Reaction to Dwyer and Peters, HOMESCHOOLING

In a previous post I summarized the new book by Shawn F. Peters and James G. Dwyer, Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2019).  In this post I will make some comments about it.

The book, as I noted in my summary, has three chapters of history written by Peters, a transitional chapter, and then three chapters by Dwyer laying out an argument for regulating homeschooling and explaining how he thinks it should be done.  I’ll comment at length on the history and then briefly on the policy.

I have two things to say about Peters’ historical chapters.  First, I am thrilled by them.  Until Peters’ contribution, my own book, first published in 2008, and revised and updated in 2017, had been the only real scholarly treatment of homeschooling history other than a few journal articles from the 1990s.  Peters’ narrative follows the same basic story-line as did my work, but he also breaks new ground, in two ways.

First, Peters managed to find several examples from the  past that I missed.  He mentions Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, the first female graduate from Johns Hopkins Medical School, who was homeschooled as a child.  So was Theodore Roosevelt due to his asthma.  So was Margaret Mead, taught by her grandmother.  Peters unearths Kentucky native Zachariah Montgomery’s 1886 Poison Drops in the Federal Senate, a screed against compulsory schooling’s attack on the family, and also Rita Scherman’s A Mother’s Letters to a Schoolmaster from 1923, which explains why Scherman decided to school her gifted son at home.  He found a New York Times article written by Patricia Heidenry in 1975 describing her Holt-inspired unschooling, and another by daughter Margaret Heidenry written in 2011 reflecting back on what it was like.  He mentions the Los Angeles Home Tutorial Program, created by anti-busing activists in 1978 as a way to keep their children out of integrated public schools.  All of these were things I had missed in my own investigations and that have, to my knowledge, never been included in historical accounts of homeschooling before.

Second, Peters is excellent on the legal history of homeschooling.  His own training is in history of law, and he has an entire book on the famous Wisconsin v. Yoder decision.  In many, many places I found his analysis of relevant case law and to be enlightening, much more so than what I was able to provide in my own work.  Let me mention here two examples that especially struck me.  First, though we usually hear (and I have often written) that the Supreme Court has never actually ruled on homeschooling, Peters includes a lengthy quotation from the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision, a decision usually interpreted by homeschooling advocates as providing support for the idea of parent interest trumping school interest, that reveals quite the opposite.  Along with other things, the Court in Pierce said, “Indeed, the State’s interest in assuring that these standards are being met has been considered a sufficient reason for refusing to accept instruction at home as compliance with compulsory education statutes.” (p. 57)  Second, the case HSLDA usually uses as the basis for its claim that homeschooling is a Constitutional right protected by the First Amendment is the 1993 People v. DeJonge decision in Michigan.  I cover that decision in my book at some length.  But what I did not know was that, as Peters explains, “in that same year…the federal appellate court in the circuit that includes Michigan…rejected the hybrid-rights theory and held that only rational basis review applies to any free exercise challenge to a law of general applicability, thus eviscerating the legal foundation of the DeJonge decision.” (p. 66) I won’t get into hybrid rights and rational basis here, but we have covered it in previous posts about these issues.  Peters is an excellent guide.

So, again, I am thrilled by a lot of what Peters does in his history.  My second comment, on the other hand, is that the chapters, especially the first one on the early history, lack the ear for historical complexity, contingency, and context that is now the trademark of professional historiography.  The chapters, especially chapter one, read more like an argument for something like Dwyer’s proposals than an effort to tell a story about the past as it actually happened.  Peters frequently makes anachronistic comments or reduces a phenomenon to a morality tale, always drawing conclusions consistent with what Dwyer will argue later on.  That strategy does make this book cohere nicely, but it rankles my historian’s sensibilities.  Professional historians do not like their discipline being used reductively as prolegomena to policy proposals.  Peters does that in these pages frequently.

I have much less to say about Dwyer’s chapters.  Briefly, I found them bracing and thoughtful.  I was expecting something far more critical given his earlier writings on children’s rights.  But Dwyer has clearly read deeply and thought a lot about homeschooling, and the position he lands on, while more pro-regulation than what most homeschoolers themselves would want, is far more nuanced and generous than what many academics who tend to get labeled “critics” of homeschooling often advocate.  Despite that, and as Dwyer himself well knows, his thoughtful and well-reasoned proposals have no chance of becoming policy.  Why?  Because there is not a political constituency who will advocate for them.  There is, however, a large, organized, and motivated constituency willing to devote great energy to see to it that recommendations like Dwyer’s never come to fruition, and they are winning.

Milton Gaither, Messiah College