{"id":524,"date":"2013-01-07T16:22:17","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T16:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=524"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:20:37","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:20:37","slug":"the-prima-facie-case-against-homeschooling-a-critique-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=524","title":{"rendered":"THE PRIMA FACIE CASE AGAINST HOMESCHOOLING: A Critique, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, \u201cThe Prima Facie<\/em> Case Against Homeschooling\u201d in Public Affairs Quarterly<\/em>, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>In my previous post<\/a> I argued against the historic backstory Curren and Blokhuis provide as the underpinning of their argument.\u00a0 Today I will look at the argument itself.\u00a0 In general they make two basic claims.\u00a0 First, they claim that all children are entitled to equal public protection of their educational interests, which means that all forms of education, including private schooling and homeschooling, must provide equal educative opportunities.\u00a0 Second, they claim that the nature of knowledge is such that, especially at the secondary level, parents (or any other citizen) can be presumed to lack competence to teach, and that anybody who wants to teach must overcome this presumption of incompetence by proving their merit.<\/p>\n

Curren and Blokhuis elaborate on these claims through a three-part argument.\u00a0 I will first summarize their argument and then offer some critiques.<\/p>\n

Part 1 lays out their abstract, prima facie<\/em> ideals for education.\u00a0 Their point here is not to say that this is what schools in the United States are<\/em> actually like but what they should<\/em> be.\u00a0 And what should they look like?\u00a0 First, they should teach the entire range of subjects, not as mere matters of fact but as domains of public knowledge derived through collective intellectual endeavor using evidence and reason to amass truth.\u00a0 Second, schools should foster engagement between people who are different from one another so that we all learn to cooperate with one another despite our differences.\u00a0 This second characteristic carries the added benefit of exposing students to \u201cvalues and beliefs they would not otherwise encounter,\u201d (p.5) expanding their horizons for what their lives might entail and protecting them from fanaticism.<\/p>\n

Given these two ideals of public knowledge and the fostering of cooperative civic engagement with all sorts of people, Curren and Blokhuis argue that public, or common, schools would seem to be in a better position to realize these ideals than homeschooling.\u00a0 The common school\u2019s teachers would be trained in their respective disciplines and thus ought to be able collectively to provide a far more rigorous and accurate education in the various subjects than any single parent could provide on his or her own.\u00a0 And if everyone attends these schools, then of course each student would be exposed to a much wider range of human beings than a child would get at home.\u00a0 This is the prima facie<\/em> argument in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

Part 2 is much shorter and makes the point that both parents and the state have a shared interest in providing children with a good general education.\u00a0 Children have a right to a good education, and both parents and the state have a duty to provide it.\u00a0 Both parents and the state have the burden of proving that they are doing their part to help meet the ideals laid out in part 1.\u00a0 In the ideal world this would happen in common schools all attend with the support of all parents.\u00a0 But, Curren and Blokhuis realize, this is not the ideal world.\u00a0 We move now from their prima facie<\/em> argument to a reality check.<\/p>\n

In Part 3 Curren and Blokhuis provide a weak but at least well-intentioned effort to describe how both homeschooling and public schooling can be less than ideal.\u00a0 For homeschooling they quote at length a fabricated make-believe version of Christian schooling penned by Jim Dwyer.\u00a0 Why they did that I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 We have several good empirical studies of fundamentalist schooling that could have been drawn on that would make their case seem more credible.\u00a0 Dwyer\u2019s nightmare scenario has elements of truth in it, but it is a caricature born of the fevered imagination of someone who clearly has not spent much time in Christian schools.\u00a0 After quoting Dwyer\u2019s scenario the authors share a second anecdote from their own experience of a young man whose homeschooling did not prepare him well for the sort of job he wanted.\u00a0 That\u2019s fine as far as it goes, but it sure is sloppy.\u00a0 A work of fiction and a single anecdote as your evidentiary basis for homeschooling\u2019s problems?<\/p>\n

Their account of public schooling\u2019s problems is similarly episodic but at least has a bit more empirical validation.\u00a0 The two failings they emphasize are the enormous gaps in quality of schools between wealthy and poor districts and the counterproductive emphasis on standardized testing that has emerged to try to do something about it.\u00a0 Concerning testing they say, \u201cTheir focus on student outcomes<\/em> creates perverse incentives and dynamics that undermine effective teaching and learning\u2026\u201d(p. 13), and they suggest that alternative methods of assessment would be better.<\/p>\n

