The Wiley Handbook of Home Education

Milton Gaither, Milton Gaither

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118926888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

The Wiley Handbook of Home Education is a comprehensive collection of the latest scholarship in all aspects of home education in the United States and abroad.

• Presents the latest findings on academic achievement of home-schooled children, issues of socialization, and legal argumentation about home-schooling and government regulation
• A truly global perspective on home education, this handbook includes the disparate work of scholars outside of the U.S.
• Typically understudied topics are addressed, such as the emotional lives of home educating mothers and the impact of home education on young adults
• Writing is accessible to students, scholars, educators, and anyone interested in home schooling issues

Part I
Home Education in the United States

1
The History of Homeschooling

Milton Gaither

Introduction

When discussing the history of homeschooling two distinctions need to be made at the very outset. First, it is important to distinguish, as some do not (Jeynes 2012; Hill 2000), between homeschooling as a deliberately chosen alternative to institutional schools on the one hand and, on the other, the pragmatic use of the home to educate children. The latter practice has been central to many if not most human societies from ancient times. In this chapter we will label this “domestic education” and only deal with it cursorily. What we are mostly concerned with is the self‐consciously alternative practice, and this emerged only in the 20th century in reaction to compulsory school laws and public school bureaucracies, at first in isolated instances but coalescing into a discernible political movement by the late 1970s.

The second distinction that needs to be made is between history as an academic discipline and history as an argumentative tool. Many polemics by homeschoolers against schools and by advocates of schools against homeschooling include historical claims. Many scholarly articles on homeschooling, especially those making legal or philosophical arguments, include historical claims or narratives as part of their overall argument. But very few polemicists or academics have approached the topic of homeschooling history from within the discipline of historical study itself with its requisite attention to primary source documentation, its careful consideration of context, and its feel for nuance and complexity. The result has been a series of oft‐repeated but false claims about the homeschooling movement or some aspect thereof. Many of the most egregious and frequently reiterated false claims pertain to the legal history of homeschooling, including inaccurate assertions about the degree to which homeschooling was illegal in the past (Somerville 2001), misleading claims about the basis for and easy acceptance of compulsory school laws (Curren and Blokhuis 2011), or misinterpretations of the meaning and scope of key Supreme Court cases such as Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Wisconsin v. Yoder (Kreager, Jr. 2010; Olsen 2009).

In what follows we will, after briefly discussing the historiography of home education outside the United States and the historiography of domestic education within the United States, survey all of the available scholarship on the history of the modern American homeschooling movement. We will not cover the many articles that contextualize their theme by providing a brief and entirely derivative historical introduction (e.g., Vieux 2014).

The History of Home Education Outside the United States

As of this writing no major work concerning itself exclusively with the history of the home education movement in any country outside of the United States has been published. As most European nations and their colonies had longstanding traditions of domestic education, there has been good recent work done on the pre‐homeschooling period. English‐language examples include articles about visual learning in the homes of early modern Italians (Evangelisti 2013), tutors in 19th century Brazil (Vasconcelos 2013), the British and French tutors and governesses of the Russian Aristocracy (Staroverova 2011) and rural Mongolia in the early 20th century (Marzluf 2015). Such work is typically performed by specialists in various historical fields and is typically not connected explicitly to home education movements in their respective countries today, though sometimes the connection is made (Staroverova 2011).

While we lack any complete account for a particular country, region, or continent, in general it can be asserted that movement homeschooling emerged in many countries outside the United States at roughly the same time as it did in the States, though usually on a much smaller scale. Occasionally the influence of the American movement was discernible; occasionally developments seemed to be more autochthonous. Until a fuller and richer historiography emerges it will be difficult to say with precision exactly what happened when and why. Until that literature emerges interested readers will have to make do with historical material that occasionally shows up in more general pieces about home education in particular countries. Recent examples of English‐language works that include at least some information about the history of home education in a given locale include Olatunji’s robust account of the emergence of home education in South Africa (2014), Paciorkowski’s detailed description of the legal history of home education in Poland (2014), Drabsch’s brief discussion of the history of home education in Australia (2013), Martin’s summary of the history of the unique situation in Germany (2010), Staroverova’s description of the reemergence of domestic education among the new Russian plutocrats who have emerged since the fall of communism (2011), and Zur Nedden’s account of pioneering Canadian home educator Wendy Priesnitz (2008). This is not by any means an exhaustive list. It is very common for articles about home education in some country other than the United States to include at least a brief history of the practice in the region under discussion.

