Record: Sarah Jeanne Pannone, “The influence of homeschooling on entrepreneurial activities: a collective case study” Education + Training, 59, No. 7/8 (2017): 706-7019. [Abstract]
Summary: Sarah Pannone is a dissertation chair for the School of Education at Liberty University. In this study she uses several case studies to investigate how homeschooling may influence entrepreneurial characteristics and activity.
Pannone felt compelled to investigate the effect of homeschooling on entrepreneurial characteristics because of advocates who exult homeschooling’s influence on someone’s entrepreneurial potential. While it is difficult to precisely define an entrepreneur, the characteristics often associated with entrepreneurs in the research literature include a willingness to take risks, a high tolerance of ambiguity, persistence, and self-efficacy.
The participants of this study are five former homeschoolers who became entrepreneurs. The author knew two of the participants personally, and the other three were located through snowball sampling. All of the participants were homeschooled from kindergarten to 12th grade, and all were from the southeast or southwest USA. Furthermore, all of the participants were male. Their ages ranged from 23 to 33, and they had between 1 and 10 years of entrepreneurial experience. The men operated diverse businesses such as web startups, athletic training, and landscaping.
During the interviews, three themes emerged. First, the participants noted that the independent, self-motivated type of learning in which they engaged (particularly in their later years of homeschooling) impacted their entrepreneurial activities. Just as in homeschooling, entrepreneurs need the ability to create their own schedules without prompting. For example, one man said, “When you work for someone else I think it is more similar to regular school where you are told what to do, and what time to do it at.”
Second, four of the five participants believed that the alternative nature of homeschooling had influenced their entrepreneurship because it taught them to be comfortable with being different. As one said, homeschooling taught him to not be afraid to “buck the system or question the way things are done traditionally or conventionally.” In homeschooling, they believe that there is greater room for risk and failure at a younger age, which prepared them for the ownership of a business. One of the men succinctly summarized the second theme by saying that homeschooling fostered a, “willingness to do things in a non-traditional, non-conventional kind of way and be comfortable with that.”
Finally, the third theme to emerge was the idea that homeschooling develops an internal locus of control, which is a helpful conviction for entrepreneurs to possess. For example, one participant shared, “We were grounded young to know and have confidence that we can do what we set out to do, and if you fail it is not the end of the world.” Likewise, another said that his main take-away from homeschooling was, “Just the idea of you being responsible for your work and getting stuff done that you need to get done.”
Appraisal: Pannone’s study is the first to investigate the claims that homeschooling fosters an entrepreneurial attitude. While her findings are unable to be generalized because of the small convenience sample and the inherent selection bias (unsuccessful entrepreneurs are not represented, nor are homeschoolers who did not become entrepreneurs), this study does provide a theoretical introduction to how homeschooling may impact entrepreneurship. Much more research would be required to determine whether homeschoolers are more likely to become successful entrepreneurs than non-homeschoolers. Doubtless many successful entrepreneurs who were not homeschooled would also exhibit and extol qualities like independence, unconventionality, and internal locus of control. Nevertheless, we can tentatively say at least that five successful entrepreneurs found homeschooling to be instrumental in their journeys.
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