Homeschooling: Parent action for productive protest

• In Event: Learning In And With The Community

Proposal

What happens when parents decide to advocate for their children by devoting their own time and energy into directing and managing the educational process? When one parent finds success and shares their story with a friend, the friend may also choose this approach. Eventually they form support groups that help them pursue this alternative for educating their children. They also encourage other parents to opt for an arrangement that promises to improve circumstances for their individual children. Eventually their actions accumulate into a movement that protests the ills of the educational system and asserts the love and interest of parents in the education of their children.

CIES 2024 addresses the power of protest as a mechanism for educational reform. A discussion of homeschooling brings the voices and actions of parents into the conversation. What can we learn from the parents who take it on themselves to provide a positive educational environment for their children? How has this movement developed in the USA and around the world? What can educational systems learn from the choices and outcomes of homeschooled students?

Educational philosophers, theorists, reformers, and activists all attempt to speak to what it will take to transform our system of education into something that helps our society move forward. Boggs et al. (2012) asserts, “the movement today ... is being created ... by individuals and groups responding creatively with passion and imagination to the real problems and challenges that they face where they live and work”(p. 178). Whether it is Ivan Illich (1971) writing his ideas for deschooling society, Paulo Freire (1970) advocating to work for their own release from oppression, a community creating a new school for a marginalized neighborhood, or an individual parent’s choice to create a safe, culturally relevant educational setting at home for their child, liberation will be worked out through the efforts of everyone who contributes in the way they are able. Homeschooling goes beyond a rejection of the problems that students face; it lives out a productive protest that actively promotes an education that parents see will benefit their children.

The act of conducting schooling at home, or bringing the management of education into the purview of the home, has come to be known as homeschooling. Presently, families who choose to homeschool have a wide range of options and support networks to draw upon. As an option for education, homeschooling has grown over the past 60 years in the US from an unknown or unaccepted concept into a phenomenon that has become commonplace in popular speech. The closing of schools and the increase of online instruction accessed from home during the pandemic of 2020 exposed many people to the dynamics of children’s school experience and the possibilities of parents increasing their involvement with the children at home. As schools have reopened, many families are pursuing alternatives that include homeschooling. Whether people choose homeschooling based on a particular circumstance with an individual child or as a broader political statement, the act of homeschooling combines a critique of the system of education with an effort to create a new solution to the perceived problem.

This paper presents a review of literature that explores homeschooling as a social movement. The analysis includes understandings of legal history, school developments, demographics, and current shifts in this alternative form of education. With an eye to the broader context of education reform, this review includes a discussion of the concept of deschooling as a school reform philosophy that has influenced the homeschooling movement. Seeking to understand how marginalized groups interact with the homeschooling movement, the review also explores research done with Black families in the US. Despite the existence of diversity within the population of homeschooling (Wang et al, 2019), there is a dramatic gap in the literature regarding other marginalized groups homeschooling (Dennison et al, 2020).

As a grassroots, dispersed social movement, homeschooling holds a place in the conversation that considers to what extent systems and individuals will stretch and sacrifice for the sake of countering the challenges that students face in any of the wide range of schooling options available to them. Homeschooling is no longer fringe, deviant, or invisible. Within the broader context of education reform, the experience of homeschooled students and their families offers insight into where the school system is failing students and what solutions could be possible.

Critiques of homeschooling often focus on stereotypes that classify homeschooling as an option that middle-class, white, educated parents invoke as a religiously isolating move that rejects the beneficial offerings of the public school system. This stereotype leads to labeling homeschooling as a separatist action that undermines the core purpose of societal equity promoted in public schools. However, recognizing homeschooling as a protest against injustices in the education system transforms the paradigm and offers a radically different angle by which educators can seek to understand this alternative that families pursue. When viewed as parents’ best efforts to create new advantages in the face of a system that has been difficult for their children, homeschooling can be considered an expression of activism by many families who seek to provide an education that remedies the challenges students face in school. Specifically, empirical research has revealed that black families assert their agency and live out their protest of injustices in the school system through homeschooling (Fields-Smith and Kisura, 2013; Puga, 2019).

No longer is homeschooling merely a neoliberal option that privileged individuals select to further their own advantage. Along the lines of the critique that Illich presents of schooling decreasing agency and imagination, homeschooling is an expression of autonomy on the part of families and students to choose an educational setting that will best nurture their needs for cultural integrity, for emotional and academic safety, and for a love of learning that will endure for a lifetime. All educational systems would benefit from understanding this living protest.

Author

• Georgina J Aubin