{"id":370,"date":"2012-11-16T14:01:58","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T14:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=370"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:30:09","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:30:09","slug":"home-education-three-types-of-homeschoolers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=370","title":{"rendered":"HOME EDUCATION: Three Types of Homeschoolers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Ruth Morton, \u201cHome Education: Constructions of Choice\u201d in International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education<\/em> 3, no. 1 (October 2010) Available Here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>Morton<\/a>, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick whose dissertation is a qualitative study of homeschooling motivations and practice in the United Kingdom, here gives us a taste of what the dissertation will contain, describing how there are three basic motivational types of homeschoolers.<\/p>\n

In 2007 Morton interviewed 19 homeschooling families and one Local Authority official, went regularly to homeschooling meetings, and attended a week-long home educators\u2019 camp.\u00a0 She says that her generalizations are based upon the experiences of \u201c40 to 45\u2033 families.\u00a0 In all but two of these families the father was \u201cperipheral or even completely absent\u201d in terms of homeschooling decisions. (p. 46)<\/p>\n

Her interviews and other experiences suggested to Morton that there are three basic categories of homeschoolers, though they sometimes overlap:<\/p>\n

1. \u201cNatural Choice\u201d<\/strong>\u2013Some parents (really mothers) choose homeschooling out of a desire to return to a pre-industrial lifestyle free from the artifice of mainstream society.\u00a0 These parents are often sharply critical of the capitalist structures and social conformity that they believe predominates in mainstream public schooling, and they possess romantic ideals about childhood and education.<\/p>\n

2. \u201cSocial Choice\u201d<\/strong>\u2013Some parents do not object to formal education as such but to the negative socialization they believe their children will experience there.\u00a0 Many of these families are conservative Christians, many of whom would send their children to private religious schools if they could afford it.\u00a0 Basically, these parents didn\u2019t want their kids mixing with other kids who might lead them morally or religiously astray.<\/p>\n

Morton found that \u201csocial\u201d motivation homeschoolers tended to follow a more structured curriculum (usually imported from the United States) than natural motivation homeschoolers.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cNo Choice\u201d<\/strong>\u2013Some parents choose homeschooling only as a last resort, having exhausted other options.\u00a0 In Morton\u2019s sample there were 8 families in this category.\u00a0 The presenting cause varied widely, from bullying to special education needs to a child\u2019s emotional instability to personality conflicts with school officials.\u00a0 Most of these families had tried numerous times to \u201cmake school \u2018work\u2019\u201d for their admittedly atypical child, and only after much frustration did they turn to homeschooling.\u00a0 They typically saw homeschooling as a temporary fix, but frequently after giving it a try they often stayed with it for many years.<\/p>\n

Morton found that parents in this third category frequently transitioned over time to one of the first two categories in terms of their self-understanding.<\/p>\n

She concludes by noting that all three of these motivational types share a basic orientation that privileges the individual child over the needs of the educational system.\u00a0 They all tend not to care too much about the broader social meaning of what they\u2019re doing, nor do they spend a lot of time dwelling on how the educational system might be changed to make it more hospitable.\u00a0 They care mostly about their own children and think of their choice on this narrowly individual level, not about its broader social implications.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>Do we learn anything new here?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 Morton\u2019s terms \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201csocial\u201d take their place alongside other venerable dichotomies like Van Galen\u2019s \u201cpedagogues\u201d and \u201cidealogues,\u201d Mitchell Stevens\u2019 \u201cinclusives\u201d and \u201cbelievers\u201d, and my own \u201copen communion\u201d and \u201cclosed communion\u201d to describe basically the same thing.<\/p>\n

That she gives equal weight to her third category is the real contribution I think, for it takes a point that\u2019s been made by other researchers (that special education is a significant and growing aspect of homeschooling) and turns it into a category that\u2019s just as important as the historic categories stressing romantic naturalists and religious conservatives.\u00a0 In this short article we aren\u2019t told how she went about choosing her subjects so we can\u2019t say whether her 8 \u201cno choice\u201d families (which is HUGE given an overall sample of 19) is typical of U.K. homeschooling.\u00a0 Hopefully her dissertation will deal with this sort of thing.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Ruth Morton, \u201cHome Education: Constructions of Choice\u201d in International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010) Available Here. Summary: Morton, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick whose dissertation is a qualitative study of homeschooling … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10,19],"tags":[342,390,345,341,343],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","category-parental-motivation","tag-international-electric-journal-of-elementary-education","tag-jane-van-galen","tag-mitchell-stevens","tag-ruth-morton","tag-university-of-warwick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1139,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/1139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}