Record: Leslie Safran Barson, “Home Educating Parents: Martyrs or Pathmakers?” in International Perspectives on Home Education (2015): 21-29. [Table of Contents]
Summary: This article is part of a series of reviews on the book International Perspectives on Home Education. Barson is a homeschooling mother who went on to get her PhD in Education. Here she discusses the sacrifices that parents make to homeschool their children.
The data comes from her thesis and includes 34 parents who have home educated their children for more than three years. In a previous article reviewed here she uses this sample to good effect to apply the concept of “legitimate peripheral participation” to homeschoolers involved in groups. The previous article goes into much greater detail on the sample. She conducted in-depth interviews with the parents to see how they thought home education had affected their family’s finances, their career, and their free-time.
Starting with finances, 59% of the parents said they had no financial worries as a result of their decision to home educate. Nearly half said that home education had a negative effect on their finances because of only being able to work part-time or other reasons. The parents interviewed were almost all mothers who had chosen to give up their careers upon having children, so homeschooling was not much of a sacrifice for most of them. Many parents began to see home education as their career and derived personal satisfaction from it. Barson also did not find any significant trends in the time that the parents spent on themselves and their personal interests, but overall she concludes that home education required few, if any, sacrifices from the parents she interviewed.
Appraisal: Barson is not able to accomplish much in this small piece. Partially this is due to space limits, but it is also due to the fact that she does not have any significant findings. The experiences of her sample are not representative of the home education community as a whole, and even within her own sample, the responses are all over the place. While home education may not be much of a sacrifice for some parents, other studies by Lois, Sherfinski, and Vigilant have found significant sacrifices by homeschooling mothers.
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