The Joshua Generation is rebelling
December 5, 2013 7:29 AM   Subscribe

The Homeschool Apostates by Kathryn Joyce. Via The Toast.
posted by zeptoweasel (171 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 
And that's why homeschooling should be illegal unless strictly monitored: it provides too much control to parents.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:53 AM on December 5, 2013 [25 favorites]


Still making my way through the article, but just -- wow. This is depressing.

The comparison that comes to my mind actually is all the hysteria about "Satanic cults" engaging in ritual child abuse during the early 1980s which was eventually revealed to be an urban legend. Except apparently ritual child abuse is really happening, just not in the name of Satan.
posted by trunk muffins at 8:01 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


Too much control to parents is a problem? Only if the parents themselves are a problem.

Homeschooling is a great option for plenty of kids, for a variety of reasons. For others it's not. One way or another, I'm really not interested at all in someone else deciding what's best for the education of our children.
posted by jquinby at 8:04 AM on December 5, 2013 [14 favorites]


Still, Jones expressed the HSLDA’s long-held position that abuse cases are too rare to warrant new regulation. “Although abuse does exist in the homeschooling community,” he wrote, “we believe that statistics show that it is much less prevalent than in society at large. This is one of the reasons that we have always opposed, and continue to oppose, expansion of monitoring of homeschoolers.”


Shouldn't even one case of abuse warrant regulation? If you truly desire to protect children (and the homeschool parents who do the right thing), shouldn't you be all for increased rules and protections?

One of the premises behind the book Christian Nation by Frederic Rich is that a Christian fundamentalist America rises out of the ashes of a Sarah Palin presidency. The key is Generation Joshua and an entire culture of anti-intellectual, anti-science, strict-Christian families homeschooled with little exposure to the outside world. It's fiction (thank goodness), but I definitely recommend reading it.
posted by zooropa at 8:04 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


Whoa. That hit way way too close to home.

So I was home schooled at the other end of the spectrum : my mother worked, my father raised us. Unschooled is a euphemism for how my brother and I were educated; really we were basically feral. I was luckier than my brother in that I had 4 years of socialization in public school before I was pulled out; he just got the two.

My father suffered from under- and counterproductively-treated mental health issues. He mostly sequestered himself in his room to play ham radio. If we made too much noise he came out to yell at us. As I got older I would be summoned to his room to hear long rambling rants about everything that was wrong in the world
I particularly remember the explanation that transistors were discovered at Roswell.

This was the primary adult, and one of two people, who I had interaction for 8 years.

So much of this rings true. Particularly the piece about feeling like a stranger in a strange land. When I started going to community college I had no idea how to perform basic interactions with peers. I had no idea what normal was.

I don't want to go on at too much length. I think limiting the number of people one interacts with in the way homeschooling often does is incredibly damaging. But even more so, I think having no relationships outside the family leads to a hugely messed up perspective on human interaction.

Sorry for the verbosity.
posted by PMdixon at 8:06 AM on December 5, 2013 [95 favorites]


This is an extreme example. I am in favor of reasonable oversight of children's education, but if parents have a problem with the school district, curriculum, or culture available to their kids and want to home school they should be allowed to.
posted by fraxil at 8:07 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


Having read a lot of these blogs like No Longer Quivering (and Love Joy Feminism, not mentioned in the article) which are amazing, I think you will find their take on homeschooling in general is more nuanced than that. Homeschooling has been abused by a particular strain of radical fundamentalism, but it has also helped non-religious (or non-extreme) families take their kids out of unsafe or nonworking situations. I don't want to take that safety valve away from the kids and families who really do need it.

The story here is not just about homeschooling but about a whole subculture, and the victims who are fighting back. The article mentions betrothal/arranged marriage, but Love Joy Feminism has been asking lately about marrying very young women off to older men (Link 1, Link 2), an even more disturbing practice. But hardly surprising in such an insular, cult-like, patriarchy-focused group.
posted by emjaybee at 8:07 AM on December 5, 2013 [11 favorites]


Homeschooling is a problem that solves itself.
posted by Ghost Mode at 8:08 AM on December 5, 2013


I don't have children, but I'm struck by how often those who do describe the joy they find in watching their child develop his or her own personality, finding out who they are and what they value in life. It's the essence of humanity, and I can scarcely express how much contempt I feel for anyone so narcissistic as to deny their children that basic right with a smothering regime of isolation and indoctrination.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:10 AM on December 5, 2013 [18 favorites]


I loved this bit.

For Ryan Stollar and many other ex-homeschoolers, debate club changed everything. The lessons in critical thinking, he says, undermined Farris’s dream of creating thousands of eloquent new advocates for the homeschooling cause. “You can’t do debate unless you teach people how to look at different sides of an issue, to research all the different arguments that could be made for and against something,” Stollar says. “And so all of a sudden, debate as a way to create culture-war soldiers backfires. They go into this being well trained, they start questioning something neutral like energy policy, but it doesn’t stop there. They start questioning everything.”

If you teach kids to think you can't control the outcome. Homeschooling worked, way better than the fundie parents wanted though.

Both my kids were homeschooled K-12, although from the liberal hippie side of the homeschooling movement. Both are awesome young adults. Homeschooling works way more often than it doesn't. The problem here is psychotic, religious, controlling parents, not homeschooling. If they couldn't homeschool they would have found a Christian school that let them get away with the same shit.
posted by COD at 8:11 AM on December 5, 2013 [27 favorites]


Being raised as a Jehovah's Witness, I saw this sort of behavior quite frequently beginning in the mid-80s. Pulling your kids out of school and "teaching" them at home became the thing to do and you were viewed in a negative light if you didn't do the same thing. You didn't care enough about your family and your children's salvation if you didn't "protect" them from the horrors of a public education.

Instead, it is an excuse to insulate children from the world around them. One of the fundamentals of JW upbringing is the avoidance of "ungodly persons" who may seem "goodly, but aren't godly". That means that friendships outside the church are forbidden. Not just frowned upon, but forbidden. You are never allowed to do ANYTHING without parental supervision. No group of kids going to the movies together, no hanging out at the mall, no to most things that kids get to do as a regular function of their daily lives.

They know that once people experience the benefits of a normal, non-cult upbringing, the happiness and joy that having true friendships can bring and being able to live without the constant threat of a fiery, world destroying Armageddon hanging over your head, you're going to split.

I stayed in the religion much longer than I should have, truthfully, and it pains me to know that so many other children are still exposed to these horrors.
posted by BrianJ at 8:11 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


Too much control to parents is a problem? Only if the parents themselves are a problem.

But if you let homeschooling go completely unregulated, you'll never know if the parents are a problem.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:12 AM on December 5, 2013 [36 favorites]


But if you let homeschooling parenting go completely unregulated, you'll never know if the parents are a problem.

FTFY
posted by COD at 8:13 AM on December 5, 2013 [11 favorites]


Shouldn't even one case of abuse warrant regulation? If you truly desire to protect children (and the homeschool parents who do the right thing), shouldn't you be all for increased rules and protections?

I don't think so, no. You will never eliminate the possibility of abuse as long as people have privacy and autonomy. I don't think the elimination of those things is realistically possible, let alone a good idea, even if it means that sometimes, parents do horrible things to their children. I take child abuse very seriously indeed, but I don't think that "if it happens even once" is a good standard for deciding to impose regulations of any sort upon a population as a whole.

(Disclosure: I was homeschooled in a fundamentalist family from First Grade on through high school -- a lot of that article hits close to home for me and I definitely identify some of the behaviors described as abusive, as I do some of the things that I experienced in childhood. I look askance at a lot of homeschooling practices and think a lot of these kinds of families are at least borderline abusive.)
posted by gauche at 8:14 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


This is the story of a community website and its members' struggle to develop a position more nuanced than "all homeschooling should be illegal" and "the state is trying to control all parenting." Will they succeed? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion...
posted by Behemoth at 8:15 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


Homeschooling in the right hands can be wonderful, but too often it is not in the right hands. My great-nibs are being homeschooled by a woman who herself dropped out before her junior year of highschool. She uses some kind of on-line class system -- the kids are shooed off to their rooms for a few hours every day to work on their computer. That's it. My sister and sister-in-law, both teachers, have offered all kinds of enrichment materials and activities that they have, but she is un-interested. Plus, everytime she's pregnant, the kids get about 6 months off school because she isn't up to "handling it" -- which means they get about 6 to 8 month of school a year.

Considering that they are not only quiverfull and homeschool, but also anti-vax and almost exclusively holistic healing, it's probably as well that the kids aren't in public schools to spread disease. They have already had mumps, measles and chicken pox -- they came out fine, but not everyone them came in contact with would.
posted by pbrim at 8:17 AM on December 5, 2013


But if you let parenting go completely unregulated, you'll never know if the parents are a problem.

Change regulated to monitored and that's entirely true. This is why there are mandatory reporters.
posted by PMdixon at 8:17 AM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


Too much control to parents is a problem? Only if the parents themselves are a problem.
posted by jquinby at 11:04 AM on December 5


But if you let homeschooling go completely unregulated, you'll never know if the parents are a problem.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:12 AM on December 5


From the article:

The emphasis on discipline has given rise to a cottage industry promoting harsh parenting techniques as godly...The combination of those disciplinary techniques with unregulated homeschooling has spawned a growing number of horror stories now being circulated by the ex-homeschoolers—including that of Calista Springer, a 16-year-old in Michigan who died in a house fire while tied to her bed after her parents removed her from public school, or Hana Williams, an Ethiopian adoptee whose Washington state parents were convicted in September of killing her with starvation and abuse in a Pearl-style system. Materials from HSLDA were found in the home of Williams’s parents.

It's like a perfect storm of protection for child abusers. I had no idea that home schooling was unregulated to such a degree, nor of the roots of the lack of regulation.
posted by magstheaxe at 8:18 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


They are kind of an unusual example because so much of their lives are public, but I do often wonder what stories the Duggar children are going to tell when enough of them are grown and out.

Without getting into the legal weeds, I do think there has to be some positive way to make sure every child has interaction with people outside their family, whether outside the school or in other ways, if only just to enlarge their world, not to mention make detecting abuse possible. We do some of that with mandatory reporting for any adult who suspects abuse; even fundamentalist families have to interact in some way with the outside world, to get groceries or healthcare or send mail, so there is some chance. Of course, abusers work very hard to conceal their abuse, so even a schooled kid being abused may be too scared to speak out.

But then there is the fear all parents feel that their actions might be misinterepreted as abuse if they ever yell at their kid, or the kid describes an innocent event in a way that's misinterpreted by someone else. Maybe it's an irrational fear, but you hear stories of parents being prosecuted for photographing their kid in the tub, or breastfeeding, or because of accusations during a divorce or an incompetent or racist CPS official. And so, it's easy to say "regulate parents!" but then you end up with a different kind of abuse.

I don't want to give abusive assholes cover, in any way. It just seems like the law is such a blunt instrument that surveilling and regulating all family interactions is not something it can do well.

What would work? Mandating that every child go to a class that teaches them they have the right not to be abused, hit, starved or neglected? That teaches them what abuse is and how to get help?
posted by emjaybee at 8:25 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


The juxtaposition of this thread's comments with those from the Ask a North Korean thread a few days ago are stunning. Never in my life would I have thought being homeschooled (in a terrible situation like the one I've read so far in the article) could be like being born in an Orwellian dictatorship like North Korea.

Holy shit. A dictatorship with invisible borders, that travels with you everywhere you go.
posted by Decimask at 8:27 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


It just seems like the law is such a blunt instrument that surveilling and regulating all family interactions is not something it can do well.

Laws drafted to regulate homeschooling can be and have been tailored much more narrowly than "regulating all family interactions." See Louis Greenfield's [pdf] "Religious Home-schools: That Is Not a Monkey on Your Back; It's a Compelling State Interest" for a discussion of middle ground between no-regulation and potentially burdensome regulation.
posted by audi alteram partem at 8:32 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


“I had never really lived in the real world. I didn’t understand how Americans thought. All my language was religious language. I didn’t know how to interact with people without trying to convert them. I had a lot of really discouraging experiences where I realized that you could leave fundamentalism, but at the end of the day fundamentalism was still inside of me.”

This part here rings through, clear as a bell, for me. I grew up in a fundamentalist christian home, in a fundamentalist southern christian town, which was in turn surrounded by even more fundamentalist societies (and so on, until you got to the Mennonites who lives out on the mountain...). I got out but every time I go back, I see the same people in the same places. Once you instill a healthy fear of the secular world, then limit opportunities to actually understand that secular world, you create a great, invisible wall, that past a certain point, you don't have the the tools to operate outside of. It boggled my mind then, how the leaders of these groups would proudly state that their youth staying in their community as proof of the "rightfulness" of their ways. Sure. As if doing the cultural equivalent of taking away their phone and passport and putting them in prison uniforms didn't dissuade them at all.

Don't get me wrong, these, on the whole, aren't bad people. They hold some beliefs I don't agree with, and they vote for things I consider appalling, but they keep to the themselves, don't beat each other up, they do watch over each other, no one goes hungry and no one goes homeless. It's just a very strange totalitarian response to what they fear is an increasingly totalitarian, secular society.

