http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=211
Homeschooling and the Double Standard
By Kimboo York
Ms. York is a professional writer and lives in Orlando, Florida. She
graduated from New College, the Florida State honors college, and was
homeschooled almost exclusively from second grade through twelfth.
After the Columbine massacre, no one questioned the fact that a public
school can turn into a hostile, deadly environment. But no one, or at
least very few, asked the important question that should follow: Are
public schools inherently deadly? Such a question demands tomes of
academic analysis, years of carefully planned research, and probably
millions of dollars worth of study. Yet, no one has asked the question at
all; instead, the debate has centered on how to make public schools
safer, not on whether they are fundamentally dangerous places.
But a double standard is being applied to homeschooling. When Andrea Pia
Yates
killed all five of her children by drowning them in Houston, Texas, a
vocal group of homeschool critics not just raised the question of whether
homeschooling children is deadly, they assumed that the very case itself
was proof that it is.
The argument is based on the concept that teaching a bunch of kids at home is
far
too stressful for anybody, and that it creates an unnatural
psychological toll that at some point may break the parents or the
children. Unfortunately, this argument is also radically leftist,
assuming that the majority of homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians
whose sole aim is to isolate and indoctrinate their children.
Is their argument sound? Is it based on facts? It is worthwhile to look at
the history of
homeschooling, perhaps, to find answers.
Historically speaking, there is only one "homeschool" movement, and it is a
comparatively recent phenomenon. The homeschool movement as it is
understood today - parents pulling children out of public or private
schools, to be taught at home - began in the early 1970s, and can be
broadly traced to the publication of John Holt's book, Freedom and Beyond
, in 1972. Homeschooling has been hotly contested by professional
educators and fought for by grassroots activists on a state by state
basis ever since, and it was not even until the late 1980s that the first
crop of homeschooled high school graduates went on to college.
The homeschool movement, according to statistics, includes at least 350,000
families in all 50 states of the U.S. and ranges in style across the
board from fundamentalist Christians to liberal atheists. Unfortunately,
the statistics are by nature flawed: few states have methods in place for
accurately recording how many children are currently homeschooled (and
those that do rarely ask what the political and religious persuasions are
of the homeschool parents), and many families never report their
activities to any official body for fear of truancy reports or state
intervention.
However, the act of schooling a child at home (as apart from the "homeschool
movement") is an ancient tradition. Given that public education in the
formal sense is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last 200 years, not
gaining wide acceptance even until the mid to late 1800s, it must be
concluded that homeschooling and private schools were the de facto
options for parents wishing to educate their children during the majority
of the history of the U.S.
This being the case, homeschool should have a long history of violence, or of
peace.
This is not a question I believe anyone is prepared to answer, as no
one (to my knowledge) has conducted a legitimate, scientific inquiry into
whether families that schooled children at home prior to 1970 have a
higher murder and/or suicide rate. Theoretically it would be difficult to
prove, but proper study of newspaper and death records of rural areas
(where homeschooling was more prevalent in the last two centuries) might
shed some light into the subject. In fact, a similar study confined to
the modern era would prove useful as well.
Homeschool activists have gathered quite a bit of circumstantial evidence in
their
efforts to prove that homeschooling is a natural, healthy method of
education. Many leaders of the homeschool movement, both liberal and
conservative, point to Thomas Edison, whose mother finally removed him
from formal schooling when he was 12, after years of contentious debate
with both her son and the school master. Other homeschool luminaries
include Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Mark Twain,
Pearl Buck, and Albert Einstein. The list goes on, but the point is many
successful people were homeschooled. Were they exceptions, though? Does
homeschool, as critics suggest, critically remove children from proper
socialization and burden the parents with overwhelming emotional duress?
In the end, both public schools and home schools can be considered dangerous,
deadly environments; both can also be seen as positive and encouraging
sources of education for today's youth. The questions asked of either
should be applied equally to both, whether it is how to make each
environment safer, or if one or the other is unredeemably lethal.
In the case of Yates, it is quite probable that the stress of dealing with
all five of her
children all day, every day was a factor in their deaths. Yet the
historical data, as incomplete and circumstantial as it obviously is,
points to the fact that millions of families over the last 600 years have
homeschooled their children without resorting to lethal recourse. It is
far more likely that homeschooling was simply another factor in Yates's
life, along with post partum depression and mental instability, that led
to her allegedly committing the murder of all five of her children
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