate, intellectually mature, humanistic manner, Farenga feels. Philosopher and University of Bordeaux professor Jacques Ellul, said Farenga, had it right more than forty years ago when he said "[public] education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians."
John Taylor Gatto, another leading education reformer and homeschool icon, has a similar philosophy. Gatto is a former New York teacher of the year turned anti-public schooling. He regularly writes and lectures on the shortcomings of contemporary public school education. While Gatto's particular brand of beliefs sometimes ring strong and a little on the zealous side, and his writings and lectures are heavy with vitriolic homilies and something of a disdain for the rational (although most of his arguments are quite rational), his belief in human dignity and independence is equally strong.
"It's time to turn the school business back to people where the Constitution vested it in the 10th Amendment," he argued at a lecture in India.[11]" "It's time to let any small group that wants to try to show what it can do in schooling. A million family schools over the past decade have demonstrated that uncertified parents, many of them in modest circumstances and lacking the benefit of college themselves, can pin back the ears of the best factory model schools, public or private."
"...Our present system of schooling alienates us so sharply from our inner genius, most of us are barred from being able ever to hear our calling. Calling in most of us shrivels to fantasy and daydreams as a remnant of what might have been."
In a paper titled, "The Six Lesson School Teacher,[12]" Gatto facetiously breaks down the public school teaching process into six mind-numbing steps that he says includes brainwashing children to stay in their classes "where they belong," turning their interests and curiosities on and off like light switches, surrendering their will to a higher authority, letting someone else determine what they will study, learning to let others be the judge of their self-worth, and becoming inured to living under constant observation.
Like Illich, Gatto believes that such compulsory, rigid education leads to a creation of a caste system and "a dehumanization of our lives."
"Without a fully active role in community life," he concludes, " you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration."
Illich, Holt, Gatto and even homeschool popularizers Raymond and Dorothy Moore -Seventh Day Adventists significant in the early days of home education who believed simply in giving children time to learn for the simple sake of learning well - all had at the heart of their education reform philosophies the very humanist belief in maximizing individual liberty "unfettered by creed, authority or source." It is to these fascinating, thoughtful and thought provoking individuals that homeschoolers today should give their thanks and whose work modern educators would do well to revisit.
Author Info:
[1] Lines, Patricia M. Homeschoolers: Estimating Numbers and Growth, National Institute on Student achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment Office of Educational Research and Improvement U.S. Department of Education Web Edition, Spring 1999 (previously released as a paper in Spring 1998)
[2] Seelhoff, Cheryl. "Who Stole Homeschooling? Gentle Spirit Magazine, page 26, Volume 6, Number 3, May 1999.
[3] The Teaching Home, Box 20219, Portland OR 97294 was founded in 1980, with it's stated purpose to " provide information, inspiration, and support to Christian home-school families and Christian home-school state and national organizations."
[4] Hegener, Helen. "An Interview with Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff" Home Education Magazine, September-October 1999, page 32
[5] Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society New York, Harrow Books, 1971, also online at http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
[6] Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd. Random House, November 1983
[7] Holt, John
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