I've done work with victims of all sorts since I left that world, and I understand better now, than what I did, what exactly it takes to leave, but I sure don't know from experience. As I've said before, some days all you can do is just to listen or read these stories and just be the one who heard. Sometimes, that's a start.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 8:34 AM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


That article read like the story of my life up until I was eighteen, except my parents sent me to public school because when they tried to send me to a private christian school because I made so much trouble at the Christian school it suggested that I not return. I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio, or watch unsupervised television, or visit friends that my mother didn't approve as acceptable. Since we lived in the country miles from town I didn't have any friends. The only reason I was not ignorant of the outside world other than what I could learn at school from the few people who would tolerate such a freak was that my father would let me check out whatever books I wanted from the library, so I could at least read about normal life.

I am strongly opposed to homeschooling because my life was hard enough as it was under her control (and I still have fallout from the weird alien way I was raised, like the woman in the article) - imagining what it is like for the children who never get out of the house to experience other people is a vision of hell.
posted by winna at 8:34 AM on December 5, 2013 [15 favorites]


I'm in agreement with COD:

Homeschooling works way more often than it doesn't. The problem here is psychotic, religious, controlling parents, not homeschooling. If they couldn't homeschool they would have found a Christian school that let them get away with the same shit.

I think a lot of the problem with this stuff is fundamentalism and not homeschooling. Even in my own upbringing, about which I have decidedly mixed feelings, I was given a lot of autonomy and ability to pursue my own interests in really deep ways that I feel were truly beneficial. And I had peers who truly flourished in homeschooling -- and for whom, I'm certain, public school would have been truly torturous.

Abusive parenting is awful, and a lot of fundamentalist homeschooling parents seems, to me, to be homeschooling because of their own fears and not out of a sense of what will be good for the child. There's a horrible strain of thinking, in fundamentalist Christianity, that children know nothing and parents should micromanage their entire lives to keep them from being "corrupted" by "the world" (i.e., their peers, television, media, "socialism" -- that is, government, &c. &c.) There's lots of "spare the rod, spoil the child" thinking in there.

But at the same time, this same fundamentalist strain of thinking wants to be politically influential and keeps trying to raise children to be "statesmen" and "leaders" who will reliably support radical right-wing political causes. There is a weird tension here because the whole parenting style is deeply authoritarian but at the same time only grudgingly submits to its own legitimate (on their terms, "God-appointed") earthly authority, the state. There's another tension in that you can't micromanage a child into leadership. It's a very complicated and ultimately contradictory way of looking at the world. I find it cult-like.

But, again, this is the fundamentalism and not the homeschooling I'm talking about. Homeschooling is not even a single pedagogical philosophy. It's a lot of different things, some of which are better than public schools and even private schools, and some of which are equivalent, and some of which are worse.

Every time I see one of these articles about fundamentalist homeschoolers, or encounter a reference to Homeschoolers Anonymous, I think about setting down my own experience, but it remains too complicated to unpack.

Some time ago, I was talking to a friend who comes out of a similar background, about how we've had to back-form all of our cultural references from before college, and how we have a world of experiences that are totally different to the experiences of folks who were not homeschooled. He said something like, "I don't know how to share, I only know how to overshare."
posted by gauche at 8:41 AM on December 5, 2013 [20 favorites]


sio42 and winna, the bit about not even being able to listen to the radio rings true here, too. My mother had a lot of issues about food, too -- we couldn't afford health insurance so she spent a lot of energy making sure our food was as healthful as possible, no refined sugars or flours, lots of vegetables we grew ourselves, &c.

My sister once joked that if we "rebelled" against our upbringing (rebellion being the big scary watchword in our family) people wouldn't even be able to tell: we'd just buy CDs and drink soda like normal teenagers.
posted by gauche at 8:49 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


The other thing that occurred to me while reading this is that the worst abusive types who read this article are going to do so to take notes on cracking down on the escape routes and outside influences that the kids in these stories managed to acquire. :(

This stuff wasn't really going strong yet when I was a kid, which is good, because my dad would have been attracted to it. Of course, that would have meant fighting with my mom, who had a limited tolerance for fundie stuff; I am grateful to her even now for not going along with so much of it, because she gave me a normal life and a role model of a woman who wouldn't be bullied.
posted by emjaybee at 8:52 AM on December 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


Conservatives still mock the "It takes a village to raise a child line," and this is exactly why. If the village is raising the child this shit is much harder to cover up. If everybody is engaged and involved in their communities then it becomes more difficult (but not impossible) to hide. That however, is a cultural issue and not something that can be fixed by government regulation.
posted by COD at 8:57 AM on December 5, 2013 [17 favorites]


As a new father (to a six month old girl), and as someone who is learning what it is really like to be a parent competely overwhelmed by love for my child, it's all the more shocking to me lately to hear of parents who don't seem to even like their kids all that much. It's just so sad and I don't understand it, absent obvious cases of mental illness.
I have plenty of ideas of how I would prefer my daughter to be, but am incredibly excited to see what kind of person she wants to be. To stifle that, or try to choose for her, just seems like a way to make my whole family deeply unhappy.

Full disclosure, my wife and I are seriously considering home-schooling, albeit in a totally non-religious way. For me it is more about time-efficiency and fostering/maintaining as much natural creativity in my daughter/future-children as possible. With the prevalence of other home-schoolers these days, there are many many avenues for socialization, which makes it a lot easier.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 9:00 AM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


But, again, this is the fundamentalism and not the homeschooling I'm talking about.

The problem is that given the current environment in homeschooling as referenced in the article, this is kind of like asking us to ignore the masses of children being locked into a culture of ignorance because there are some people who are extraordinary who make it work. You can't base public policy on the best case scenario.
posted by winna at 9:05 AM on December 5, 2013 [19 favorites]


Oh, and I should add, I thought I was a feminist before, but now that I have a daughter I defy anyone to tell me there is something a man can do that she can't. Parenthood is a funny thing; really illuminating.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 9:07 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


These people aren't abusing their kids because they're Christian fundamentalists or because they're homeschoolers. They're abusing their kids because they are abusers - they have whatever has gone wrong in their brain that lets them harm their own children.

But the problem is that there are no failsafes within the institution of homeschooling, or within the Christian fundamentalist community, to protect these children. I think that's more the issue - it's not that homeschooling is a terrible thing, but that a) there are holes that kids are slipping through that need to be closed up, and b) the communities are doing things like giving families lists of lies they can tell social workers to keep them from protecting their children. Homeschooling can be beneficial. Both the amount of regulation and the fundamentalist community's attitude need to change, to ensure that it is beneficial.
posted by capricorn at 9:12 AM on December 5, 2013 [16 favorites]


//this is kind of like asking us to ignore the masses of children being locked into a culture of ignorance because there are some people who are extraordinary who make it work//

You've got it backwards. The families profiled in the article are the outliers. 99% of homeschooled kids are fine, within the wide range of what qualifies for normal. Limiting kids social outlets is not abuse. It's bad parenting in my opinion, but parents have a right in the US to believe that rock and roll is evil, and (try to) limit their kids access to it. Where that limiting crosses the line to abuse is a fuzzy line that no government regulation will ever be able to define. It's a side effect of freedom - other people are free to make decisions you and I might not agree with.
posted by COD at 9:13 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


Limiting kids social outlets is not abuse.

I would say it utterly can be. Humans are eusocial animals. We need contact with other humans to thrive and development. Stunting that contact can absolutely stunt the human.

I don't think it should legally be counted as abuse but normatively? There are definitely cases that rise to that level.
posted by PMdixon at 9:17 AM on December 5, 2013 [20 favorites]


As I've said before, home schooling can be an improvement for individuals, but it's a net loss for the public interest. The structural relation home schooling (and worse, online virtual schools) has to public schools and what it does to the budgetary picture for the public school system as a whole (and therefore, the very many underprivileged children it still serves) is the problem. It erodes support for the public system and provides varying levels of educational quality highly-correlating to personal wealth.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:17 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


My first reaction: "Oh, geez, not this lady again."

Joyce's past two articles were exemplars about how not to write about conservative Evangelical America. Conceived in the most profoundly uncharitable understanding as possible and dedicated to the proposition that it is entirely reasonable to use what even members of the communities in question recognize to be a problematic fringe component as representative of the entire community.

In other words, about as axe-grindy as it is possible to be.

Now I'm going to go read the article and see if she's learned anything since then. I'm not hopeful.
posted by valkyryn at 9:19 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


What never gets addressed is that the whole point of schooling is that it isn't in the home, and you don't get taught things from your parents because they aren't teachers.

This is one of the huge things that I hate anecdotes about. "Oh, I was homeschooled and now I'm successful and happy! The implication that my parents were college professors doesn't have any bearing on this subject."
posted by Sphinx at 9:21 AM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


Now I'm going to go read the article and see if she's learned anything since then. I'm not hopeful.

I wonder if, in the future, you might do that before you comment?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:23 AM on December 5, 2013 [32 favorites]


COD, where are you getting your numbers? You're throwing out lots of stats in this thread, is there research that backs them up?
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 9:28 AM on December 5, 2013


Sphinx, I'm not aware of the precept that the "whole point of school is that it isn't in the home". Public school, in anything resembling its current form is a fairly recent experiment in the grand scheme of things, and I don't know that I can say that the organizational aspects have been improving.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 9:28 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


What never gets addressed is that the whole point of schooling is that it isn't in the home, and you don't get taught things from your parents because they aren't teachers.

Yeah, I don't think those things get discussed because the point of school isn't that you leave home, and you do get taught things from your parents.
posted by skewed at 9:29 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


//The implication that my parents were college professors doesn't have any bearing on this subject."//

The parents aren't qualified to teach red herring has been so thoroughly beaten down over the last 20 years that the schools don't even try to use it against homeschoolers anymore. Managing a class of 30 kids with varying abilities absolutely requires advanced training and knowledge that one gets from being a professional teacher. Managing a class of your own 2 kids is something any motivated parent can handle. The reality is that most homeschoolers of the non-dominonist Christian variety are expecting the kids to teach themselves, especially as they get older.
posted by COD at 9:32 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


The families profiled in the article are the outliers. 99% of homeschooled kids are fine...

Maybe. But with zero government oversight, how can we be sure about that?
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:38 AM on December 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


>The families profiled in the article are the outliers. 99% of homeschooled kids are fine, within the wide range of what qualifies for normal.

The effectiveness of Kathryn Joyce's writing is based upon describing in great detail a few cases of bad actors, whether they are homeschooling parents or adoptive parents, and suggesting they are emblematic of the wider movement (and it's always a "movement"). The reader comes away with strong feelings about how the movement should be squashed or regulated, since it comprises so many terrible people. One would never suspect that there is such a thing as a healthy, well-adjusted homeschooler or adoptee (especially of the conservative fundamentalist variety) reading Joyce's work.

Heck, just look at very first comment posted in this thread.
posted by BurntHombre at 9:39 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


//COD, where are you getting your numbers? You're throwing out lots of stats in this thread, is there research that backs them up?//

I just read every comment of mine in this thread. The only thing close to a stat I can find is the 99% comment, which was more a statement of over whelming majority than a statement of statistics, although I suspect it's close to the right number.
posted by COD at 9:40 AM on December 5, 2013


The problem is that given the current environment in homeschooling as referenced in the article, this is kind of like asking us to ignore the masses of children being locked into a culture of ignorance because there are some people who are extraordinary who make it work. You can't base public policy on the best case scenario.

That's not, at all, what I'm doing. I think that there are elements of abuse in a LOT of relationships, including many parent-child relationships. But I don't think that the population of homeschooled children suffers abuse that is either a) significantly worse in kind, or b) at a significantly greater rate of incidence, than the general population. I'd like to see data that suggests otherwise.
posted by gauche at 9:41 AM on December 5, 2013


more a statement of over whelming majority than a statement of statistics, although I suspect it's close to the right number.

oh okay
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 9:42 AM on December 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't want to go on at too much length. I think limiting the number of people one interacts with in the way homeschooling often does is incredibly damaging. But even more so, I think having no relationships outside the family leads to a hugely messed up perspective on human interaction.

I struggle to participate in discussions about this topic without my contributions sounding like the screech of an axe being ground down to the hilt, so let me just award you my best and shiniest favorite for this observation and bug the hell out of here.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:53 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


One would never suspect that there is such a thing as a healthy, well-adjusted homeschooler or adoptee (especially of the conservative fundamentalist variety) reading Joyce's work.
posted by BurntHombre at 12:39 PM on December 5


Ryan Stollar came off pretty well-adjusted in the article.
posted by magstheaxe at 9:54 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


The problem is that this article is mashing together a number of different issues.

I have friends who homeschool, and they are part of groups and classes for their children so they get social activities, but area able to keep up with specific areas that they feel their child excel in that the school system wouldn't take care of. I have friends who were homeschooled and who are perfectly well adjusted members of society.

I have a cousin who believes in the quiverfull concept, and I can see the damage it does to have all of those children in a tiny house and to be constantly adding more while homeschooling. I find it hard to believe that you can provide a truly quality education to 5 children while also taking care of the needs of 2 toddlers and a baby while you are pregnant.

My husband was in a very abusive relationship where the abuse was justified with bibilical teachings and a believe that a man of god would continue to turn the other cheek. We still deal with a huge amount of fallout when dealing with his daughter, who's been taught that we are godless heathens, and therefore we are not to be trusted. It's a scary place to be in, and it's scarier still to have to fight that without the resources the other side has.

The problem is that when you look at each of these things as a venn diagram, there are some really dangerous problems when you overlap with the abuse and the justification of abuse based on warped religious teachings. It's not the homeschooling that's the issue, it's where it overlaps with abuse and there is no one to intervene that the problem becomes pronounced.
posted by Nimmie Amee at 10:00 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


So much to think about w/r/t this issue. So much to be anxious about.

