{"id":521,"date":"2013-01-07T16:08:34","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T16:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=521"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:21:13","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:21:13","slug":"the-prima-facie-case-against-homeschooling-a-critique-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=521","title":{"rendered":"THE PRIMA FACIE CASE AGAINST HOMESCHOOLING: A Critique, Part 1"},"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

<\/strong>Curren, a distinguished philosopher of education<\/a>, and Blokhuis, a recent graduate student of Curren\u2019s who is now Assistant Professor of Education<\/a> at Renison University College in Canada, here build on earlier work, especially Blokhuis\u2019 doctoral dissertation, to argue that in the abstract common schools do a better job of preparing children for public life than do parents.<\/p>\n

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

The term prima facie<\/em> in the title is crucial for this argument.\u00a0 It means that they are not claiming that public schools are actually<\/em> better or that homeschooling parents are actually <\/em>incompetent to teach.\u00a0 They\u2019re just saying that in principle a common school with professionally trained teachers at first blush seems like a better set up than homeschooling.\u00a0\u00a0This first post will limit itself to the authors\u2019 first paragraph.\u00a0 A second post <\/a>will summarize and evaluate their main arguments.<\/p>\n

Curren and Blokhuis begin, I regret to say, with a very weak historical introduction.\u00a0 It is weak because it is wrong.\u00a0 They claim first that compulsory schooling laws were passed under the common law principle of parens patriae<\/em> and second that such laws \u201cwere rarely challenged\u201d for imposing \u201cobvious limits on the custodial authority of all parents for the sake of all children.\u201d (p. 1)<\/p>\n

<\/strong>First, while the parens patriae<\/em> doctrine, which was the subject of Blokhuis\u2019 dissertation and of his excellent article I reviewed here<\/a>, is of vital theoretical importance, when you look at the actual legislative and legal history of compulsory education laws you don\u2019t really see it referred to that much.\u00a0 Philosophers often do this to history.\u00a0 They make things sound a lot more logical than they actually were.\u00a0 Compulsory school laws were passed for a lot of reasons, chief among them Republicans\u2019 fear of immigrants\u2019 radical politics and Catholic religion.\u00a0 While parens patriae<\/em> is a very important principle of the common law that provides the theoretical underpinnings of much of our family law today, things in the 19th century were not so clear. Sometimes judges talked about Parens Patriae<\/em>, but lots of times they didn\u2019t, and legislatures hardly ever did.\u00a0 To the degree that compulsory education had any constitutional or legal underpinning at all, it tended to be as an aspect of the state\u2019s \u201cpolice power<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secondly, it is simply not true that compulsory school laws were not challenged by people who saw them as infringing on parental rights.\u00a0 They were.\u00a0 Frequently.\u00a0 For an excellent treatment of the many court cases that emerged in the wake of these compulsory school laws see Stephen Provasnik\u2019s 2006 article, \u201cJudicial Activism and the Origins of Parental Choice<\/a>: The Court\u2019s Role in the Institutionalization of Compulsory Education in the United States, 1891-1925\u2033 in the History of Education Quarterly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Provasnik documents how the late 19th century inherited two traditions of jurisprudence on the question of state vs. parent rights\u2013one favoring state authority and the other favoring parents.\u00a0 The dominant tradition was the parental rights one.\u00a0 Provasnik summarizes several cases, but let me quote from only one of them, People<\/em> v. Turner<\/em><\/a> (1870), which I select because of its explicit rejection of an expansive parens patriae<\/em> doctrine.\u00a0 Illinois\u2019 highest court held in this case that,<\/p>\n

Another branch of parental duty, strongly inculcated by writers on natural law, is the education of children\u2026 Before any abridgement of the right, gross misconduct or almost total unfitness on the part of the parent, should be clearly proved.\u00a0 This power is an emanation from God, and every attempt to infringe upon it, except from dire necessity, should be resisted in all well governed States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After canvassing many, many cases, Provasnik summarizes,<\/p>\n

the fact that between the 1870s and the 1890s the courts consistently confirmed parental authority as the ultimate authority over both whether children were to be schooled and what they would study there suggests that the courts were neither in a position in which they were bound to uphold compulsory attendance nor steadily and inextricably moving toward such a position. (p. 328)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet when compulsory laws were passed and when they were challenged, in state after state courts did in fact sustain them and rule against parents.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 <\/em>Provasnik\u2019s fascinating article answers that question (noting, by the way, that only one of the state courts based its decision on parens patriae.\u00a0 <\/em>Police power was the more common justification, with profound consequences.), and it culminates in a sensitive look at the famous Meyer <\/em>and Pierce<\/em> decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court.\u00a0 My point here is only that Curren and Blokhuis misrepresent the American past when they claim that their view, the pro-state view, was the historic consensus.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 It became<\/em> the consensus at the turn of the century among the powerful, largely because of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment among native white Protestants, who looked to compulsory education as the way to Protestantize and Americanize immigrant children.<\/p>\n

So their backstory gets it wrong.\u00a0 Does it matter?\u00a0 I think it does.\u00a0 In my next post<\/a> I will lay out Curren and Blockhuis\u2019 philosophical argument.\u00a0 Here we\u2019ve seen that an ignorance of actual American history has allowed them to make false generalizations about the past.\u00a0 This means that they begin their ostensibly \u201cprima facie<\/em>\u201d argument on the wrong foot.\u00a0 A prima facie<\/em> argument is supposed to be an argument based on first impressions, an argument that seems obvious based on the facts of the case, and the burden of proof is on an opponent to show why this prima facie<\/em> argument is wrong.\u00a0 But what if the \u201cfacts\u201d aren\u2019t right in the first place?\u00a0 If you\u2019re going to make a first-blush argument you\u2019d best make sure your facts are right.\u00a0 Curren and Blokhuis don\u2019t do that for the history of the very issue they\u2019re about to discuss.\u00a0 Because they misunderstand and misrepresent the degree to which many Americans, and many American courts, have distrusted state control of education, they think their job is far easier than it really is.\u00a0 It has never been self-evident in the United States that the state should be responsible for the education of children, and every stage of growth in state oversight was bitterly contested by people who didn\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n

Homeschooling in this sense, then, is just a contemporary manifestation of one side in a long and bitter debate, and Curren and Blokhuis are a manifestation of the other side.\u00a0 Whether or not they are aware of the fact that their ideological predecessors were motivated largely by anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic animus I can\u2019t say, but it does make the argument that they\u2019re going to make seem a little less prima facie<\/em> plausible, at least to me.\u00a0 But we\u2019ll take up that issue next time<\/a>.<\/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. Curren, a distinguished philosopher of education, and Blokhuis, a recent graduate student of Curren\u2019s who is now … 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":[9,13],"tags":[132,275,122,279,302,121,448,447,277,449],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-public-schools","tag-history-of-education-quarterly","tag-j-c-blokhuis","tag-meyer-v-nebraska","tag-parens-patriae","tag-people-v-turner","tag-pierce-v-society-of-sisters","tag-public-affairs-quarterly","tag-randall-curren","tag-renison-university-college","tag-stephen-provasnik"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1119,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/1119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}