The point here is that both homeschooling and public schooling end up being less compelling in the real world than they might sound in the world of prima facie<\/em> argumentation.\u00a0 What then should we do?\u00a0 Curren and Blokhuis basically want to foster compromise on a case-by-case basis.\u00a0 In some places the schools will be wonderful, the teachers amazing, and everyone can just attend them.\u00a0 In other cases parents might be better at some subjects than the schools, so the student could maybe just attend school for the courses the parent can\u2019t cover as well.\u00a0 In some cases the schools might be dangerous for the child or unhealthy or whatever, and full homeschooling might be the best option.\u00a0 In every instance we need a \u201ccase-by-case review of how the educational interests of children could best be served.\u201d\u00a0 (p. 14)\u00a0 The authors don\u2019t say who gets to do this review or who gets to make the final call on what path is taken, but they seem to think that the school should be preferred unless it is shown to be deficient.<\/p>\n

And for those who do elect to homeschool, Curren and Blokhuis think that their principle that all children have a right to a good education requires 1. that parents who want to homeschool must show their competence in every subject they want to teach (their wording here seems to suggest that this only becomes an issue at the secondary level), and 2. that homeschools be regulated in all of the following ways:\u00a0 required registration, home visits and interviews with the children free from parent supervision, curriculum requirements, mandatory civic education in a public venue, and periodic assessment of academic progress.\u00a0 The point of all of these measures are not to coerce parents but to ensure that all children are getting a good education.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>I would like here to disagree with both of the main claims Curren and Blokhuis make in this article.\u00a0 You\u2019ll recall that their first point is that all children are entitled to equal public protection of their educational interests.\u00a0 Are they?<\/p>\n

Unfortunately (in my view), according to the Supreme Court they are not.\u00a0 The clearest domain where this principle has been forwarded and ultimately rejected is in the glaring inequalities across districts Curren and Blokhuis acknowledge to be a problem for public education.\u00a0 In 1973 the Supreme Court, in San Antonio v. Rodriguez<\/em><\/a>, rejected the argument that education is a fundamental right, concluding that the 14th Amendment\u2019s equal protection clause does not apply to public schools.\u00a0 This ruling (along with several others in the late 70s and into the 90s) pretty much sealed the deal for the current apartheid, savagely unequal public schools that now exist across the United States.\u00a0 It also shows that Curren and Blokhuis\u2019 fundamental claim would not stand up in court.\u00a0 Children do not in this country according to current constitutional law have a right to a good education.\u00a0 If they did then every state in the country would be breaking the law with their public schools that so clearly provide unequal education based entirely on where a child happens to live.<\/p>\n

Their second point is that homeschooling parents (and any other citizen who has not received adequate professional training) are presumed incompetent to teach unless they prove otherwise.\u00a0 Here I speak with trepidation, because I\u2019m about to use parens patriae<\/em> to argue against somebody who knows more about parens patriae<\/em> than probably anyone else in the country.\u00a0 But here goes.\u00a0 As I understand it, parents under the parens patriae<\/em> doctrine are presumed competent unless proven otherwise.\u00a0 That\u2019s why parents don\u2019t have to prove that they won\u2019t abuse their children or prove that they will feed them.\u00a0 The presumption is that the vast majority of parents will do just fine, and the state will only need to step in if a parent is grossly derelict or incompetent in performing parental duties.\u00a0 Following this logic, it seems to me that Curren and Blokhuis have reversed the burden of proof.\u00a0 I would argue that parents should be presumed competent to teach unless shown otherwise.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a reason why I think this.<\/p>\n

Anybody who has spent much time in the world of teacher education would have seen this coming, but Curren and Blokhuis\u2019 arguments become incoherent when dealing with this issue of teacher competence.\u00a0 They seem to associate the ability to teach with the ability to have a deep understanding of a specialized subject, ignoring all of the research about teaching as such.\u00a0 They also want teachers to be able to prove their competence.\u00a0 But how?\u00a0 The usual way is by testing.\u00a0 But they don\u2019t like testing because it \u201cundermines effective teaching and learning.\u201d (p. 13, and then they go on to recommend that homeschoolers be regularly tested!)\u00a0 How then do we decide who the good teachers are?\u00a0 Are you a good math teacher because you<\/em> pass an algebra test?\u00a0 Because your students<\/em> pass an algebra test?<\/p>\n

