Critical Perspectives on Youth
General Editors: Amy L. Best, Lorena Garcia, and Jessica K. Taft
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Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity
Mary Robertson
The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children
Jessica K. Taft
Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity
Manata Hashemi
The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling
Jennie Germann Molz
The Homeschool Choice: Parents and the Privatization of Education
Kate Henley Averett
The Homeschool Choice
Parents and the Privatization of Education
Kate Henley Averett
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2021 by New York University
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Averett, Kate Henley, author.
Title: The homeschool choice : parents and the privatization of education / Kate Henley Averett.
Other titles: The home school choice
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2021] | Series: Critical perspectives on youth | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035723 (print) | LCCN 2020035724 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479882786 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479891610 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479801664 (ebook other) | ISBN 9781479820689 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Home schooling—Social aspects—United States. | Privatization in education—United States. | Gender identity in education—United States.
Classification: LCC LC40 .A94 2021 (print) | LCC LC40 (ebook) | DDC 371.04/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035723
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035724
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For Sanden, for everything,
And in memory of Charlie Long and Blondie and Charlie Brownfield
Contents
Introduction
1. Homeschooling in the United States: A Brief Overview
2. What Is Childhood? Contrasting Views of Childhood Gender and Sexuality
3. Educating the Unique Child
4. Views of Education: What Do Children Need out of an Education, and Who Should Provide It?
5. Giving Up on Government
6. Motherhood and the Gendered Labor of Homeschooling
Conclusion: Is Homeschooling a Problem?
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Methodology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction
Sharon Bennett, Maura Harrington, and Alma Garcia all homeschool their children. On the surface, they have little else in common. Sharon, a fundamentalist Christian, turned to homeschooling because she saw public schools as hostile to her family’s religious beliefs, especially when it came to issues like sexuality, where she thought the schools overreached by teaching children too much. In contrast, Maura, a self-identified feminist, homeschooled in part because she felt public schools were not doing enough to foster healthy sexual development in students, especially girls. And Alma had quite a few critiques of her own local school district and how they handled her son’s learning disability—a frustrating experience that led her to homeschool both of her children—but she considered herself a great supporter of public schools in general.
Sharon Bennett lived in the suburbs about half an hour north of Austin, Texas, in a single-family home with her husband and sixteen-year-old son, Luke. I began my interview with her by telling her I wanted to learn about how people make the decision to homeschool. She replied, without hesitation, “Well I know for us, [it’s because] we are a Christian family.” She recalled how, when Luke was just a toddler, “that’s what I felt God calling me to do, was to homeschool.” Later, when I asked her what she saw as the main advantage of homeschooling over public schooling, she said, without hesitation, that it was educating her son in a Christian environment. “You can’t really do that with the public schools,” she mused. “It’s almost like there’s everything but Christianity. I mean, they can teach all of these other things, but if you want to bring the Bible into it, you can’t.” Recounting some recent drama in a neighboring school district about teaching gay- and lesbian-inclusive sex-education content in the high school, she reflected nostalgically on an imagined public school of the past, saying that “years and years ago, probably fifty years ago, back before they took prayer out of school, you used to be able to talk about God, or pray in school, or have your Bible—those were things that you could do.” She paused, then added wistfully, “and they’ve changed all of that, so culturally it’s gotten so different.”
Unlike Sharon, Maura Harrington—who lived on a narrow dirt road in a small town in the Texas Hill Country with her husband and her twelve-year-old daughter, Merri—said she homeschools, at least in part, for “feminist reasons.” She and her husband were especially concerned about some of the ways in which girls are treated in society, particularly about how they are socialized to objectify themselves starting at a young age. She explained to me, “We had concerns about the way that it seems like girls are being sexualized younger, and younger, and younger. And we wanted her to keep her sense of being, looking out through her own eyes at the world rather than thinking about how she appears to other people. Because that seems to be a large part of that process, is the turning of the gaze, instead of through her own eyes, thinking about how she appears to others. That was a big concern for us.” I asked her if she feels as though homeschooling has helped in this regard, and she said, “Yeah,