One tiny pinprick of thought, maybe a pretty basic one: reading this article makes me realize in an explicit fashion that education is a process of detaching one's self from parents. Intellectually, materially, emotionally, ideologically, practically. Education (formal and informal) is about climbing a slow upward curve of autonomy. And if you explicitly want your children not to be independent actors but instead to be culture warriors fully under your command . . . well, that's no education at all, is it?

Thank god (no irony intended) for those debate clubs, I guess.
posted by erlking at 10:01 AM on December 5, 2013 [18 favorites]


//I don't want to go on at too much length. I think limiting the number of people one interacts with in the way homeschooling often does is incredibly damaging. But even more so, I think having no relationships outside the family leads to a hugely messed up perspective on human interaction.//

I agree 100%. But it does not mean that government should "do something." Government should absolutely do something when actual abuse as defined by law is taking place. However, hugely messed up perspectives on human interaction are not illegal, nor should they be.

A government that had the power to force all Christians (or whoever) to expose their kids to some mandated percentage of outside perspectives would also have the power to force the rest of us to attend church. You can't have it both ways. If you want the freedom to live your life as you see best, and to raise your kids as you see best, you have to grant that same right to everybody else. Even, and especially, in those cases where you don't agree.

Society will always debate where the line between abuse and bad parenting is, but traditionally, and correctly IMO, it has fallen far on the side of giving the parents the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, that means some parents will get away with abusing their kids. Call it the price of freedom or whatever you want, but that is just how people work.
posted by COD at 10:02 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


The etymology of the word School defines it as "a place to go for learning". Schools have been around for thousands of years, and are in no way a recent development.

"Well, I expect students to teach themselves" is lazy teaching.

And I'm so happy that in the last twenty years we've beaten that red herring that 'parents aren't qualified to teach' down. Goddamit, that's utter bullshit. Teachers should teach, and parents should parent.
posted by Sphinx at 10:03 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


(subthought: and of course homeschooled kids can also climb that slow upward curve of autonomy, but the parents have to be in on that project)
posted by erlking at 10:05 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I don't believe I said anything about the government or anyone else "doing something". I merely related my reaction to the article and my experience.
posted by PMdixon at 10:08 AM on December 5, 2013


//Teachers should teach, and parents should parent.//

Funny, I don't remember any teachers in my house when my kids learned to walk, or talk, to eat with utensils, or any of 1000 other things they learned to do before they were even school age.

And school, as a universal right available to all as we know it today, is a very recent development. Prior to the start of the 20th century only the rich and privileged could afford to waste away their days in school. Everybody else might get in a few years of school before they were old enough to be useful on the farm or in the family shop. After that, they worked in a few lessons where ever they could between chores.
posted by COD at 10:11 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I did like the name for the group of people who left the Quiverfull movement, "No Longer Quivering".
posted by benito.strauss at 10:11 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


The etymology of the word School defines it as "a place to go for learning". Schools have been around for thousands of years, and are in no way a recent development.

This is bizarre idea to be concerned with. First off, the etymology of a word doesn't define it. That's why atom doesn't mean "an indivisible body". Secondly, the etymology isn't "a place to go for learning", it's just "a place of learning", among things. Those other things include "intermission of work, leisure for learning; learned conversation, debate; lecture; meeting place for teachers and students, place of instruction; disciples of a teacher, body of followers, sect,". So what?

None of that suggests the "whole point" of school is that it's outside the home. The whole point of school is that you learn something.
posted by skewed at 10:18 AM on December 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


Conservatives still mock the "It takes a village to raise a child line," and this is exactly why. If the village is raising the child this shit is much harder to cover up. If everybody is engaged and involved in their communities then it becomes more difficult (but not impossible) to hide. That however, is a cultural issue and not something that can be fixed by government regulation.

I genuinely don't understand this attitude towards regulation and why we should just trust communities to do the right thing. Communities as a whole can be completely abusive (it sounds like what is happening here is that the parents profiled are part of larger communities that solidify their views on how to raise/teach a child, and those larger communities have some problematic ideas about, for example, physical punishments), so you can't always rely on them to be willing to uncover or stop abuse, especially if they don't think it's abuse and is just godly parenting. And government regulates all sorts of things about parenting - you can't drive your child around without a car seat, you can't not feed them, you can't beat them, you're supposed to educate them whether you send them to school and do it yourself, you have to seek medical care for children when necessary, and so forth. Regulation can be a net good and if homeschooling is such a positive thing then it has nothing to fear from being regulating and checked on, surely?
posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:18 AM on December 5, 2013 [17 favorites]


Love the Victoria's Secret ad midway through the article. Boobies abound!!
posted by Give my rear guards to fraudway at 10:19 AM on December 5, 2013


And school, as a universal right available to all as we know it today, is a very recent development. Prior to the start of the 20th century only the rich and privileged could afford to waste away their days in school. Everybody else might get in a few years of school before they were old enough to be useful on the farm or in the family shop. After that, they worked in a few lessons where ever they could between chores.

I am assuming you're not saying that's a good thing? People fought long and hard to get public schooling - which has actually been around in various forms for a long, long time. Even the Romans endowed schools for both boys and girls; yes, not everyone could go, but I don't think we should celebrate that. (But I may have misread your point.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:21 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


Funny, I don't remember any teachers in my house when my kids learned to walk, or talk, to eat with utensils, or any of 1000 other things they learned to do before they were even school age.

My parents knew how to do all of those things. However, if my mother had to teach me how to diagram a sentence, I would have gotten verbs all over my adverbs and probably chunks of noun in my pronouns.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:22 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


//I am assuming you're not saying that's a good thing?//

School has been an unquestioned net positive for society. I'm not one of those HSers that thinks public school is evil. Poorly managed in many cases these days, but not evil.
posted by COD at 10:24 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


COD: "Funny, I don't remember any teachers in my house when my kids learned to walk, or talk, to eat with utensils, or any of 1000 other things they learned to do before they were even school age."

That's not teaching, that's parenting. Try and differentiate the two.

//and what the holy hell is this crap?// //please stop now//
posted by Sphinx at 10:31 AM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


when you look at each of these things as a venn diagram

Yes, exactly: there are potentially dangerous overlaps of isolation, vulnerable minors, controlling parents, sick religion, suspicion of government, and the absence of an informal safety net. It sets the stage for abuse and mistreatment. Homeschooling can become an outcome of these conditions, but is not necessarily the cause.
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:34 AM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


I agree with COD. I think school has definitely been a net positive on a societal basis, but that doesn't mean that I won't look at alternatives for my family if I think the current public school paradigm is ill-suited for optimal learning and development.

My point upthread, which I think triggered various responses/commentary on the history of schooling was simply meant to point out that our educational system today is not some tried and true method. It is very different than many structures being cited as precedent above. I'm hoping they figure it out, but with the corporatization of public schools, I'm less than optimistic. In the end I'm going to choose what is right for my kids.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 10:34 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sphinx, are you suggesting that parenting doesn't automatically include a healthy dose of teaching?
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 10:34 AM on December 5, 2013


//However, if my mother had to teach me how to diagram a sentence, I would have gotten verbs all over my adverbs and probably chunks of noun in my pronouns.//

Doubtful. I can't diagram a sentence either, but it didn't stop either of my kids from mastering every phase of grammar, or at least every phase that is tested by the SAT. They also mastered all kinds of things that I can barely even spell, let alone explain. Teaching is actually more like facilitating learning. Especially in 2014 with all the resources at our disposal today, the teacher doesn't have to have all the answers. They just need to know where to find the answers. You don't learn when the teacher diagrams a sentence on the blackboard. You learn when you do it yourself 20 times that night. At home.

But if it up to me, diagramming sentences would be illegal and no kid would have to suffer through it. God I hated diagramming sentences in school.
posted by COD at 10:35 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


They just need to know where to find the answers.

I imagine that you, like me, have met many people who cannot even accomplish this.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:37 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


What I'm taking away from this is that homeschooling isn't the problem, the lack of accountability is. Some parents cannot teach, some can and some of the curricula used are worthless. Have two or three observational visits a year by a teacher and have the kids present a portfolio of work at the end of the year. It does not have to be in line with what the public schools teach, but there should be proof that, to steal a phrase, our children are learning.

Teachers have regular reviews throughout the year (if the schools is paying attention) and receive feedback on their lessons not just from their students but also from their peers. There are continuing education requirements.

I am not saying that parents who homeschool their children should be subject to the same requirements, but a commitment to showing that your kids are learning and that they are not being harmed should be part and parcel with homeschooling.

(I am not going to advocate that kids be tested and parent's graded like schools are in NCLB, although the idea amuses me to no end. If your kids receive a failing grade, you have to improve the study conditions at home and provide them with enough money to go to school and back as part of a school choice program.)
posted by Hactar at 10:38 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


//That's not teaching, that's parenting. Try and differentiate the two.

You don't have kids, do you Sphinx?
posted by COD at 10:38 AM on December 5, 2013


I'd like to see public school attendance heavily incentivized in the tax code. Children with engaged parents tend to have successful outcomes regardless of their school situation, and engaged parents are precisely the sort of parents who can improve public schools for all children with their personal engagement. They also tend to have the social and financial power to hold schools accountable. If those engaged parents choose to homeschool or send their children to private schools, it's a tragedy of the commons situation where the children left in the public schools are exactly the ones who need the most resources, which incentivizes even more parents to get their kids out if they can.

I absolutely see it as a moral issue and am not afraid to speak out about it in my social groups, where homeschooling seems to becoming more prevalent in a way that cuts across political and religious affiliation. I think your own children are where the rubber meets the road for "I've got mine". I want to improve outcomes for all children, not just the ones with the parents who care and have resources.
posted by Kwine at 10:43 AM on December 5, 2013 [15 favorites]


//What I'm taking away from this is that homeschooling isn't the problem, the lack of accountability is.//

The article overplays the lack of accountability issue. Some states, like Pennsylvania, do have pretty rigorous oversight. My state of VA requires annual testing for most homeschoolers. There is a religious exemption. On the other end of the spectrum Texas has no oversight at all.

This map is from HSLDA, so their definition of "moderate" oversight is probably different than most of us, but you can see that most states have some level of oversight of homeschoolers.
posted by COD at 10:48 AM on December 5, 2013


Kwine, I'm not sure that improving outcomes for all children precludes removing your kids from a less than optimal environment.
With regards to tax incentives, it seems to me that currently parents of homeschooled children pay taxes like everyone else and are actually less of an expense burden by virtue of opting out. Wouldn't reducing the tax basis and adding headcount exacerbate resource constraints?
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 10:48 AM on December 5, 2013


Yeah, my initial assessment was entirely, depressingly correct. Let's just go with a quote from the article:
Thanks largely to sites like No Longer Quivering and Homeschoolers Anonymous, a critical mass of homeschoolers and Quiverfull daughters now know that their families aren’t unique and that they aren’t alone in questioning the certainties with which they were raised.
"Critical mass"? The hell now? As far as I can tell there are three numbers in this article that might possibly go to support that assertion. Two million, 200, and 600,000. The first is the estimated number of homeschooled kids in the country, though the author suggests it's probably higher. She's probably right. The second is 200. That's the number of people who signed up for one of the website she touts as forming part of this "critical mass". The other is 600,000, the number of page views said website has garnered since it was created. As anyone who has run an actual website can tell you, page views don't mean jack.

So apparently "critical mass" means. . . 200 out of two million?

And that's exactly, precisely, what she's been doing since she started on this axe-grindiest crusade a few years ago: taking a tiny, miniscule fraction of the homeschooling movement--even if we were to multiply the number of users on that website by 10, we'd still only have 2,000, which is 0.1% of the official estimated total, which is itself likely too low--and insisting that it must obviously represent a widespread pattern in homeschooling families. That together with asserting that homeschooling families are influenced by Rushdooney, which as I've argued previously, is horseshit, because most homeschooling families don't know who Rushdooney is. Same goes for groups like the HSLDA, Focus on the Family, etc. What, 85,000 dues-paying familes in HSLDA? That's, what, maybe 20% of the number of homeschooling families in the country? A budget of $10 million plus whatever they can come up with in donations? Man, those homeschooling families have got Soros and the Kochs downright outnumbered!

TL;DR: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." This story is based on a mere handful of anecdotes. The author wants to argue that these represent a massive, dangerous trend amongst homeschooling families, but she has presented absolutely zero evidence that this is the case. It's definitely nonsense, and one is tempted to call it defamatory nonsense. Joyce and the horse she rode in on can go take a long walk off a short pier.
posted by valkyryn at 10:51 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


I don't want you to opt out and reduce headcount, I want you to show up to parent teacher conferences, chaperone the field trips, visit the classroom to see how things are going, demand healthier food in the lunchroom, demand that bad teachers be held accountable, and generally use the energy that you'd devote exclusively the education of your own children instead to benefit the many. If you really don't want to do that, I'll take your money, but that's a poor second choice to your time and attention.
posted by Kwine at 10:55 AM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


COD: Managing a class of 30 kids with varying abilities absolutely requires advanced training and knowledge that one gets from being a professional teacher. Managing a class of your own 2 kids is something any motivated parent can handle. The reality is that most homeschoolers of the non-dominonist Christian variety are expecting the kids to teach themselves, especially as they get older.


Managing your own two kids is one thing, but the Quiverfull/Christian Homeschooling families that Joyce is writing about and that No Longer Quivering and Homeschoolers Anonymous are covering have lots more, sometimes 10 or 12 or even 20, like the Duggars, of all ages, with only one of the parents staying home -- and she's usually pregnant.

