sexuality that is heterosexual and traditionally gendered, and this understanding ends up constraining, and even hurting, children. I argue that these two critiques correspond to two competing ideologies of childhood: one that views children as “in process,” or as developing toward selfhood, and the other that views children as already selves, capable of exercising agency and autonomy. These two ideologies of childhood result in different homeschooling practices, highlighting how the homeschooling experience can be very different for children depending on their parents’ ideological standpoint.
The competing ideologies of childhood that I discuss in chapter 2 were not the only ideologies of childhood that I came across in my research. Whether they understand children as innocent people-in-development or as already agentic, autonomous people, the parents I interviewed almost universally talked about their children as unique. In chapter 3, I examine this ideology of the unique child, arguing that it has taken hold as one of the dominant ideologies of childhood in the United States. Examining how homeschooling parents utilize this discourse of unique children demonstrates the ways in which this ideology leads parents to prioritize their own children’s needs over the needs of other children. I demonstrate that parents talk about homeschooling as a practice that allows them to tailor children’s education to their unique temperaments, aptitudes, interests, and other needs, and furthermore, that it does this in a way that is just not feasible in public-school classrooms.
In chapters 4 and 5, I look more closely at parents’ perceptions of public education. In chapter 4, I show that these parents believe that children need certain things out of their educational experiences, but they do not always see children—their own and others—getting these things from public schools. The parents I interviewed use the logic and rhetoric of the school-choice movement to talk about their search for alternative options to their local public schools when they see an incompatibility between what they think their children need out of their education and what schools are providing. The school choice model has, ironically, resulted in increased standardization of schools, with a corresponding decrease in individual and collective efficacy of teachers to advocate for their students. I argue that these twin trends, when combined with the increased pressure for mothers to manage the individual needs of their children, effectively pit motherhood and public schools against each other. Mothers feel forced to take an oppositional stance toward public school to ensure that their children’s needs are met. When these needs are not met, the responsibility falls on the mother, not the school, to find an alternative solution. I argue that these narratives reveal how some mothers feel pushed into homeschooling, seeing it as a “choice” that they were forced into when faced with a lack of alternatives.
In chapter 5, I look at how parents view public schools as an extension of the state, complete with political agendas that parents often dislike. Given the political diversity of the parents I interviewed, it should come as no surprise that the substance of their critiques of the political agendas present in schools varied. Parents also critiqued the inefficiency of the state in running public schools, with some critiquing the overall lack of funding for education and others criticizing what they see as poor prioritization with respect to what that funding goes to. Parents also expressed a profound disappointment with federal education reforms, using these as an example of general government incompetence. In short, even when their assessment of what children needed from education varied, there was a common sentiment among these parents that the government would not, or could not, provide that education.
Mothers do the majority of the day-to-day homeschooling labor in most families. In chapter 6, I examine the way motherhood was framed at the conferences I attended, as well as how the parents I interviewed understand their roles as mothers, in order to understand why homeschooling is so overwhelmingly seen as women’s work. Some mothers explained their assumption of homeschooling work in essentialist terms, describing it as something at which women are naturally better—or, for some, divinely ordained to be better. Other mothers, however, described homeschooling as an extension of the general work of mothering. This was particularly true for those parents who practiced attachment parenting. And some mothers articulated the gendered division of labor in their own, and other, homeschooling families as being a reflection of a larger society with pervasive gender inequality, in which men’s higher earnings, women’s and men’s gendered skill development, and the accountability that mothers, but not fathers, face for their parenting decisions all push women toward being the primary homeschooling parent. I argue that these explanations are all best understood in the context of the ideology of intensive mothering and the neoliberal mandate that mothers exercise managerial control over their children’s lives—or be held accountable if they do not. These ideologies work together to constrain mothers’ actions to their own family, because they feel that any work they may want to undertake to make social change at a larger level would mean sacrificing the well-being of their own children. In other words, I argue that the demands of neoliberal mothering depoliticize these women.
In the book’s conclusion, I turn to an ongoing question among critics of homeschooling: is homeschooling a problem? I discuss how I see this research contributing to larger debates about homeschooling regulation. I argue that, because this book demonstrates that homeschooling is one case of the larger phenomenon of school choice, rather than asking whether homeschooling is a problem, it is more appropriate to ask whether school choice is a problem. I demonstrate that, because school choice more broadly reinforces social inequalities along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, and age, we should see school choice—and the encroachment of neoliberalism into education, family, and childhood—as a social problem.
The Homeschool Choice is a book about how American families have responded to increasing polarization around issues of gender and sexuality, in an era of privatization. It offers a window into how parents feel both empowered and constrained by recent changes in education policy motivated by the ethos of school choice. The narratives of homeschooling parents illuminate the changing relationships among the family, the state, and public schools under a neoliberal policy model, and the infiltration of neoliberal beliefs into our broader cultural ideologies of childhood, education, motherhood, and the state. These accounts highlight how trust in, and reliance upon, public services are changing, and what this means for the changing burdens families face as the state divests from public education.
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Homeschooling in the United States
A Brief Overview
Many homeschoolers are quick to remark that homeschooling is a centuries-old practice: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison were some of the most popular “famous homeschoolers” I heard mentioned over the course of my fieldwork.1 However, this narrative is only partially true, as home-based education was, for many early Americans, the only option available. The modern homeschooling movement, however, in which homeschooling serves as a self-conscious alternative to public schools, began in the United States in the 1960s.2 From the early part of the twentieth century, when compulsory education laws became widespread, the idea that children would attend public (or, for some, private) schools was largely unquestioned by Americans, and homeschooling was practically unheard of.3 How did the practice come to be taken up by hundreds, thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of American families? In this chapter, I briefly discuss the origins and growth of the modern homeschooling movement, followed by a discussion of what homeschooling in the United States looks like today, including current homeschooling regulations, recent changes and trends in the kinds of people who homeschool, and some of the common forms of homeschooling instruction.
The Emergence of the Modern Homeschooling Movement
Though the homeschooling movement’s growth is largely credited to the practice being taken up by fundamentalist Christians, the movement itself originated in the work of progressive education reformers, most notably John Holt.4 Holt, a public school teacher who had grown disillusioned with the school system, published several notable works in the 1960s that scrutinized public
