Home Schooling

It is no accident that one of the most significant countercultural movements in America today has been the parent-driven expansion of educational alternatives to the public schools - particularly the rise in small public "charter" schools (schools released from mandates and bureaucratic regulations), denominational private schools, and home schooling. The home schooling movement entails a quite radical withdrawal from engagement with the outside culture. According to conservative estimates, the number of children schooled at home in America increased from around ten thousand in 1980 to approximately one million by 1996.

Of course, in their efforts to protect family life and children from the ravages of a hostile environment, home schooling families have not been able to disappear completely from public life. They have been forced by a number of open challenges to their autonomy (the most recent being a provision of Congress's 1994 education bill that would have required teacher certification of any parent who taught his child at home) to wage a fight for their right to educate their children their way.

Parents have been convicted of child abuse for spanking, for grounding, for home schooling, and even for no reason other than a suspicion on the part of a mandated reporter or social worker that while conditions in the home are at present stable, they may be conducive to neglect or abuse in the future. In fact, parents do not have to commit any offense at all in order to be accused of child maltreatment. A 1986 federal study evaluating child welfare caseworkers found that up to two - thirds of substantiated cases of child maltreatment involved no actual wrongdoing on the part of parents.

Could it be that in their determination to loose children from family loyalties and to promote the peer group as a source of both emotional support and social approval, educators have inadvertently promoted such hideous behavior? Could it be that in their zeal to lay bare children's inner lives for scrutiny and refitting, they are selling children's souls to their peers? Some parents think they are. Home schooling parents often point up what they consider the unhealthy ways schools socialize kids. African-American home schooling mother Donna Nichols-White told Time magazine, "When people mention the problem of gang membership, I mention that the common factor amongst all gang members is they attended school."

Somewhere between 900,000 and 1.2 million children do let the school bus pass every day. They are the children of America 's home schooling families. Their numbers have multiplied exponentially in the past two decades (from 12,500 in the late 1970s, according to a Time magazine report), and their retreat from institutional schooling can tell us much about the kind of soul-searching the anti-family culture has prompted.

A growing number of parents, she says, perceive that school is "a terrible waste" of childhood and family time, and that schools are "less about learning than about control." Traditionally, says Carey, home-schoolers have been radical nonconformists, people who "never bought the system." But increasing numbers of parents, she says, are tiring of conformity. Citing statistics that indicate home schooling will continue to grow, Carey notes, "Parents feel like an oppressed minority. They find it hard to identify with prevailing cultural values."