Allahyari, Rebecca A. “Christian Soldiers and Downshifters: U.S. Homeschoolers on the World.” The Practice of Altruism: Caring and Religion in Global Perspective, edited by R. L. F. Habito and K. Inaba, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2006), 141-163. [Description Here]
Summary: In this book chapter, Allahyari, a Research Associate at the School for Advanced Research, looks at the question “What does the proliferation of homeschooling tell us about America?” in regards to changes in civic life that have occurred in society over the past century.
To answer this question, Allahyari first looks at the concerns that have been raised about the socialization of homeschooled children. One common claim is that homeschooling robs children of a normal childhood because of how mature they may appear. Furthermore, others complain that homeschoolers are cocooned and protected by their parents to an unacceptable degree. They claim that homeschoolers frequently feed antigovernment politics, resentment of taxation, and fear of the “other.” Homeschooling, Robert Reich argues, may curtail students’ exposure to multicultural education.
After presenting such concerns about homeschoolers’ socialization, Allahyari turns to the defense. First, she notes that homeschooling is often compared to public education without acknowledging that public schools frequently fall short of the utopian ideal. Second, she notes that homeschoolers frequently are seeking refuge from the highly rationalized and disenchanted world of the 21st century.
Next Allahyari begins a lengthy discussion of the effects of the Biblical worldview of evangelical homeschoolers (which she defines as those homeschoolers who identified with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association [HSLDA], its founder Michael Farris, and its various conservative affiliates). These homeschoolers, while grounding their beliefs in the Bible, do not shy away from politics. Instead, they frequently homeschool so that their children can become Christian leaders in a nation that is becoming increasingly secular.
One way that evangelical Christians have dealt with the cultural shift in the US is to create their own institutions. For example, Allahyari spends several pages discussing her investigations of Patrick Henry College (PHC) which was founded by Michael Farris and the HSLDA in the year 2000. What she found at PHC was a group of conservative Christian students, many of them formerly homeschooled, that she portrays as disconnected from the world due to, for instance, their relative lack of diversity and their emphasis on a classical education rather than preparations for a more worldly “vocation.” However, she says that one thing that these students could not be faulted for is a lack of altruism. She found that evangelical Christians often promoted altruism in their charitable and political work.
After finalizing her discussion of PHC, Allahyari moves on to the topics of institutionalization and how even non-religious parents have become concerned by the institutionalization of schooling. First she talks about the case of Suzanne Gilbert, a Pueblo Indian woman who homeschooled her two children in an unstructured environment. In spite of the children’s isolated and unconventional upbringing, Allahyari described them to be well-adjusted to their lives in college and sure in their personal beliefs. Also in New Mexico, Allayari met Theresa, a woman who left her career to homeschool her two children. Like Suzanne, Theresa was deeply concerned by the institutionalization that children undergo at school. She describes how the homeschoolers of Santa Fe, New Mexico, went from being a unified community to two separate groups: a Christian community and an all-inclusive community.
Moving to conclusions, Allahyari finally starts to make some sense out of her disjointed investigations. First, she concludes that homeschoolers are absolutely political, even though some people believe that homeschooling is a withdrawal from social and political life. Second, she questions once again why homeschoolers are held to such scrutiny when public schools often produce racially stratified outcomes. Finally, in response to her opening question of what homeschooling teaches us about America, she says, “Homeschooling children, we can speculate, learn that participation in the dominant society need not be assumed and that one can move in and out of societies’ large bureaucracies, even refashion them into new forms” (p. 159).
Appraisal: Though there are many insightful sections of this chapter, they do not come together into a single coherent argument, and they most certainly do not prove Allahyari’s main thesis. Her disjointed discussions about PHC and the New Mexican homeschoolers are not brought together until her closing paragraph, and that paragraph ends on a conclusion that seems completely unsupported by the text. She says, “The proliferation of homeschooling sparks new imaginings of altruistic life” (p. 160). If Allahyari was trying to form a connection between homeschooling and altruism, I would have expected her to have a more in-depth discussion of altruism than just a side note that she observed significant altruistic behavior at Patrick Henry College. Prior to her concluding paragraph, the only other mention of the topic at all came at the end of her observations at PHC, where she says, “While the social and political values of the evangelical homeschoolers may be critiqued as not conducive to liberal democracy, they can not be faulted for their lack of altruism” (p. 154). While the statement may be true, Allahyari did not say anything in the section that would justify such a broad conclusion about homeschooling more generally, and her evidence even for PHC is anecdotal at best.
It must be noted, finally, that this article was published in 2006. Homeschooling research has come a long way in the past 10 years. The socialization category of this website will be able to give you a more quantitative look at the effects of homeschooling on students’ socialization than Allahyari’s conclusions, drawn from a few case studies, can provide. We reviewed this chapter because it had previously escaped our notice, because it provides an exceedingly rare glimpse of home education among a Pueblo Indian family, and because of its coverage of PHC. Patrick Henry has of course received quite a bit of attention, and interested researchers will want to be aware of this article.
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