Record: John Scott Gray, “Dewey and the American Movement to Homeschooling,” in Education 3-13, vol. 46, no. 4 (2018), pp. 441-446. [Abstract Here]
Summary:
Gray, a philosophy professor at Ferris State University, here argues that homeschooling is incommensurate with the educational ideals of John Dewey. He begins with a very brief orientation to homeschooling and explains that he wrote this article in light of the 100th anniversary of Dewey’s classic 1916 work Democracy and Education. Dewey had argued that society perpetuates itself by and in communication, and that public schools are society’s common communication platform and content. When parents remove their children from the public schools, they remove them from the most important institution for “collectively communicating essential ideals while attempting to weed out undesirable tendencies, including racism and sexism.” (p. 442) Schools are assimilative institutions, countering the many isolating and fragmenting forces in modern life.
One such fragmenting force is religion. After centuries of intra-Christian wars in Europe, what Dewey called “The State Consciousness” emerged, which saw the whole as, in Dewey’s words, “of more importance than the flourishing of any segment or class.” (p. 443) In Dewey’s ideal, adults work together to construct an environment for children that helps them learn to understand the world as it has come to be so that they can make it better in the future. Democracy is the political system most conducive to the collective realization of what one scholar called “the human eros,” the society that maximizes human flourishing. This is no easy task, which is why we need professional teachers skilled in the art of matching curriculum to a child’s present interests and future needs.
Homeschooling, which typically recruits the parent (usually the mother) to be the teacher, is usually inadequate in this respect, as most homeschooling parents have not been formally trained as teachers. They are not curriculum experts, nor are they necessarily committed to the project of educating for the common good. One of public education’s chief virtues is that it exposes children to much diversity. Homeschooling typically does not. Furthermore, both homeschooling and Christian day schooling can be used to indoctrinate children into (often religious) distorted views of the world that separate children from the American mainstream. Here Gray especially mentions young-Earth creationism.
Unfortunately, acknowledges Gray, public schools themselves seldom live up to these Deweyan ideals, especially since the passage of No Child Left Behind and the regime of testing that has taken over the schools. As a potential alternative, Gray points to community colleges as an American success story. Though their funding has been cut by short-sighted administrators and politicians, they attest to the possibility of providing a democratic education that aligns personal ambitions with common civic aims. In the end, education is about preparing individuals to improve society. Homeschooling, in contrast, furthers cultural fragmentation.
Appraisal: As I was reading this article I kept wondering why it was written and for whom? Why does it matter whether or not Dewey would have approved of homeschooling? Dewey, who died in 1952, has never had a profound impact on public education policy. Even admirers admit that his vision of teaching is nearly impossible to realize in actual classrooms. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Gray has convincingly demonstrated that homeschooling is incommensurate with Dewey’s educational vision. So what?
Moreover, I think it could be argued that homeschooling can be very Deweyan, much more so than any public school. Dewey always had nostalgia for the premodern farm life of his own mid-19th century Vermont childhood, where children learned what they needed to know naturally, from the rich experience of growing up in the countryside. Many homeschoolers would agree, and though they don’t often make the connection explicit, the love of many homeschoolers for nature study, for projects and portfolios, for child-centered learning, for literature-rich environments, for loving nurture of the child’s potential, are all very Deweyan themes. Dewey’s own school, the Lab School at the University of Chicago, was not a public school.
Having said that, the more general point Gray makes, that homeschooling is a step away from the common culture and toward sectarianism, is no doubt true. However, ostensibly “public” schools have a long history of being complicit in sectarianisms of their own, not least the racism and sexism Gray asserts that public education exists to counteract. I just returned from the History of Education Society Annual Meeting I have attended every year for 20 years. Paper after paper at these meetings document the deep and abiding history of racial discrimination public schools have fostered throughout U.S. history. Bestselling books in our own time continue the exposé and suggest various solutions to the abiding achievement gap between white and black and brown children that persists despite sixty years of increasing expenditures and reform efforts to counteract it. Gray surely knows all of this. One potential take-home message from both the long and the recent history of public education in the United States may be that those hoping to build a society that is “worthy, lovely and harmonious” may have to find some other mechanism than schooling to do so.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College