That is a whole nother level. I can't imagine doing it at all, much less doing it well. The only hope is if the older kids (girls usually) give up some of their own educations and their own childhoods for the sake of their younger siblings to become assistant mothers at a young age.

It is silly to insist on an all or nothing "ban homeschooling" or "ban government interference in homeschooling" approach, though. I like Hactar's approach. Parents acting as teachers are taking on a job which we normally pay professionals to do because it is in the interests of all of us that children should be educated -- there should at least be some level of oversight from trained professionals.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:58 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


A lot of arguing from ignorance in this thread. Homeschooling has better outcomes than public school in almost every rubric.

Sure there are a few abusive parents homeschooling their kids. There are also abusive parents, teachers and especially other students in the public school system. Until we fix that system, I don't think we are ready to start attacking the alternatives.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 11:03 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


the Quiverfull/Christian Homeschooling families that Joyce is writing about and that No Longer Quivering and Homeschoolers Anonymous are covering have lots more, sometimes 10 or 12 or even 20

That's a tiny, tiny minority of homeschooling families. Most homeschooling families are in the 3-5 kid range. Six is considered a relatively large family, even amongst homeschoolers. True, most non-homeschooling families consider three kids to be plenty, but implying that there are all these homeschooling families with two dozen kids out there is just not the case. They exist, but they're rare.
posted by valkyryn at 11:05 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


//I don't want you to opt out and reduce headcount, I want you to show up to parent teacher conferences...///

The reality in most US locations is that homeschoolers are not welcome to do those things. Even though I pay all the same taxes as everybody else, my kids were not allowed in the school library, were not allowed to fill an empty seat in a classroom if there was a class that they wanted to take, not allowed to participate in sports, not allowed to go on field trips, etc.

Most of which I'm fine with, BTW. I think I am helping by proving that alternate education methods beyond one teacher in front of a class of 25+ can work. I'd love to see public education start to look more like homeschooling with less standardized testing and rote curriculum and more freedom for the kids to follow their interests.
posted by COD at 11:09 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


COD, what you saw as plenty of oversight, I see as gaping holes. In 23 states, the maximum required to homeschool is to show up and let the school know that you are doing that. The minimum should be the orange level of regulation. "State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress."

On preview: Psycho-Alchemy, the sources for that inforgraph include World Net Daily, End of the American Dream, a 20 year old thesis (fairly well done, but without any controls for parental income or other factors), the HSLDA and the Cato Institute, among others. I wish I could tell which numbers came from where, but, honestly, after WND and End of the American Dream, I really can't stand to visit any more of those sites.

Are there studies undertaken by actual researchers in this? Primary sources, no pseudo-academic think tanks, peer reviewed if possible. No flashy images, please. I know a bit about educational research and would love to read as much of the papers as possible.
posted by Hactar at 11:18 AM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


Kwine, that's a fair point, and I don't disagree that it is a net societal good for any engaged parent to maintain involvement with the school. If, however, that is at the expense of my own child's learning and development it becomes harder to justify.
That very well may be the "I've got mine" scenario that concerns you, but I view it as a parental prerogative. There's not a lot that would convince me to (potentially) disadvantage my own kid for a third party's benefit. There's a chance I'm a villain in that regard.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 11:20 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


//Managing your own two kids is one thing, but the Quiverfull/Christian Homeschooling families that Joyce is writing about...//

I don't pretend to understand the Quiverfull movement or why anybody would want 10+ kids. However, they are a tiny, tiny minority and building rules, regulations, or even your beliefs about HSing about the edge cases is not productive.

This, I think, is a more balanced perspective of why many people, especially those that aren't religious extremists, homeschool. (self-link - 5 minute Ignite presentation).
posted by COD at 11:23 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


You know, valkyryn, you really should spend some time on the websites of these women and former homeschoolers. Whatever you think of the author's motives, nothing she wrote was surprising to me, because I do hang out and read their stories. I have no reason to think they are part of some massive Discredit Conservative Homeschooling movement. They are people who were hurt by an abusive subculture. Almost all of them still have siblings and loved ones who are still in those situations, that they can't help, or that have been told horrible things about them and so wouldn't accept help. Many of them relate stories of rape, or severe emotional abuse, and they also consistently describe the books, speeches, and educational materials they were surrounded with that were used to justify or encourage their abuse. Materials that are still best-sellers and being used by parents.

Do you think they are all lying, or whining, or have some unspoken need to vilify the people who raised them?
posted by emjaybee at 11:23 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


valkryn:
I'm sure you'd agree that if it were only 1% of major meat-packing plants that had serious health and safety problems that we should forego all oversight and regulation of said meat-packing industry?

The point here, as I see it, is that, yes, most homeschoolers have perfectly good experiences. But the bad instances are where homeschooling collides with child abuse (and, imho, crazy-ass fundamentalism). It turns out that regular contact with professionals in school environments is one of the major ways to detect child abuse; having a way for abusive parents to evade that check is problematic.

One other number in that article for you: 700,000, the number of sales of 'To Train Up a Child' claimed by the books authors. Which is hopefully exaggerated, given that it's basically a how-to- manual for child abuse.

Creating institutional cover for child abuse is not ok.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:26 AM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


If one thinks that the HSLDA is a stalking horse for Christian Dominionism one might find the stat that 20% of HS families are dues paying members pretty disturbing.
posted by PMdixon at 11:27 AM on December 5, 2013


HACTAR: Statistics, from an actual government website.
posted by COD at 11:30 AM on December 5, 2013


As a new father (to a six month old girl), and as someone who is learning what it is really like to be a parent competely overwhelmed by love for my child, it's all the more shocking to me lately to hear of parents who don't seem to even like their kids all that much.

A lot of people don't actually think that much about their decision to have kids. I've often talked about the Real Adult Treadmill I saw in my own life as my friends grew up. If you want to be A Real Adult you have to get married and then buy a house and then have kids and then buy a minivan and on and on until you die, and if you step outside that rubric, you get massive amounts of social shaming and pressure.

Having a kid or kids is one of those things. People think my wife and I are weird because we've had several discussions and the fact is I, personally, don't like kids. I don't find them interesting or fascinating. I have about a 15 minute tolerance before I want them out of my space. She's okay with them but feels no pressing need or want to have them. So we're not having them.

Number of people who've said "Oh okay given that reasoning it sounds like a good decision": 0.

Number of people who've tried to convince us to have them anyway: An infinite number.

And yeah, I know, "it's different when it's yours"...but what if it's not? I know a LOT of parents who don't even seem to like their kids and I don't want to be one of those that gave into all the social pressure and "oh it's different when it's your own" and then, welp, I still hate kids. And people think I'm crazy for thinking that way.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:33 AM on December 5, 2013 [15 favorites]


If one thinks that the HSLDA is a stalking horse for Christian Dominionism one might find the stat that 20% of HS families are dues paying members pretty disturbing.

Indeed. People in this thread seem to be curiously uninterested in bringing in actual numbers, in their apparent attempts to disentangle homeschooling from christian fundamentalism. In 2007 (can't find more recent numbers that are reliable, but I found quotes of higher percentages that are more recent), 36% of homeschooling parents listed "to provide religion or moral instruction" as the primary reason for homeschooling, corresponding to around 540,000 students. 83% of homeschooling parents, corresponding to around 1.26 million students, listed it as an applicable reason. [ed.gov source, pdf]

(I'm assuming that to have religion at all as a part of the reasoning for homeschooling indicates some stripe of fundamentalism, which I suppose one could dispute.)
posted by advil at 11:35 AM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


//f one thinks that the HSLDA is a stalking horse for Christian Dominionism one might find the stat that 20% of HS families are dues paying members pretty disturbing.//

Don't forget the source of that 20% number - HSLDA themselves. Also, HSLDA quit being a homeschool organization about 20 years ago. They are a dominionist Christian lobbying organization fronting as a homeschool organization. There was a time when HSers did have to worry about the Sheriff showing up at the front door, but those days are long past. Most homeschool related legal disputes these days are really custody disputes, which HSLDA specifically will not help you with.. However, that doesn't stop HSLDA from continuing to scare homeschoolers into paying up for their protection.

HSLDA is a direct marketing machine. If you do anything anywhere that might show an interest in homechooling you are on their mail list forever. Hell, I still get mail from them and I've got a blog with years of archives that are very critical of them.
posted by COD at 11:36 AM on December 5, 2013


If one thinks that the HSLDA is a stalking horse for Christian Dominionism one might find the stat that 20% of HS families are dues paying members pretty disturbing.


They seem to be pretty stealthy about being a christian organization, judging by their website. You have to dig into the FAQ's to find mention of Generation Joshua. I can totally imagine them getting dues from non-fundy parents, and that's probably a big part of their strategy.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:37 AM on December 5, 2013


//I can totally imagine them getting dues from non-fundy parents, and that's probably a big part of their strategy.//

Bingo! They sell themselves as lawyers that will help you for free (if you are a member) when the government tries to force your kids into school. Like I said above, that rarely happens anymore, but the marketing schtick still works.
posted by COD at 11:40 AM on December 5, 2013


This is just so weirdly framed. The problem illustrated is not homeschooling specifically, but fundamentalism generally.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:42 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


The article overplays the lack of accountability issue. Some states, like Pennsylvania, do have pretty rigorous oversight. My state of VA requires annual testing for most homeschoolers. There is a religious exemption. On the other end of the spectrum Texas has no oversight at all.

If you're giving religious exemptions then it's not much of an oversight system (or so it seems to me). I don't have an issue with homeschooling; I've seen it work for some people and I've seen some spectacular disasters, but that's the case with a lot of education. I just don't see why mandated and non-escapable oversight of homeschooling is such a terrible thing. If homeschooling attracts some abusive parents who want to use this to sequester their kids this would stand a better chance of catching them; and those who are actually using this as a reasonable alternative to public schools wouldn't have any issues.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:47 AM on December 5, 2013 [13 favorites]


Metafilter: You don't have kids, do you?
posted by Sphinx at 11:54 AM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


IMO the religious exemption is abused in VA. The reporting requirements here aren't exactly onerous. We tell the state we are homeschooling at the beginning of the year, and the kids have to score above 35th percentile on one of the nationally normed standardized tests each year (Iowa Basic Skills, CAT9, etc). I've never really understood exactly how that interferes with somebody's right to practice religion, but we give religions wide latitude in this country on just about everything.

And by abused, we are still only talking about a few thousand kids a year being homeschooled under religious exemption,
posted by COD at 11:55 AM on December 5, 2013


One of the features of attending a school outside your home is that you have the opportunity to learn from a variety of different personality types. If your first grade teacher is mean and spends the entire school day yelling, next year, there's always the chance of getting the nice second grade teacher that gives out cookies as gold stars. Personally, I did better with some teachers and learned much more with them than I did with others. Once I got into the grades where we got different teachers for different subjects, it was even more pronounced. Some teachers' personalities and teaching styles just clicked for me.

Both of my parents were teachers and from what I understand from many of their former students, they were damn good teachers. I know I learned a good bit from my dad and it all seemed fairly easy with him. However, my mother cannot teach me anything. Her style and my personality are not well-suited and 90% of the things she tried to teach me, never took. In fact, I've gone back as an adult and taught myself a number of the things she tried to teach me and I'm quite good at them now. But she and I both understand that the way she presents information and the way I recieve are just inherently unmatchy.

I can't imagine how I would feel about education if I didn't get to learn at the feet of many different people and I highly doubt I would have become as successful as I am at learning if I had not been exposed to different teaching styles and personalities from a young age.

The fundamentalist and abuse issues aside, I have a serious difficulty believing that learning from only one or two people who you see every day can be helpful and a positive thing. No one I know has worked with the same people they started with, nor have they spent their entire lives surrounded by only their families. At some point you have to deal with the outside world, either intellectually or in some sort of administrative form. The lady at the DMV will not treat you like your mom and you need to be able to deal with that. For me, school and all the various people associated with it taught me how to adapt to different personalities and situations.
posted by teleri025 at 12:07 PM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


psycho-alchemy: "A lot of arguing from ignorance in this thread. Homeschooling has better outcomes than public school in almost every rubric."

Wow. That link is incredibly disingenuous. It wants to both posit that homeschooling parents are professionals! Lawyers! Doctors! Accountants! And that homeschooling children succeed better than public schooled kids regardless of parental income or education level. BOTH CAN'T BE TRUE.

Homeschooled students are self-selecting and they are absolutely wealthier, better-educated, and have more parental involvement than the average public school student. In virtually every situation where students are self-selecting, they will outperform an average public school. Public schools do not get the option of turning away children and rejecting parts of the community. However, if you compare apples to apples, and look at, for example, socioeconomic cohort direct comparisons, or even out the special ed weighting, these differences start to disappear. And of course the listed sources are fairly questionable.

Ugh, this infographic is filling me with so much rage I can hardly even handle it. Top-performing public schools -- where 30% of the fathers (just fathers! not mothers! the mothers are at home teaching!) of students are lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers -- ABSOLUTELY outperform the percentiles given in this terrible infographic. In fact, if you are selecting your students for high parental involvement, giving them "class sizes" averaging about five students (let us say), personalizing their curriculum, earning $70,000 a year, and your kids are averaging only in the 89th percentile (as is given as the average percentile score for homeschooled children of homes with income of $70,000 or more) THOSE CHILDREN ARE NOT RECEIVING AN EFFECTIVE EDUCATION. Kids with those demographics should be averaging higher.

