FAMILY TIES: Inside Homeschooling with a Sociologist

Record

Gary Wyatt, Family Ties: Relationships, Socialization, and Homeschooling (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007).

Summary

Wyatt offers here a short book summarizing the results of twelve years as a participant observer in the homeschooling world.  He makes several generalizations from extensive “field notes” he took while participating in the movement.

Wyatt’s main argument is that survey data has failed to capture some of the central motivations of many homeschooling parents.  In his view, many parents are searching for an alternative understanding of family to that common in mainstream American culture.  They want stronger parent/child bonds.  And they want these bonds to serve largely as a resource to their children to help them resist perceived destructive social forces common in school culture (things like cruelty, anti-intellectualism, moral permissiveness, ironic detachment, and indecorous behavior).

Wyatt makes several other generalizations as well.  He notes that in his experience, a large number of homeschooling parents had bad experiences in school themselves.  Many homeschooling parents he cites recall in vivid detail merciless teasing and other horrors endured in school.  He concludes, “home schooling is a defensive strategy initiated to ensure that their children are not subjected to the torment that defined their childhoods.” (p. 17)

Wyatt’s chapter on socialization makes the characteristic homeschooler move of turning the question back at public schools, using a wide range of academic work done on the culture of public schooling to argue that schools are often characterized by cliquishness, petty meanspiritedness, obsession with appearances, anti-intellectualism, racial segregation, and bullying.  He concludes that homeschooling can provide children with the solitude some scholars say is necessary for acquiring personal depth and insight.

Appraisal

Wyatt’s book is a welcome departure from the typical insider’s memoir.  He is clearly an advocate for homeschooling, but his sociologist’s training enables him to look at the phenomenon with an empiricist’s eye.  His generalizations are based entirely on his own admittedly rich experience, so they cannot be called scientific.  They are, however, very thoughtful and could serve as inspirations for further research.  Is it true, for example, that decision to homeschool correlates very strongly with negative schooling experience when the parent was a child (see also on this Arai, 2000 and various articles by Gary Knowles)?  Do parents who choose homeschooling to strengthen family bonds find their decision to have been successful?  Do their children?

Milton Gaither, Messiah College

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