Domestic Education in the United States

Like their European, African, Asian, and South American counterparts, specialists in various periods of American history have occasionally studied the use of the home to educate children. Huge fields of historical inquiry devoted to the history of childhood, of the family, and of femininity and masculinity, have all on occasion explored the use of the home as an educative institution. Most of this historical scholarship was synthesized by Gaither in 2008 in what remains the most complete account of the home as an educational institution. The first three chapters of that book deal respectively with domestic education in the colonial period, the early national and antebellum periods, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This chapter will not review the secondary works upon which that synthesis was based. Interested readers are invited to consult the endnotes therein for the sources available as of 2008 for such an account (Gaither 2008).

Since 2008 a fair amount of high level scholarship has been published on related themes that adds even more to our knowledge of domestic education practices prior to the expansion of compulsory schooling in the mid‐20th century. Herndon and Murray’s 2009 book Children Bound to Labor brings together the work of thirteen scholars who collectively tell the story of pauper apprenticeships in early America. The book’s many case studies draw on archival and other primary sources to bring the common practice of placing orphaned, neglected, or simply poor children in the homes of other families to be taught trades. One component of the apprenticeship model was the requirement that host families teach basic literacy and numeracy to their charges, and the book provides a more detailed look at how various families did and did not do this than anything before it (Herndon and Murray 2009).

Several other recent works have examined various aspects of family life, all of which have connections with domestic education. Wilson emphasizes the degree to which stepfamilies were a pervasive phenomenon in colonial New England due to frequent spousal death dislocation (2014). Glover provides rich detail about the family lives of many of the United States’ founding fathers, many of whom were taught at home and/or had their own children taught at home (2014). Hyde provides a remarkable synthesis of the history of the American West, using the family as organizing principle and revealing along the way how fluid were the boundaries between home and school on the frontier (2011). King’s revised and expanded version of her classic study provides much new information about the lives of slave children in both the South and North (2011). del Mar’s sweeping synthesis of US family history provides a fitting context for both the domestic education of early centuries and the emergence of homeschooling in more recent times (2011). Hampel investigates the dramatic rise of correspondence study‐at‐home programs in the early 20th century, some sponsored by universities but many by profit‐seeking firms often engaging in dubious practices (2010). Morice provides an early 20th‐century case study of progressive home education as a reaction against industrialized institutional schooling (2012). Many other works could be listed, but these are standout examples of recent historiography with direct bearing on various aspects of domestic education.

History of The Homeschooling Movement – Early Contributions

For this chapter we will take Gaither’s book Homeschool: An American History as a pivot point. Historical accounts written prior to Gaither’s book will not be discussed in detail as they are all parsed and synthesized in that work (2008). Briefly, the most notable early works that tried to provide a history of the modern homeschooling movement fall into two categories. In the first place there are accounts of the early years of the national homeschooling movement or its manifestation in a particular locale by movement activists. While there is much of value in these memoirs and first‐person narratives, they must be read with scholarly discernment. For the national movement standout examples of the genre include Klicka’s celebratory account (2006) and Seelhoff’s more critical appraisal (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c). Many local accounts by movement insiders, some book‐length (Richman 1989; Meighan 2007; Griffith 2007), most brief (e.g., Lambert 1997; Smith 2007) have been published, though often only in a transient online format (Lepore 2015).

Very few scholarly works dealing exclusively with the homeschooling movement’s history were published prior to 2008. Perhaps the most widely cited has been Knowles, Marlow, and Muchmore (1992), which laid out a five‐phase model of the development of homeschooling in the United States. Their basic narrative structure was one of conflict between homeschooling advocates and public school personnel that gave way gradually to cooperation as laws were changed to make the practice more clearly legal,...