Either these homeschooling advocates are terrible at statistics or great at rhetoric, I guess.

My two beefs with homeschooling are 1) the abandonment of the public good -- I got mine, screw you -- often by people who deplore that in other situations; and 2) the fact that children are vulnerable and have rights and, when those rights are being violated by their families, the only other current effective check on that is the school system. I've seen two (lefty, secular) homeschooling families of my acquaintance whose children had developmental issues that didn't get addressed for quite some time because the reassurance they received from the homeschooling community was that their children were special and different and developmental "norms" had little to do with individual children. Which is true to a point, I guess? But when your child actually has a developmental problem that can be addressed with early intervention and appropriate therapies, but you don't get that because your child doesn't go to school and no professionals with the ability to recognize the issues (pediatricians often aren't, for more learning disability type things) ever see your child, and you don't know it's problematically abnormal because you only have two children and when you're a newish parent, you just don't know ... I don't know, that's a problem. I don't really know how to address it, because I do think parents should have a very broad right to make educational decisions for their children, but their children also ought to have a right to a competent, age-appropriate educational and developmental program, and help if they need it. A lot of parents simply can't provide that.

And that's leaving aside questions of abuse and neglect; these are well-loved children with smart, engaged parents, but parents simply can't be expected to take on every single need of their children on their own.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:11 PM on December 5, 2013 [43 favorites]


//I have a serious difficulty believing that learning from only one or two people who you see every day can be helpful and a positive thing//

That's not how homeschooling works for non-fundamentalist families. Hell, it's not how it works in most religious homeschooling families. I have a friend that is a pHD in Chemistry that teaches the CHem classes for his local homeschool co-op. Do you think the kids he works with might be learning a little chemistry? Who do think visits museums at 10 AM on a random Wednesday? When the kids in school are stuck in biology class the homeschoolers are at the park on a ranger led tour of the local watershed. Who do you think is learning more?

Also, what happens to the kid in school who doesn't click with the math curriculum purchased by that state? He is screwed, or at least struggling. When the chosen math curriculum doesn't work for a HSer it goes up for sale on Ebay and you try something different. I should know as we tried several new, improved math curriculums before realizing what worked for our kids is old school Saxon math.

You've objected to just about every comment I've made in this thread, and all your objections exhibit a real lack of understanding in what actually goes on in the average homeschooling household. It's nothing like school, and we were rarely even at home.
posted by COD at 12:21 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


@Ghostride the Whip:
I've said this to several of my friends who aren't having kids (and two of them I'M glad they aren't having kids):
Good on you. I'm glad that you've put in thought and energy and discussion with your partner and made the purposeful decision to NOT have them. I love my first and am excited for my second. But that's MY choice. I wouldn't force the awfulness of child-rearing on anyone who isn't prepared to accept both it and the awesome parts that come with it.
Seriously, from a random Intertuber: I think you've made a good decision.
posted by mfu at 12:27 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Homeschooling is great because it keeps the fundamentalist parents out of the PTA. I really don't care about the quality of the education their children receive, and they don't try to destroy our science and history classes.
posted by Ghost Mode at 12:29 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


COD: "Also, what happens to the kid in school who doesn't click with the math curriculum purchased by that state? He is screwed, or at least struggling. When the chosen math curriculum doesn't work for a HSer it goes up for sale on Ebay and you try something different. I should know as we tried several new, improved math curriculums before realizing what worked for our kids is old school Saxon math."

But why should that option only be available to children whose parents are educated enough to make those decisions, and wealthy enough to spare enough parental labor for homeschooling? Why shouldn't all children have those options? What happens to the child in the school who is "screwed" because he doesn't understand the math curriculum and his single mother works two jobs to keep him fed and clothed? Why is that child not important? Or if that child is important, what will you do for that child? Or are children just not equal, and not entitled to equal educational opportunities?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:30 PM on December 5, 2013 [22 favorites]


I have a friend that is a pHD in Chemistry that teaches the CHem classes for his local homeschool co-op.

What makes this homeschool and not school-school?
posted by KathrynT at 12:34 PM on December 5, 2013 [7 favorites]


COD, I'm not disagreeing with everything you said, I was just relating my own difficulties with learning from my parents and how I felt that learning from a broad range of people is helpful.

The families that I've dealt with who have homeschooled have not participated in co-ops or any of the other things it sounds like you're doing.

I am curious how a homeschool co-op differs from any other small privately run school, though. If you have professionals that are trained in a specific knowledge area teaching classes, the kids going to a central location and learning the same type of things as each other, and organized activities and learning, I'm curious as to how that's different from a small private school. Is an accreditation and regulation thing? Or is there something more fundamental that I'm missing?

I'm a child of two public school teachers and I obviously have a bias towards public education, but I'm curious about this co-op thing and how it differs from the other options.
posted by teleri025 at 12:35 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


A co-op might meet once a week for classroom work, with the homework and other daily assignments being completed at home. Some co-ops are large and organized, meeting in classrooms on a regular basis and others are just a pick-up group of homeschooling parents who want to do group field trips.

When we started homeschooling in Atlanta, the challenge was not finding stuff to do outside of the home. It was figuring out how much not to do. There were sports leagues, band, and just about any sort of club/co-op/hybrid school you could imagine, ranging all over the spectrum in terms of religious affiliation. Owing to the area, most were Protestant, but the Catholic homeschoolers had a couple of large groups as well.
posted by jquinby at 12:39 PM on December 5, 2013


My two beefs with homeschooling are 1) the abandonment of the public good -- I got mine, screw you -- often by people who deplore that in other situations; and 2) the fact that children are vulnerable

This is the nut of the liberal guilt over abandoning a public school, though. Public school is a social good. They do better when involved parents use them. That is manifestly true.

HOWEVER.

In states like mine, the government has severely underfunded them (resulting in big classes, stressed teachers), sabotaged efforts at effective teaching in the name of ideology, and of course all that is the poop sprinkles on the shit sundae of school funding based on local taxes, which ensures severe disparities for richer and poorer districts (and also affects minorities disproportionately).

So, as a liberal parent with a kid that you want to give a good education to, do you sacrifice that kid's 12 years by putting them in run-down, stressful schools, contributing your pitiful mite of attention and volunteering (when you can get off work) trying to make them better, to live up to your ideals? Or do you take them out to homeschool/private school, even knowing that you are contributing to the tragedy of the commons?

My kid was in first grade and did almost nothing but goddamn worksheets or computer quizzes all day. He was in a good school, at least we were told it was by many people. His teacher was involved and really trying. But her hands were tied by the constraints of the system. He was not happy, and was trying really hard, but he was not flourishing. We were told, repeatedly, that it was going to get worse by second and third. More worksheets, more homework, and then standardized testing drilling, over and over. There was nothing we could do to change that, other than voting when we had the chance. We were powerless.

So we took him out. We were going to homeschool, but luckily a startup private school on a Montessori system opened up near us, and we found the cash and sent him. He's been there since September.

He's like a different kid. He doesn't pick fights with us when he gets home. He is learning, and being taught by people who care about him, know him, and are letting him set his pace. He is not stuck in a classroom. He never does worksheets. During free reading he initially refused to read anything but Hop on Pop for weeks; now he studies archaeology and geology books way beyond his actual reading level, because he's allowed to and they are interesting. And that reading level has greatly improved, because he is motivated. He is doing logic puzzles and creating and completing projects. He is working with kids older and younger than him and his life is so much richer for it. I didn't realize how dull his expression had been after a day at his old school until I saw how alive he looked after coming home from the new one. My god.

I can't possibly send him back. He's my kid. I will gladly fight for a solution that gives what he has to everyone, but I can't send him back to what he was dealing with before, not now that I know what it could be like for him.

The teachers who run the school are friends. They were dedicated to the kids they used to teach in public schools, but so so frustrated and depressed because they were not allowed to teach the way they knew they could. They cry when they talk about their new (thriving) school, because this is what they became teachers to do. Can I really call them villains for leaving a system that was completely hostile to that goal, and to them?
posted by emjaybee at 12:45 PM on December 5, 2013 [19 favorites]


First of all, in a co-op all the teachers are volunteers, although there is frequently a requirement that if your kids are participating you have to give back in some way by teaching, administrating, whatever. So it's not a school by any legal definition of a school. There is no accreditation, no oversight by the state, etc. It's just a group of like minded parents coming together to share resources, both physical, like space for the classes, and intellectual, like ability to teach certain subjects, to help the kids.

Obviously, the fundamentalist Christians can do the same thing and have a biology class that teaches the earth is only 6000 years old. And they do, and as far as I'm concerned that is fine. Plenty of people with wrong beliefs still manage to be responsible taxpayers and hold down a job, etc. Not everybody has to be intelligent.
posted by COD at 12:48 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Eybrows McGhee: I had a response for you but on preview - just read emjaybee. I was trying to say that, but not nearly as well.
posted by COD at 12:51 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


But why should that option only be available to children whose parents are educated enough to make those decisions, and wealthy enough to spare enough parental labor for homeschooling? Why shouldn't all children have those options? What happens to the child in the school who is "screwed" because he doesn't understand the math curriculum and his single mother works two jobs to keep him fed and clothed? Why is that child not important? Or if that child is important, what will you do for that child? Or are children just not equal, and not entitled to equal educational opportunities?

Well, what about them? I don't think anybody is saying that kids who aren't homeschooled aren't important. But to the extent that some parents will be more involved and some parents less involved in their kid's educations (parental involvement being, from what I understand I understand, the single most important factor in a child's educational success), the world kind of just isn't fair, you know?

I'd like to live in a world where single parents don't have to make these hard choices. I work to bring that world into existence. I advocate for it. But I don't know what this argument has to do with homeschooling, unless you are suggesting that until we eliminate socioeconomic inequality, nobody should be allowed to homeschool, which it kind of seems like you are. Is that your argument?
posted by gauche at 12:52 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Plenty of people with wrong beliefs still manage to be responsible taxpayers and hold down a job, etc. Not everybody has to be intelligent.

Kinda sucks to be the kid who doesn't get to be intelligent in the way they'd like because their parents didn't make a priority of teaching certain subjects, or teaching them correctly, whether out of ideology or ignorance. Which can happen just as easily in a secular homeschooling household.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:52 PM on December 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


//Kinda sucks to be the kid who doesn't get to be intelligent in the way they'd like because their parents didn't make a priority of teaching certain subjects, or teaching them correctly, whether out of ideology or ignorance. Which can happen just as easily in a secular homeschooling household.//

It also kind of sucks to be a kid stuck in an underfunded public school with outdated textbooks and no budget for field trips, being taught by burned out teachers sick of teaching to a fill in the dot test that will impact their pay next year.

Do you want to take a guess at which group represents the larger, more urgent problem? Do you want to take a guess at where we can help the most kids?

I'll make it simple, it'll cost absolutely nothing. Eliminate mandatory standardized testing in schools. That one thing will help more kids than exist in the highest, most far fetched estimates of the homeschooling population.
posted by COD at 1:02 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


emjaybee: "So, as a liberal parent with a kid that you want to give a good education to, do you sacrifice that kid's 12 years by putting them in run-down, stressful schools, contributing your pitiful mite of attention and volunteering (when you can get off work) trying to make them better, to live up to your ideals? Or do you take them out to homeschool/private school, even knowing that you are contributing to the tragedy of the commons?

Is this a rhetorical question or are you asking me personally? Because I, personally, got pregnant, looked at that shit, and ran for school board. There are 14,000 children in this city who deserve better, not just two who happen to belong to me. If I have the time and ability to make it better for my children, I have the time and ability to make it better for everyone's children. If I won't tolerate it for my children, I won't tolerate it for anybody's children.

I will gladly fight for a solution that gives what he has to everyone

In what way are you doing so?

I don't think parents who put their children in private schools or home school them are villains. I think they're trying to do what's best for their children, as all parents do. But I think they are being very shortsighted, and I think they are unintentionally teaching some very powerful lessons to their children about privilege, class, community, and the shared burdens and common goods of democracy, and maybe not the lessons they would wish to impart.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:04 PM on December 5, 2013 [39 favorites]


It does not work this way. You cannot follow “they [fundie homeschoolers] look at her in disgust” with “they’ve been raised with manners and to respect girls.” If they were raised to respect girls, why are they looking at Jane in disgust?
posted by telstar at 1:04 PM on December 5, 2013


gauche: "But I don't know what this argument has to do with homeschooling, unless you are suggesting that until we eliminate socioeconomic inequality, nobody should be allowed to homeschool, which it kind of seems like you are. Is that your argument?

In my comment just above I said I was a believer in a broad parental right to make educational decisions for their children, so not so much, no.

It is, however, fair to ask how a policy that an individual pursues would apply if everyone pursued it, and what the solution is when some individuals are able to buy their way out of public services -- for example, it's fair to debate educational draft deferments that allowed children of the upper-middle class to largely skip Vietnam if they so desired. If we agree that all children have a right to a good education, but that parents will be allowed to buy their students out of public schools such that public schools only serve the neediest children (educationally, developmentally, socially, economically), there are serious public policy implications to that, and that needs to be discussed.

I mean, quite literally, what is your solution to get that child of single parents a good education, if well-resourced students are allowed to buy their way out of the public school system and pursue private educations rather than engaging their families in improving the public systems? Advocates for homeschooling MUST answer that question; homeschooling doesn't exist in a vacuum and has significant impact on the rest of the community. I imagine there are many possible answers to that question, but it MUST be answered.

