The number of American children who are homeschool has grown exponentially in recent decades, but remains comparatively low—a reasonable estimate would put it in the area of 4% the school aged population. Many homeschooling parents are conservative Christians who go this route in large part for religious reasons, and these parents dominate the self-identified homeschool movement and its largest and most effective lobbying organization. This is also the population that most readily comes to mind when the topic of homeschooling is broached.
It might be tempting, then, to imagine homeschooling as simply another facet of the conservative evangelical world living at the margins of mainstream American culture, of a piece with the rural religious private schools teaching creationism and abstinence before marriage. A Harvard Magazine article profiling the work of Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet published last year—and the culture war dustup that ensued—suggests there is quite a bit more at stake.
In the Harvard Magazine profile, and in an Arizona Law Review article at its heart, Bartholet reduces homeschoolers to their most extreme evangelical caricature and argues for a “presumptive ban” on the practice. Not surprisingly, the simplistic portrayal of these parents enraged homeschoolers and their conservative allies, and the call for a ban was savaged as both illiberal and unconstitutional. Lost in all of this was the substance of Bartholet’s arguments. Two of these are familiar and defensible—a third maybe less so.
By reasonable standards—and certainly in comparison to other countries— effective guarantees that homeschooled children actually learn something are woefully inadequate or simply non-existence in the US. In most American states, homeschoolers are free to pull their children out of public school with little more than a notification to local officials. Nothing requires parents to show they are up to the task, and rarely do they need to provide evidence of a child’s growing proficiency in, well, anything. How many homeschooled children end up with a harmfully bad education as a result is very unclear—the lack of any regulation makes it hard to collect meaningful data. On average homeschooled children who go to college do fine, but virtually nothing can be said about the population as a whole. To anyone who thinks the state has an obligation to see that every child is educated, the need for more regulation of homeschooling is obvious.
Child abuse is a second major concern. A commonly heard worry is that abuse and neglect will go undetected in families whose children rarely leave the house. As Bartholet notes, schoolteachers are mandatory reporters of suspected child abuse, and they are the group who most commonly alert authorities. Bartholet also illustrates how disturbingly easy it is for those suspected of child abuse to shield themselves from further scrutiny by simply taking their children out of school. Here too, the case for stronger legal measures is clear. At a minimum, we need legislation that would prevent those credibly suspected of child abuse from homeschooling their children.
None of this, however, makes the case for a presumptive ban. Bartholet does not deny that homeschooling can be done well. Nor does any of the available evidence suggest homeschooling parents are particularly prone to be abusive. Why then a ban rather than more regulation?
This is where things get rather curious. Questions about educational adequacy and abuse are largely empirical and the worries are nothing new. But there’s another argument emerging in the debate, one that turns on the question of how much control over their children’s education in the first place. Bartholet is vague, but she is flirting with a position that has been gathering converts within the academy for some time.
In the Harvard Magazine article, Bartholet says it is bad for children to be under their parents’ control “24/7”. She also insists schooling should expose children to “other viewpoints.” In her Arizona Law Review piece, she worries about parents who “are committed to raising their children so that they will stay within the parents’ culture and community”, or who are “ideologically committed to raising children in isolation from the larger society.” Considered alongside her preoccupation with Christian homeschoolers, these quotes suggest Bartholet’s most abiding worry is the parent who homeschools to make sure her kids grow up to be conservative Christians. Lurking more deeply still is a suspicion that by its nature homeschooling is unlikely to do right by children because it is the most complete distillation a noxious belief, namely the conviction that parents alone should decide what kind of life their child will go on to live.
A lot is at stake here. While most Americans take it for granted that parents are well within their rights to raise their children to believe and practice the same religion as they do, a growing number of philosophers of education and legal theorists are not so sure. The tenor of these arguments was introduced some 40 years ago by Joel Feinberg in a hugely influential paper called “A Child’s Right to an Open Future.” In the name of the ideal of autonomy dear to liberals, Feinberg argued self-determination is so important that cutting off a child’s future options should be considered a violation of her rights.
Feinberg was writing in response to the famous—some would say infamous—Supreme Court decision Yoder v. Wisconsin, in which the Supreme Court declared it permissible for Amish parents to withdraw their children from public school after the 8th grade. At the heart of the parents’ brief was a claimed right to keep their children Amish by sheltering them from the corrupting influences American high schools. Feinberg found it outrageous that children might be left with no effective choice but to be Amish and argued an education that forced a child into a life decided upon by others is no education at all. An upbringing that respects a child’s future autonomy—her right to an open future— is one that in the end leaves religion up to her.
His conviction that Yoder was wrongly decided notwithstanding, Feinberg drew modest practical conclusions overall. He was not opposed to parents raising their children to be Catholic or what have you, or to religiously oriented private schools per se. He did insist, however, that attempts to instill religious beliefs and values in children must also preserve and expand their abilities to ultimately decide such matters for themselves.
Feinberg’s position is by now a conservative one in the world of philosophy of education. In fact, his sole focus on what children’s future autonomy is increasingly considered too weak to protect children’s true rights. Contemporary thinkers would protect children’s current autonomy by insisting parents have no right to compel religious practice in their children even while they are children, or to subject them to a “directive” education intended to induct them into a particular faith. The most parents should do is “expose” their children to different religions and ideas while working to develop the skills they need to decide for themselves which if any faith to adopt. By these lights, religiously motivated homeschooling starts to look to be as bad as it gets
The philosophical arguments behind this position can be subtle and technical. They converge, however, with the more straightforward arguments of legal thinkers like William and Mary law professor James Dwyer, who argues that recognizing children’s moral equality speaks against allowing parents to treat them in ways adults are not allowed to treat one another. If it is wrong for one person to compel another to practice a religion against her will, it does not become acceptable just because the people in question are parent and child. Only the shameful and discredited idea that children are property of their parents obscures the profound wrongs of religious education tailored to win converts who are too young to know what is at stake. Here too, the profound need to have the state dilute parental influence looms large.
Many will scoff at the mere suggestion that Christians parents are out of line in baptizing their children or sending them to Christian schools to make Christians out of them, and doubts about both the philosophical and legal arguments abound. Deliberately declining to instill a religious understanding of the world in a child is not obviously different than raising her within a faith—both approaches presuppose things about the value of religion to children that they themselves are in no position to question. And while legal theorists can point to international instruments, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that recognize children’s right to religious freedom, such instruments invariably take back with one hand what they give with the other. And as even the most aggressive defenders of children’s legal rights concede, American case law is stacked heavily against those who would significantly limit a parent’s right to control her child’s education.
Still, the rising moral status of children has brought deep and abiding changes in how we think of children’s rights and parental and social obligations for their care and protection and it would be a mistake to take too much for granted. Corporal punishment in both schools and homes went from a common occurrence to legally forbidden in much of the world in a generation. Even something as unquestioned as religiously motived male circumcision has recently faced legal challenges in Europe, as has the right of parents to make medical decisions for their older children. That she’s ‘just a child’ no longer works as prima facie defense of differential treatment—the burden is now on those who insist we cannot always treat children as the equals of adults.
Parental control over a child’s education is another front in this ongoing sorting. With its convergence of so many of cultural war flashpoints, homeschooling is a potent distillation of all that remains unsettled about our duties to children.