Record: Kyle Greenwalt, “Homeschooling in the United States” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (February 2019) [Abstract here]
Summary: Greenwalt, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Minnesota, here attempts a broad summary of homeschooling in the United States in the form of an encyclopedia article.
Greenwalt divides his article into four parts: the definition of homeschooling, the history of homeschooling, sociological study of homeschooling, and the future of homeschooling. We’ll take each in turn.
First, Greenwalt sees homeschooling as one of several options that have emerged as public education has come to be seen more as a private choice than a public good. Homeschooling joins with charter schooling, private schooling, and the increasing variety of hybrid options to provide individual families with educational options tailored to their private needs. Greenwalt notes, however, that many homeschoolers themselves think of the practice not as a choice but as a right or even a God-given responsibility. For many it is not just a decision about schooling but an entire lifestyle or way of being. Greenwalt concludes this section by suggesting that as modern society moves from hierarchical systems to decentralized networks homeschooling might be on the cutting edge of a redefinition of public life.
The history Greenwalt tells will be familiar to anyone conversant with the literature. He describes a two-pronged development, first among left-leaning critics of institutional schooling led by John Holt, and second by evangelical Christians led by many individuals and eventually by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). He mentions the classic labels different researchers have given these two groups but goes on to explain how all acknowledge that the distinction is problematic.
Greenwalt’s coverage of the sociological literature emphasizes one particular line of research. That line begins with Gary Knowles in the early 1990s, builds with Mitchell Stevens’ 2001 Kingdom of Children, and culminates with Jennifer Lois’ 2013 Home is Where the School Is. This qualitative scholarship eschewed surveys, opting instead for deep study of individual families, and its consistent finding was that biography matters. Homeschooling mothers are motivated to homeschool by their own childhood traumas with schooling (Knowles), by their romantic views about children (Stevens), and by their understanding of the sacredness of the maternal vocation and their commitment to intensive parenting (Lois).
Greenwalt’s last section, on the future, considers three topics. First, it problematizes the academic literature’s obsession with comparing public and home schooled students, noting that there is an ever-increasing blurring of boundaries and that even conventionally schooled children spend a lot of time (especially in the summers) at home. Second, Greenwalt speculates about the future of the relationship between family and state, positing that homeschooling may represent an avant-garde repossession of roles historically played by the family but subsumed by the state in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, Greenwalt suggests that the homeschooling impulse aligns nicely with other emerging sensibilities as more and more people reject deskilling and the expertization of everything in an effort to reclaim the human agency and autonomy our democracy encourages.
Appraisal: Encyclopedia articles are tricky. One only has so much space. To cover everything one must sacrifice nuance and interest for bland, trite summary. Greenwalt wisely does not do that here. Instead, he crafts a thoughtful, engaging essay.
Its first two sections are fine; sections three and four are fun. I loved his emphasis on the Knowles-Stevens-Lois strand of research, and I share his admiration of it. I’d add to this line Gary Wyatt’s interesting little 2007 book Family Ties, which makes many of the same points, and Guterman and Neuman’s 2019 article “How I Started Home Schooling,” which integrates some of the themes Greenwalt favors here with the more conventional themes discussed in the more quantitative literature.
As for the future, Greenwalt will get no argument from me. Indeed, he quotes me a few times to make his point. I agree completely with the interpretation that sees homeschooling as a manifestation of something bigger than just the decision of some families to pull their children out of school. It is that of course, but it is also part of a larger story still unfolding as technological shifts transform the way we humans live our lives together. Government, commerce, entertainment, friendship, family, religion, and, yes, education, are all being renegotiated and redefined as we grapple with the existential issues our sciences have presented.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College