(This is also, quite obviously, an argument against property taxes funding local public schools in favor of regional, state, or national funding streams or equalization payments.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:10 PM on December 5, 2013 [12 favorites]


So it's not a school by any legal definition of a school. There is no accreditation, no oversight by the state, etc.

I'm not asking about a legal definition -- I'm asking about a philosophical definition. If your argument is that your local public school can't meet your child's needs for whatever reason and so you are hacking it together on your own, great, I have no doubts that that's successful. But many homeschool parents seem to disagree with the concept of school *philosophically,* except they then go on to create institutions that are exactly like school except with no standards or oversight, as you say.

Eliminate mandatory standardized testing in schools.

I was a student in Texas public schools before the TEAMS test was introduced as part of Ross Perot's educational reforms in that state. It was not pretty, nor was it effective. And the TEAMS test was better than the TABS test; my first year in Texas public schools was the first year of any kind of accountability testing, and the difference in the kids who were being educated under accountability testing vs. the kids who hadn't been was astounding. I agree that mandatory testing is overused and can be punitive, but you really have to look at what things were like without it. I mean, is "social graduation" even a thing any more?
posted by KathrynT at 1:16 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


COD, it really sounds like you're doing awesome by your kids.
Unfortunately I think that their experience is representative of HS kids in the same way that Stuyvesant High School students' experience is representative of public high school students'.
posted by PMdixon at 1:16 PM on December 5, 2013


I don't think parents who put their children in private schools or home school them are villains. I think they're trying to do what's best for their children, as all parents do. But I think they are being very shortsighted, and I think they are unintentionally teaching some very powerful lessons to their children about privilege, class, community, and the shared burdens and common goods of democracy, and maybe not the lessons they would wish to impart.
Agreed.

One of the few things I really dislike about my new hometown of St. Louis is the overwhelming trend of private schools. It's this twisted chicken and egg problem that just keeps becoming more and more horrific. City public school sucks, parents with money/time/motivation either move to the 'Burbs or send their kids to private school. City school has even less of a tax base and even less parents that care about their kids involved in the system, and sucks even more. Heck, we have a school district in St. Louis that lost their accreditation because massive budget cuts forced them to cut back on teachers, pay, and facilities maintenence. Now, in addition to trying to repair their dying school, hire better teachers, and try to meet the necessary requirements to get re-accredited, they have to pay transportation and compensation costs for the children who opt to go to an accredited school. Now I'm not saying that your kids should have to go to an unaccredited school, or your kid should suffer through a horrible education just because the school is underfunded and broken, but, one of the few ways that public schools improve is to have parents and community members involved in the process. That doesn't happen when all the caring parents bail and pull their kids out.

One of the many reason we began public schooling in this country was to provide a more level educational playing field that could hopefully balance out the disadvantages of families and communities that did not value education. I know it hasn't always been ideal and I know the system is very far from perfect, but turning to private schools and homeschooling seems to be turning your back on the entire ideal of an engaged citizenry that is united by shared experiences and history.

Sadly, as a lifelong non-parent, my voice is but a whisper and my input valued at even less.
posted by teleri025 at 1:23 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


PMdixon: My wife and I were not some sort of super homeschooling parents. We spent a lot of time wondering if we were doing enough. The homeschool experience that my kids had is very representative of the average homeschooler. We averaged about 3 hours a day of "school," and did several field trips / outing a week with other homeschoolers when they were younger. As the kids got to high school age we pretty much stayed out of their way and let them focus on what interested them.

It's all very homeschooling 101. This stuff simply works, and you don't need to be pHD parents to pull it off. Make sure the kids can read, communicate, and handle math up through about Algebra 1, and then get out of their way and let their interests take them wherever they lead.

There is no reason you couldn't set up the school system basically the same way. Focus on the core up through about 8th grade, with a lot of options for electives and free time, then make high school all electives.
posted by COD at 1:27 PM on December 5, 2013


Nobody is making you read if it is that frustrating stoneweaver. I'm sorry you had a bad experience that was related to homeschooling. However, your experience doesn't negate the positive experience its been for millions of kids. And their POV is equally as important as yours.

I'd guess the comments in this thread are running 70% negative, so I don't see how I'm overrunning anything.
posted by COD at 1:55 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I thought the article was about the experiences of people who have been raised by fundamentalist parents, not about home-schooling in general. Anyone read anything in there about how people are complaining that their liberal, hippie, science-teaching parents should not have home-schooled them?

The discussion seems to have drifted.
posted by larrybob at 2:06 PM on December 5, 2013 [7 favorites]


Mod note: For what it's worth, a couple dozen comments out of 80 in the thread is a lot for one person and it'd probably be best to let the thread breath a bit at this point, COD.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:08 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


I did not, larrybob, but it seems like a lot of people here and elsewhere took it as a HOMESCHOOLING IS BAD attack piece and rushed desperately to the ramparts to shout and flail defensively when I read it as more "This particular group of kids homeschooled as part of this movement had an extremely terrible experience and are now developing other resources for those caught in similar situations."
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:28 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


If I have the time and ability to make it better for my children, I have the time and ability to make it better for everyone's children.

I'm skeptical. If I have five dollars, I can afford to buy a milkshake. It doesn't follow that I can afford to buy a thousand milkshakes. It also doesn't follow from the fact that since I could improve someone's life by giving her a milkshake, I could improve a thousand people's lives by giving them one one-thousandth of the same milkshake.

Without a solution to a difficult coordination problem (one that we seem to have utterly failed to solve in the United States), the degree to which one could improve the education of one's own children is much, much greater than the degree to which one could improve the education of everyone's children given the same expenditure of time and ability.

The result, then is that parents have to make a very hard choice: do I try to improve my own child's experience by a lot or do I try to improve a lot of children's experience by a little? Beyond the difficulties involved in figuring out which choice is better in terms of its overall consequences, the decision is complicated by what I take to be an instance of a non-trivial question in moral theory: Do parents owe more to their children than they do to other people's children?
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:35 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


More than a quarter of the comments by one person with no perspective on the issue? I'm even more convinced home-schooling, considered as a whole, is harmful and counter-productive. (Zealotry isn't convincing unless you're already a convert.)

Children are not possessions, or shouldn't be--I understand that's how our society and laws treat them. EVERY kid needs a warm coat, regular healthy meals, exposure to as many different points of view as possible, a good education, a decent home life--in general, opportunity. To punish kids because their parents are "failures" is gross--we should be doing what we can to make sure every kid gets as many of those things as we can. As Eyebrows points out above, if your kids have to use the same facilities and resources the poors do, you're going to do what you can to make those facilities--and the staff and the laws that govern how they are funded--are as good as they can be.

And if the home-schooling parent's reason for keeping kids home is so they can indoctrinate them into their cult...really?
posted by maxwelton at 2:48 PM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


I mean, quite literally, what is your solution to get that child of single parents a good education, if well-resourced students are allowed to buy their way out of the public school system and pursue private educations rather than engaging their families in improving the public systems? Advocates for homeschooling MUST answer that question; homeschooling doesn't exist in a vacuum and has significant impact on the rest of the community. I imagine there are many possible answers to that question, but it MUST be answered.

Sure, but no more than it must be answered by parents who send their kids to private schools. I'd also argue that, to the extent homeschooling parents pay property taxes but do not consume school resources, the very act of homeschooling could be a net positive for schools. I don't know that I want to commit to that argument without empirical data, though. But I don't know why anybody has to answer that question before they can make a decision that, I think we agree, is both lawful and moral for their own children.

It doesn't seem to me that the act of somebody else homeschooling their own kids has much to do with the educational performance of the notional child of a single parent working two jobs. I rather suspect that there are a lot of other things which would make more of a difference in that child's life first, both from a perspective of systems that are failing that child and from a perspective of making an individual intervention into a particular child's life. So I'm curious to know how you see the causation shaking out.

FWIW, My own experience of being homeschooled was not particularly that of a well-resourced family. The resource we had in abundance was my mother's time, but there were years when my father pulled down much, much less than the federal poverty level for our family's size. Having two parents active in one's life is, perhaps, a kind of privilege that we were using, but I'm not sure that is something that public policy is particilarly equipped to compensate for. My parents also both have college degrees and were avid readers; I'm aware that not everybody's parents were like this, and that probably helped shape my experience a lot. But I rather suspect that homeschoolers in general, and particularly the fundamentalist Christians which are the subject of the article, are especially well-off.
posted by gauche at 2:51 PM on December 5, 2013


I did not, larrybob, but it seems like a lot of people here and elsewhere took it as a HOMESCHOOLING IS BAD attack piece and rushed desperately to the ramparts to shout and flail defensively

This is loaded language, isn't it?

Also, it's kind of creepy how people respond to "public schools are horrible indoctrination camps" with this austere insurance-adjustor-personality "well you just need to make them better".
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 2:54 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've met unschooling families (super liberal Oregon hippies) and partial schooling families (our neighbors have their kids in a charter school that has students come in to a classroom twice a month) so I see how awesome and flexible homeschooling can be. But the stories of complete isolation and abuse that the Homeschoolers Anonymous group have been sharing are harrowing. Even if these abuses are found in just a teeny fraction (less than 1%) of homeschooling families, should we ponder some safeguards for children?
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:55 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]




I cannot fathom how homeschooling can be a success. And I have really tried to wrap my brain around this issue.
Both of my parents were successful university professors - their fields were radically different. They would occasionally assign us extra-curricular assignments (books to read, essays to write, backyard scavenger hunts) - but we attended the public school.
A homeschooling family moved in up the road. I asked my dad why he and mom didn't homeschool us - after all, they were the two most brilliant people I'd ever met.
He replied, "your mother and I don't know enough about enough subjects to provide you with the education you need."
And now I reflect back on my math and science teachers, my beloved shop teacher, my civics teacher, history and AP english... the breadth of critical thinking I was exposed to at the public school, just by paying attention...
My folks were brilliant, but I owe my education to several dozen individuals who understood the fundamentals of their fields and were able to answer my questions to my satisfaction. I can't imagine how two parents (let alone a single parent) can possibly instill curiosity in kids about so many different fields of thought.
I recognize that I am reproducing and reifying the system of education that appears to have worked well for me. I may be wrong about this - but it seems that it would take a super-human to reproduce the education I received from all my many teachers.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 3:00 PM on December 5, 2013 [16 favorites]


My last comment was too broad and not related specifically to the fundamentalist families described in the article. But perhaps there is a connection between the fundamentalist Christian mindset of Christ-against-culture at all costs and their willingness to abandon the larger project of Christian orthopraxy in favor of inventing their own systems and doctrines out of whole cloth.
It is a sort of libertarianism - abandoning the larger culture in order to carve out a new sacred space because "we know what's best for us and everyone else is obviously wrong."
posted by Baby_Balrog at 3:06 PM on December 5, 2013


It is bitterly amusing for me to read how some of "Generation Joshua," the intended Janissaries of the Christian Reconstruction movement, are refusing to remain indoctrinated. Anyone who survived a an "old time" Catholic school education can understand what happens when the operant conditioning wears off.

I am sad for the travail of these abused young people, but not for failures of the useful idiots of Rousas John Rushdoony, Gary North and the rest of the Dominionist dogmatics, who think they can "train up" children into replicants of Ted Cruz, star debater, and thereby control "the Culture."
posted by rdone at 3:12 PM on December 5, 2013


It is a sort of libertarianism - abandoning the larger culture in order to carve out a new sacred space because "we know what's best for us and everyone else is obviously wrong."

I find this pretty insightful. One of the things my homeschooling experience has given me that I most wish I had not received was this: I was never shown how to have a critique of the system without checking out of the system wholesale. I got plenty of critique, but no answers beyond "leave everything behind and start growing as much of your own food as possible." And as one of the smart, articulate ones, I was expected to come back into society as an adult and shape it according to the critique, which was a burden my parents had relieved of themselves.
posted by gauche at 3:12 PM on December 5, 2013 [12 favorites]


I'm not convinced that the message of "if you don't like society, simply don't participate" is helpful. Pulling kids out of public school does nothing to help the situation; in fact, it does much to exacerbate it. I suspect that the decision to homeschool is a decision based way more often on control than it is on actual education.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 3:21 PM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


I was interested in maybe someday eventually homeschooling my hypothetical kids until my mother told me about a relative of ours who was doing it.

Said relative only barely has a high school diploma (she dropped out at 15 and finished school through correspondence courses). Kid is an only child. There are perfectly adequate public schools in their community with qualified teachers. Homeschooling so far seems to consist of taking field trips to places that people with children in conventional schooling often go as a matter of course (the zoo, museums, etc). Kid had really thrived in the kindergarten her parents pulled her out of in order to home school.

I instinctively recoiled at the idea of pulling this kid out of school. And then I realized -- if I think it's such an awful idea for my relative to homeschool her kid, who am I to decide I'm better equipped to do the same thing?

I really think that it ought to be mandatory by law to send kids through a state accredited educational institution at least for K-5 education, in the absence of severe extenuating circumstances to the contrary as evaluated by independent observers.

I've met a few people who were home schooled in high school, and that appears to be a very different thing, to me, than simply never educating your child for selfish reasons of your own.
posted by Sara C. at 3:22 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


Homeschooling really is a prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of the commons kind of situation. Sure it might be better in isolation to homeschool your child, but the more people who do it, the worse for society as a whole.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 3:22 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


The only hope is if the older kids (girls usually) give up some of their own educations and their own childhoods for the sake of their younger siblings to become assistant mothers at a young age.

This is at the heart of my cynicism about homeschooling.