There are actually two problems here.\u00a0 First, there is no professional consensus about what makes a good teacher good or how we would measure or evaluate that.\u00a0 Second, there is the glaring empirical problem that many, many of the people who are currently public school teachers are not good teachers as Curren and Blokhuis<\/em> themselves<\/em> seem to define it:<\/p>\n

To teach these subjects with integrity<\/em> is not simply to impart facts and skills, but to embody and impart fidelity to the goods inherent in the subjects taught\u2013the forms of understanding and standards of inquiry, artistry, and excellence proper to each. (pp. 3-4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How many public school teachers teach like that?<\/p>\n

Given the lack of consensus about and inability to measure what makes a good teacher a good teacher, and given the failure of most public school teachers to meet Curren and Blokhuis\u2019 particular definition of good teaching (however flawed or limited it might be), I\u2019m wondering how in the world we\u2019re going to come up with some sort of agreed-upon standard by which to judge a parent fit to teach.\u00a0 Why not, as I think the parens patriae<\/em> principle would recommend in the first place, just presume that parents are competent to teach their kids unless it becomes clear that they are not?\u00a0 On this principle a simple occasional test such as Rob Kunzman has proposed<\/a> would be all the homeschool regulation necessary.\u00a0 As secondary schooling seems to be the main concern of this article, it might help Curren and Blokhuis to learn a bit more about how homeschoolers actually function.\u00a0 Far fewer kids are actually homeschooled in these years, and those that are very frequently take advantage of all sorts of extrinsic opportunities like cooperatives and dual-enrollment college programs to fill in the gaps in parent knowledge.<\/p>\n

There is a third critique of this piece I\u2019d like to offer.\u00a0 This one is more philosophical and to me is rather boring since it\u2019s been repeated so often and seems so obvious.\u00a0 And yet liberal theorists continue to write as they do as if they\u2019ve never encountered this objection before.\u00a0 So here it is.\u00a0 Over and over in this text Curren and Blokhuis praise the liberal ideal of exposing children to \u201cvalues and beliefs they would not otherwise encounter.\u201d\u00a0 And yet just paragraphs later they are excising all sorts of values and beliefs from their common schools.\u00a0 \u201cOutspoken white supremacists and champions of theocracy\u201d are denied entrance on page 6, as is \u201ccorrupting competition from commercial, partisan, or other private interests\u201d that might invade the sanctum of the public school.\u00a0 Liberalism has always had this remarkable inability to recognize that it itself IS a partisan position.\u00a0 It was white supremacists and Protestant theocrats who passed compulsory public education laws in the first place.\u00a0 Liberal ideals like tolerance, autonomy, children\u2019s rights, and respect for diversity are of very recent vintage.<\/p>\n

What Curren and Blokhuis repeatedly refer to as \u201cpublic\u201d reason and knowledge, is in fact perspectival, a small minority view that has only existed in the world for a few centuries and has many rivals.\u00a0 Communitarians, neo-Aristotelians, Feminists, Postmodernists, and many others have long been pointing this out, but liberals just don\u2019t seem to get it.\u00a0 They think that everyone else is being partisan and they\u2019re just being objective.\u00a0 But a close reading of Curren and Blokhuis\u2019 text reveals on page after page that they themselves are deeply prejudiced against those who disagree with them and would, if political conditions allowed it, love to construct a totalizing institution that would take every child in the country and homogenize them so that they all became good liberals just like Curren and Blokhuis.\u00a0 Homeschoolers are sometimes excessively fearful, even paranoid, about liberal professors who want to take away their freedoms.\u00a0 This article, though it concludes with an appeal for cooperation rather than coercion, is suffused with such intolerance toward Americans who don\u2019t share the authors\u2019 commitment to liberal civic values (not to mention their blindness toward how poorly many public schools actually embody those values) that it\u2019s easy to understand why homeschoolers freak out.<\/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: Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, \u201cThe Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling\u201d in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19. Summary: In my previous post I argued against the historic backstory Curren and Blokhuis provide as the … 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":[4,12,13,16],"tags":[275,310,279,448,447,315,450],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civics","category-policyregulation","category-public-schools","category-socialization","tag-j-c-blokhuis","tag-jim-dwyer","tag-parens-patriae","tag-public-affairs-quarterly","tag-randall-curren","tag-rob-kunzman","tag-san-antonio-v-rodriguez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","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=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}