It's one thing to be all, "Whee! We are unschooling so the kids do a few hours of structured learning and then are freeeeeeeeee to be themselves and pursue their own projects with guidance from us."

It's something else when that's code for, "our children are unpaid domestic labor, and the fact that they're not being educated means they can never escape this situation."
posted by Sara C. at 3:33 PM on December 5, 2013 [11 favorites]


I also wonder how much "homeschooling" is a euphemism for believing it's not important to educate daughters.
posted by Sara C. at 3:34 PM on December 5, 2013 [12 favorites]


It's about growing up homeschooled by fundamentalist parents who are using it as a tool to separate, control and train culture warriors. It's about people finding out they've been alienated their entire lives, and having to escape their families to have anything approaching a life that's satisfying and fulfilling.

yet the funny thing is that everyone in the thread wants the government to squash these dangerous radicals.

the funny thing about the article is that, reading it, you would think that Lauren and John are "Prius-driving" vegetarian subscribers to the Nation, instead of Patrick Henry educated members of the radical political right, one of whom happens to have grown up in an abusive home.

is the issue that they raised their children to be political activists? or that they were abusive?
posted by ennui.bz at 3:58 PM on December 5, 2013


I'm remembering the smaller schools idea that was picked up by the Gates foundation some years ago, and then abandoned for lack of results. My understanding of what happened is that some data was produced indicating that smaller schools produce better educational outcomes, which led to some programs being developed to support the creation of small schools.

But what had actually happened was a statistical fluke: Taking smaller sample sizes (ie, testing kids in smaller schools) produced more variance in the testing results, which in turn meant it was easier for small schools to be outliers. (This is apparently confirmed in England, where small schools do better until one controls for economic circumstances: Richer areas can pay for smaller school sizes, amongst other things, and it seems the 'other things' have greater effects than the school size.) And the argument for having exposure to more people from more walks of life is a good one, I think.

When we get down to the level of home schooling, we're talking about one or five kids at a time; this is necessarily going to provide more anecdotes than data unless one is quite serious about their methodology.... Your kid is doing better than 95% of public schooled kids? Well, so are five percent of public schooled kids.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:03 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


A lot of people denying that there is a real problem here. If children are being abused and the community doesn't do anything about it, it's a damn problem. Too many of this is about control. Too much is excused, because religion. Bullshit. The homeschool and religious communities better start getting more proactive.
posted by UseyurBrain at 4:20 PM on December 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


"(parental involvement being, from what I understand I understand, the single most important factor in a child's educational success)"

Actually, while that's correlated, the single most important factor is degree of poverty.
posted by klangklangston at 4:24 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


everyone in the thread wants the government to squash these dangerous radicals.

Not at all. I want a world where being the child of a radical, of any stripe, doesn't necessarily deprive you of basic human rights.

The parents can continue believing whatever they'd like.
posted by Sara C. at 4:25 PM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


From over here in Australia, I find this a very interesting discussion, as homeschooling is somewhat growing in popularity here, but at the same time is - like most of the world outside the US - very very rare indeed, and not the social norm anywhere.

I wonder, beyond the religious aspects, what it is about American culture and history that makes homeschooling much more attractive? Obviously, I think a stronger history of anti-regulation, anti-government, pro-independece etc. But I also can't help wondering what kind of a role racism played in its genesis as well. The accepted idea of keeping your children away from undesirables, and an ambivalence towards integration, pro-segregation etc (I am NOT saying this is necessarily the motivation around home schooling today).

One of the few things I really dislike about my new hometown of St. Louis is the overwhelming trend of private schools.

Indeed. The crazy thing is that all the research I've read - pertaining mostly to Australia - is that it makes jack shit of a difference. You put a kid with rich parents with degrees in a good school, they do good. You put them in a poor school, they still do good; the difference is literally undetectable in Australia. The same holds true for kids from lower educated parents and socioeconomic backgrounds, too. You put them in the most expensive private school in Sydney; they will still do badly compared to their bourgeois buddies.

Sometimes I feel like homeschooling, private schooling etc is an attempt by parents to control the uncontrollable - the biggest helping hand your kids will get, educationally, come from who you are, not what you give them. An uncomfortable truth.
posted by smoke at 4:31 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


But again, this article isn't about homeschooling in general. It's not a referendum on whether it's a good thing for communities or for some hypothetical kids. It's about growing up homeschooled by fundamentalist parents who are using it as a tool to separate, control and train culture warriors.

That's fair. But the first comment out of the gate was this:

And that's why homeschooling should be illegal unless strictly monitored: it provides too much control to parents.

Which is a blanket statement about homeschooling.

It's also unclear how one could address the kind of abuse detailed in the article without generic controls -- the sort of strict monitoring that MartinWisse suggested in his comment -- which means that we have to have a conversation about homeschooling in general. We can't just single out the fundamentalists and say, "No homeschooling for you."

[I would be very happy to see a testing requirement of some sort imposed on homeschooled children, but I suspect there will be pushback on this from people who think standardized tests are uninformative, from people who think standardized tests lead to homogenized education and think that's a bad thing, and from people who want to homeschool precisely to avoid those features of our public education system. I would also be very happy to see more regulation of parenting in general in the form of visits from state agents to make sure there is no abuse or neglect. But I think pushback here is (to put it mildly) much more likely, not least because it would be expensive. One might argue that we should require observations for homeschooling parents, but in order to avoid the appearance of a political witch-hunt, the government should really have numbers indicating that abuse is more common among homeschooled children than it is in the general population. If anyone has numbers like that, I would love to see them.]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 4:36 PM on December 5, 2013


Kids in public schools are in the presence of a mandatory reporter ~180 days a year. Homeschooled, potentially 0.
posted by PMdixon at 4:41 PM on December 5, 2013 [13 favorites]


wants the government to squash these dangerous radicals

Just to be clear, I don't want the regulation I implicitly endorsed above to squash anyone's religious beliefs, practices or right to raise their children (whether or not I find their beliefs radical or otherwise). I do want regulations that test the quality of education for home schooled children.
posted by audi alteram partem at 4:44 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


but at the same time is - like most of the world outside the US - very very rare indeed, and not the social norm anywhere.

It's actually very rare in the US, as well. Except for certain circles, usually either the very hippy-dippy or the very culturally conservative. The vast majority of parents send their children to school.
posted by Sara C. at 4:45 PM on December 5, 2013


Homeschoolers are not a particularly homogeneous group. The fundamentalists that are the subject of the article are as foreign to our homeschooling experience as I apparently am to 99% of Metafilter. There is virtually nothing beyond the basic right to homeschool that all homeschoolers would agree on. And quite frankly, many conservative Christian HSers would be happy to use the power of govt (if they had it) to force my kids into church.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on homeschooling specifically, although over a few cases they have upheld the right to keep kids out of school for religious reasons (Yoder V Wisconsin), the fundamental right to establish a home and bring raise kids according your religious views (Meyer v Nebraska) and the right of states to establish educational standards but not the right to dictate how parents meet those standards (Pierce v Society of Sisters). That last one is where the legality of private schools flows from. So the fantasies expressed above about making HSing illegal or forcing kids into school are simply not gonna happen. Almost 100 years of Supreme Court precedence is not on your side.

Any sort of widespread inspection or home visit program will suffer from the same sort of collateral damage that the TSA suffers from trying to find the 1 bad guy in a million that might have nefarious plans that day when boarding a flight. And that is the primary reason HSers fight any sort of expansion of regulation. The child abusers will still find a way, they always do. Meanwhile too many innocent families will be ripped apart as kids are thrown into child protective services in error. CPS is stretched thin as it is. Adding 2 million HSers to the mix in a futile effort to root out the handful of bad actors using HSing as a cover simply isn't going to work.

People like the families profiled in the OP are always going to exist. Always. It's basic human nature. Maybe there are some tweaks to the law that would make their lives more difficult without infringing on the 99% that aren't doing anything wrong. But I can't really think of anything that will pass constitutional muster.
posted by COD at 5:16 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


spamandkimchi, that was crushing and heart-breaking. My God. How many children grow up like that?
posted by thelonius at 5:16 PM on December 5, 2013


It's actually very rare in the US, as well.

Sorry, what I meant was that it's one of the higher rates, per capita, globally.
posted by smoke at 5:32 PM on December 5, 2013


gauche: " I'd also argue that, to the extent homeschooling parents pay property taxes but do not consume school resources, the very act of homeschooling could be a net positive for schools. "

It isn't in most districts. State and federal aid are distributed on a per-student-attending basis. Only about 1/3 of our funding comes from local property taxes, and commercial property is much more valuable to us than residential property; looking at residential property, only around 1/3 of households have K-12 students, so the large majority of our taxpayers already don't have students enrolled in the school.

Anyway, residential property taxes only make up maybe 1/8 of our total budget; my tax burden is right smack at the residential average for my district, and what I pay to the school district in taxes doesn't even cover a quarter of just the tuition cost of a single student. So let's say 1/4 of that student's money comes from their parent's property taxes; 3/4 of that comes from state and federal sources per student and if that student is not in school, that money is gone. We would much rather have the student and his engaged parents than the $2,000 or so in "unutilized" property taxes his family generates. I am not explaining this well but I can ask a school finance guy in the morning for a better way to illustrate it if it's important. But the point is, because of the way you distribute resources across many students, it's almost always better for us to have the student enrolled and get the state and federal money for that student than to lose that student and their state and federal money and only "get" a small amount of "unutilized" property taxes.

Jonathan Livengood: "The result, then is that parents have to make a very hard choice: do I try to improve my own child's experience by a lot or do I try to improve a lot of children's experience by a little? Beyond the difficulties involved in figuring out which choice is better in terms of its overall consequences, the decision is complicated by what I take to be an instance of a non-trivial question in moral theory: Do parents owe more to their children than they do to other people's children?"

It may help your calculus to know that middle-class students in "bad" schools statistically tend to do fine; it's poor students who are the most highly affected by the quality of the educational environment because they don't have the family resources that wealthier students do. We also know that keeping middle-class students in a school provides a disproportionately positive effect on poor peers. So pulling your middle-class child out to homeschool them doesn't provide much benefit to your child, while it does cause fairly significant harm to their impoverished classmates.

Or, basically, what smoke said about Australia, except in the U.S., we do see an effect where the larger the middle-class cohort in a school with a significant impoverished student body, the better the impoverished students do.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:57 PM on December 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


"99%" does not correlate to the 83% who keep their kids out of public school for religious reasons. From comments above:
In 2007 (can't find more recent numbers that are reliable, but I found quotes of higher percentages that are more recent), 36% of homeschooling parents listed "to provide religion or moral instruction" as the primary reason for homeschooling, corresponding to around 540,000 students. 83% of homeschooling parents, corresponding to around 1.26 million students, listed it as an applicable reason.
If these folk's perception of the "dangers" of the secular world are such that they feel their kid might be "led astray" by opening a book which has been vetted by the Texas book-buying powerhouse as being sufficiently mild, non-critical and non-scientific to pass muster, I'm going to feel free to think that maybe the number of nutters isn't 1%, but at least 36% and probably closer to 83%.
posted by maxwelton at 6:16 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


Their parents believed they had a recipe for raising kids who would never rebel and would faithfully perpetuate their parents’ values into future generations. But the ex-homeschoolers say that it was being trained as world-changers that led them to question what they were taught—and ultimately led them to leave.

It seems like it was actually a recipe for near-total rebellion as soon as the opportunity presented itself. If they wanted world-changers, they should have raised their kids to operate in that world, instead of sheltering them from it completely.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 6:29 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Limiting kids social outlets is not abuse.

Well, actually, this is why I have problems with homeschooling, even of the good, well intentioned, parents are capable of giving their children a proper, well rounded education kind. Limiting social contacts is abuse, kids need other kids to socialise with and learn to socialise with. (Not just making friends, but as important, learning how to get along with people you don't like or like you.)

That's why school is important. Homeschool, and your kids miss out on this unless you take steps to fill this void in other ways. This is not an unsolvable problem, but it is hard.

Which in turn is why you shouldn't be able to just let your kids drop out and school them anyway you want them without oversight, yet this is exactly what the fundamentalist/evangelist homeschooling movement in the US has achieved. And that makes the protestations of people here that "most homeschoolers aren't this way" unconvincing, because we don't know that bexcause there is no oversight.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:26 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


Maybe there are some tweaks to the law that would make their lives more difficult without infringing on the 99% that aren't doing anything wrong. But I can't really think of anything that will pass constitutional muster.

What's unconstitutonal about Hactar's proposal? "Have two or three observational visits a year by a teacher and have the kids present a portfolio of work at the end of the year. It does not have to be in line with what the public schools teach, but there should be proof that, to steal a phrase, our children are learning."

This is similar to current law in some states anyway. For example, New York.

And it certainly would seem to make the lives of people who are not committed educators, but homeschooling only out of cultural/religious pressure, harder in all the right ways, without unduly burdening people who want to give their kids good educations anyway. It seems like, in fact, it would be very helpful to the latter as well.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:30 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]


I was homeschooled for several years, and my siblings were homeschooled for much of their education. Articles like this really hit home for me and I'm glad to see more people speaking out against fundamentalism-based homeschooling.

As COD wrote, the majority of homeschoolers I knew weren't full-on headscarves, 12 kids, abuse-and-isolation misogynists.

However - and this is an important 'however' in my experience - there are a large number of families who are on the fringes of this ideology, my parents included.

We were taken out of public schools that my sister and I loved partly do to a teacher's enthusiasm for my sister's aptitude for science and math, which lead my parents to believe that the public school would be pushing feminism on their daughters and partly due to peer pressure from their fundamentalist church which had a few Quiverfull families, as well as more 'mainstream' families such as mine.

My parents tried to educate us well, and even up until a few years ago, would probably have said the same thing as many of the homeschooling parents on this thread: that we were well adjusted, had a quality education, and were able to pursue our own interests with more freedom than our peers in public school.

This is all true...to a point. What we missed out on were developing vital social skills, learning to respectfully consider alternative viewpoints, learning about subject areas that my parents didn't have much knowledge in, and how to form identities outside of the family.

And the isolation. Oh god, so lonely. My parents told relatives not to worry about socialisation for homeschoolers, that there were plenty of co-ops and choirs and sports teams that we could join. And we went to several of them....once or twice. Then my mom got bored or possibly the pressures of homeschooling and ferrying around four kids all day got to her and we would quit, possibly to join the next homeschooling group that caught my mother's attention for a few times.

My parents had an odd mix of ideologies, and were never as extreme as the people in the article. But what makes these ideologies so dangerous isn't just the people who take them completely onboard. Those on the fringe are also damaged.

Most of the textbooks my mother used were produced by these radical homeschooling groups. The magazines in our house - which I read avidly as some window into the outside world - were produced by radical homeschooling groups. Some of my few homeschooling friends were from really fundamentalist families. My parents didn't fully believe everything taught by these radical homeschooling groups, but they didn't denounce it either and the impression I got, as a young child, was that these radical families were the ideal.

The message of these groups carried on even after my depression and aching loneliness finally convinced my parents to send me to a charter and then a public school, and my brothers' finished up their education first at second-rate Christian school and then at a public high school.

I still battle with many of the ideologies of my early homeschool education, especially the message that my parents absorbed and then passed on to us about the importance of absolute obedience to parents. While some might say the article made broad generalisations about a small minority of families, I would argue that the article might not have gone far enough in tracing the poison of these fundamentalist homeschooling ideologies, and how they affected - and in some of my siblings' cases, continue to affect - 'fringe families', like mine.
posted by brambory at 5:17 AM on December 6, 2013 [13 favorites]


I teach English Language Arts in a failed middle school. If I had children (which I don't), I would either pony up for private school, move to a better school district, or homeschool, because this place can be chaotic, depressing, and dangerous.

But I don't have kids, so I'm free to pour energy into the public school system, hoping some day it'll be a safe and positive place to be.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 7:18 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]


Countering a point made further up about 200 stories not being representative of a large minority - I think that actually is. Getting 200 people to write a public personal account means drawing on a much larger pool of similar people, because not everyone can write or is willing to share in public. Rule of thumb is that you have about 100 people reading for every comment, 1000 for every article.

I think Joyce (she quotes me in one of her books, oddly enough) is a speculative writer more interested in theme than detail, but I also found her general adoption pieces to match my community experiences.
posted by viggorlijah at 7:35 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


Limiting social contacts is abuse, kids need other kids to socialise with and learn to socialise with. (Not just making friends, but as important, learning how to get along with people you don't like or like you.)

Let's not pretend that public schools are the answer to this problem. It took me years to recover from the "socialization" that I received in elementary and middle school.
posted by nolnacs at 7:57 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]


My experience on the socialization: I didn't lack personal interaction type skills. In fact, I was and am quite the charmer.

Instead, I lacked a lens through which to view relationships that didn't link "making people like me" to "absolutely necessary for my well being." This sounds silly, but I really truly behaved as if I had to have everyone's approval or I was literally in danger. In other words, every relationship bore the same weight as that a child has with a parent. I had no model of dealing with people in which disappointing someone, anyone, was acceptable, let alone inevitable.

Now I recognize my deal is towards the extreme. But there's more to socialization than just learning to share and not shove. It's also about learning how boundaries work, and how to negotiate one's needs with others.
posted by PMdixon at 8:12 AM on December 6, 2013 [5 favorites]


there are a large number of families who are on the fringes of this ideology, my parents included.
One thing that fascinated me about the article was the number of family narratives where it seemed like the parents weren't that extreme when they started homeschooling, but the Christian Homeschooling Community acted as sort of a radicalizing element, pushing their ideology in the form of educational resources and social experiences for the kids. After a while, the parents were "full-on twelve kids abuse and mutilation misogynists", to use your phrase.

Which gives me the wiggins, I'm sorry.

People should be able to organize politically and religiously in whatever manner they see fit. But there's something really unseemly about indoctrinating parents by appealing to their fears about their children's education.

(Also, LBR, guys, it's no coincidence that this all started immediately post-segregation.)
posted by Sara C. at 9:19 AM on December 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


Also, LBR, guys, it's no coincidence that this all started immediately post-segregation.

Basically every seemingly-bizarre uniquely American practice is about race and slavery. Especially a lot of the religious ones.
posted by PMdixon at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2013 [5 favorites]


Re the "socialization" issue, I don't see kids socializing with other kids as the big motivator for public schooling, though that's a component of it and it is important, even if it's harsh.

The important thing isn't to teach them to get along with other kids, the important thing is to make them a part of the community. As a kid going to school, there's a variety of other adults who see you every day who aren't related to you. You have to leave your home and move through the city to go to a place, every day. You have to navigate a community that is bigger than just you and your nuclear family, and that has goals and needs that might be at odds with yours. You have to meet people who are different from you.

It's a fundamental part of seeing yourself as part of a larger whole, and in the modern world which is no longer structured like "individual>patriarchal family>religious community", being introduced to that larger whole through school is an accepted institution.
posted by Sara C. at 9:25 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


Countering a point made further up about 200 stories not being representative of a large minority - I think that actually is. Getting 200 people to write a public personal account means drawing on a much larger pool of similar people, because not everyone can write or is willing to share in public.

Also, the fact that this is a growing movement implies that, while it may not be The Norm within homeschooling, it's not a few isolated families, either.
posted by Sara C. at 9:27 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]


Considering that they are not only quiverfull and homeschool, but also anti-vax and almost exclusively holistic healing, it's probably as well that the kids aren't in public schools to spread disease. They have already had mumps, measles and chicken pox -- they came out fine, but not everyone them came in contact with would.

Good point. Measles is spreading in large numbers: Measles Cases Triple in U.S., Vaccine Refusal Here and Elsewhere to Blame
posted by homunculus at 5:21 PM on December 6, 2013


It seems to me that people are making a lot of assumptions about what homeschooling is or must be like for all home schooling families. I think like a lot of things, it can be done well or it can be done poorly. I am a supporter of homeschooling mainly because my exposure has been to families who do it really, really well.

My favourite homeschooling family is one I knew when I ran a music school. There were six kids in the family and the ranged from 16 to 0 when I first met them. They all came in twice a week to do music lessons. Four of them did both individual lessons and chamber or group lessons; the littlest one did music for tots, and the baby was still a babe in arms. On the days they were not with us, they did art lessons and team sports and 4H. In the summer they did bible camp and either music camp or science camp. They received need-based scholarships from us and a combination of need and merit scholaships for their (prestigious) summer camps.

I spent at least a couple of hours a week with them waiting for their various lessons and they were lovely kids. The family was close but they didn't lack in socialisation; they did a lot of activities with other kids both in and outside their church. They were hardly isolated and had long-standing relationships with trusted adults both in and outside their church.

I think people are being very judgemental here, equating homeschooling with isolationist fundamentalism. But public school education is very new in human history; for the bulk of human development, people have been educated at home except where they were too poor to be educated at all. I mean, when Jane Austen was educated at home, that was perfectly normal and people and I recall no biographers recording it as a tragedy; many people in history have been educated by governesses and private tutors.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:23 PM on December 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


I mean, when Jane Austen was educated at home, that was perfectly normal and people and I recall no biographers recording it as a tragedy

Before public schooling, only the most privileged children or children whose parents had a particular affinity for book learning were educated.

That's not a world I'm interested in going back to. Are you?
posted by Sara C. at 8:30 PM on December 6, 2013 [12 favorites]


Before public schooling, only the most privileged children or children whose parents had a particular affinity for book learning were educated.

That's not a world I'm interested in going back to. Are you?

Is the world really that different today? Poor kids are still mostly getting screwed by the school system. They may have the same right to be warehoused in an institutional school for 12 years, but they sure as hell aren't being afforded the same privileges as the rich kids. At least they were learning useful skills (for the time) working on the farm 100 years ago. Kids who don't thrive in school today have virtually no options beyond suffering through it until they can legally quit.

Millions of well meaning people have been trying to make age based, institutionalized education work for 100 years. They still haven't figured it out, and we aren't even progressing towards the goal. Maybe that's because it's never going to work the way it's currently constructed.
posted by COD at 6:12 AM on December 7, 2013


COD: "Millions of well meaning people have been trying to make age based, institutionalized education work for 100 years. They still haven't figured it out, and we aren't even progressing towards the goal. Maybe that's because it's never going to work the way it's currently constructed."

This is absolute nonsense, but in what way would you say the goal of a free, universal public education that serves most children well hasn't been figured out and we aren't progressing towards that goal? The 90% of students in public schools? (With the vast majority of the remaining 10% in similarly-constructed private schools?) The universalization of education to include women, the poor, minorities, the disabled, the deaf, the English-as-a-second-language students? The vast delivery of educational and medical therapies through schools to help students achieve, therapies often available nowhere else because private providers don't do them? The drastic reduction in truancy? The increased child labor laws that keep kids in school and out of dangerous jobs?

Or is it outcomes, the massive number of patents filed per thousand US public-educated citizens, outpacing every other nation by quite a bit? The enormous cultural output in terms of books, movies, blogs, music?

And, if the current system of institutionalized universal free public education has failed, what is your policy alternative that will achieve the same goals of universal education for all children, and do it better, for ALL children?

Public schools aren't perfect by any means, but I have yet to hear a reasonable, equitable alternative. So what is that alternative that you propose?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:55 AM on December 7, 2013 [14 favorites]


1800: You can only become educated if your family is wealthy or your parents have a particular affinity for book learning. Period.

2013: All children have access to schooling. While not all schools are created equal, any child who actually shows up at their assigned school and does the work is guaranteed to pass on to the next educational level, potentially up to graduate and professional schooling. A diligent child from a poor background can achieve a reasonable degree of upward mobility simply by attending school.

I actually grew up with quite a few kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who, through academic achievement, have managed to grow up to be quite successful. Granted, I know most of these people through "gifted" programs, and it definitely is a crapshoot that poor and minority children will end up tracked into those programs. But without a public school system at all they wouldn't have stood a chance.
posted by Sara C. at 9:30 AM on December 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


At no time have I advocated eliminating the public school system, and in fact earlier in the thread I explicitly stated the public school system is a net positive. You two (Eyebrows and Sara C) are confusing going to school with education.They are not synonyms. Education is unquestionably a good thing in all cases. However, there is a huge number of kids for whom the public school system simply fails them. We are talking over a million kids, every year. The drop out rate is 22%. So that is 600,000 kids that don't even bother to finish high school each year. I don't know of any statistically valid way to estimate the number of kids who graduate but didn't thrive and /or were mostly miserable the entire time. If 22% drop out, which is a very extreme action., then probably an equal number were miserable enough that they frequently wished they weren't there. So the school system is succeeding for barely half (56%) of the kids in it.

That's your idea of a successful education system? 1/3 to 1/2 of the kids that supposedly did well and went on to college need remedial classes in college to make up for stuff they were supposed to learn in high school. So it didn't exactly work for a lot of them either. When I look at 100 years of American public school system history what I see is that lockstep, age based institutional schooling simply fails too many kids.

Maybe the problem is that I simply have a much higher standards for what constitutes an education. I'd like to see every kid have the life mine did growing up, without the drudgery of homework every night and without being stuck in soulless classroom all day. I'd like every kid to learn to read and write well, communicate effectively, and be comfortable with the math they need to do what they want to do in life. I'd like every kid to have the time and the resources to explore whatever they want and to follow their passions, and not have their entire K-12 existence mapped out in advance to ensure the maximum pass rate on the end of year standards of learning exams. I laid out (in super brief two sentence format) in an earlier comment how to restructure the public school system to take a big step in that direction. I'll repeat it here, a little more fleshed out.

K-8 should focus on providing the the basic tools kids will need to later to teach themselves anything they may ever want to learn. So that's reading, communicating (both written and verbal) and math up through about Albegra I and Geometry. Within that there should be ample free time for kids to follow through on whatever interests them at the time. The high school years should be 100% electives beyond whatever classes are needed to meet the standard in the first sentence.

So in my ideal world the schools have 80% less bureaucrats, probably 80% more teachers, staff scientists in every school, music and art in every school, and no football teams. (Sports would be community run outside of the schools.) So the school system looks like a mash-up of community college, Montessori schools as they exist today, and summer camp. We already spend over $10,000 per year per student in the public schools. I don't think my model needs to cost any extra, but if it does, its worth it.
posted by COD at 11:15 AM on December 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


However, there is a huge number of kids for whom the public school system simply fails them. We are talking over a million kids, every year. The drop out rate is 22%. So that is 600,000 kids that don't even bother to finish high school each year.

At least the high school dropouts had a school to drop out of. They had some degree of agency in deciding that education wasn't for them, and their path lay elsewhere. (Though I agree that the school system fails those students, obviously.)

If your parents are religious fundamentalists who decide to "homeschool", you don't have that choice. Your educational lot in life is whatever your parents say it is.
posted by Sara C. at 12:28 PM on December 7, 2013 [5 favorites]


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