I’ve just finished reading Homeschool: An American History by Milton Gaither. This book examines the history of home education in America from colonial times to its publication date in 2008. Gaither makes a distinction between home schooling (with a space) and homeschooling (without a space). He says that educating a child at home was once simply the norm and then just one of many diverse options. During a period in recent American history, homeschooling became a movement with a political and religious focus that is a conscious protest against public or traditional education. Gaither ends his book by suggesting that we’re seeing a transformation away from homeschooling and back to home schooling, with education in the home (in a wide variety of forms) just being one of many options chosen because it best fits the individual’s circumstances for the moment.
There was a lot I found fascinating about this book, and much of it I plan to research further, but I wanted to write a post about a broad trend that Gaither outlines: the connection between the cultural definition and view of a child and how we viewed schooling. The two are obviously tied together. Childhood and schooling are connected concepts, and neither are concrete terms. We have changed the definition of what it means to be a child many times over, and we’ve changed the understanding of school’s purpose just as often.
It may be difficult for us to think about since the idea is so ingrained in us, but “childhood” is not a biological category. It’s a social one that gets invented and reinvented in different eras and cultures. As Barba E. Moore writes in her Master’s thesis on the topic, scholars agree that modern American childhood did not exist prior to the 20th century.
Colonial America: Children’s Financial Value
Gaither examines some of these early days in American history, and comes to the same conclusion as Moore: in Colonial America, children were valued not because of their identity as children but because of their potential financial worth to their families and communities.
During the 1600s, Gaither explains, education was tied to the idea that children needed to learn how to be valuable to their community, and education was entirely the responsibility of the father in this Puritan, patriarchal society. As Gaither puts it, “Mothers were seen to be more emotionally indulgent and hence unfit to educate children, for education was conceived as a necessary preparation not only for material welfare but especially for salvation.” This reference to the connection between religion and education is deepened when Gaither explains that tutoring was a popular side gig for ministers, and religious education was a large part of the curriculum.
The quickly changing economy in America led to a change in philosophy as well. As people started living longer and young men went West to try their hand at chasing the American Dream, women were given more and more control over education and overseeing child-rearing. At the same time, there was a decline in church attendance among men because they no longer saw church as the sole proprietor of social capital. Women, however, continued to attend in large numbers.
Children (like women) were seen as property during this time period. They were also seen, as Moore explains, as “little adults” who should be put to good use as early as possible. There was a popular trend of “child swapping” whereby parents loaned their child out as a servant in exchange for goods. Violence was a common means of getting children to behave and perform labor, and there was little impetus for a neighbor to step in and stop this abuse. Later, the trend of “child swapping” fell out of favor for biological children, but it was still common for orphans.
Slavery: Education and Profit
Eventually, America’s changing cultural dynamics led to a shift away from indentured servitude for white children, but of course, the brutality and forced labor was the norm for black children born into slavery. Slave children were also home educated both as a regimented process enforced by slave owners to ensure the skills necessary for labor and for docility and obedience and as a secret resistance to slavery by other slaves. In 1831, teaching black children to read was outlawed after the Nat Turner rebellion.
In many ways, the Puritanical values that had a mercantile definition of a family’s purpose started to fade away, and they traded them for a more affectionate definition of family. However, this trade left a deficit in the labor force, and slavery filled the gap. Black children’s life of brutality and labor was a trade-off that allowed white children to become seen in a new way, as something other than “little adults.”
Protestantism and the American Revolution
As America declared its independence from British rule, it was also undergoing religious and political shifts that had a huge impact on children. Moore notes the impact of John Locke’s work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In this piece, Locke makes many observations about children’s ability to reason and connects that to their ability to understand the “truths” of life: “So the child must wait until time and observation have acquainted him with them; and then he will be in a fit state to know the truth of these maxims.”
In other words, Locke helped push the idea that children need a period of development before they can be expected to behave and understand like adults. This was coupled with a turn away from Calvinism and the idea of original sin. Calvinism was replaced by a doctrine based on free will, one that was much more aligned (though still contradictory in many ways) with the American work ethic that was beginning to privilege individual wealth over communal success.
Gaither notes that mothers were especially happy to embrace this new Protestantism because it allowed them “a way to reconcile their desires to have their children be both Christian and successful, poor in spirit yet rich in earthly things.” The Protestant work ethic was an outgrowth of this thinking, and it had a profound impact on education.
There was an explosion of domestic advice literature aimed at women. Mothers were seen as the gatekeepers for this new morality, and they were expected to educate their children (at home) in a way that would maintain it. As Moore explains, “This new conception of childhood took root primarily in middle-class families and was largely a romantic notion. Parents, particularly mothers, became the gentle guides, protecting their innocent, pure, and emotionally expressive children from corruption. Nurture, not will breaking, was the advice given to parents.” Middle-class families also saw the invention of concepts like family vacations, birthday celebrations, and family holiday traditions that we recognize today as part of what it means to be a “family.”
Home education was the norm, and gathering around the fireside to read together was the idyllic image of learning.
Immigration Changes Everything: Public Schools as Homogeneity
Home education was considered sufficient for most Americans until the rise in immigration threatened the Protestant monopoly on cultural norms. Immigrant populations grew more than 200% between 1840 and 1850, and the home cultures of these immigrants were very unlike that of the Protestant Americans. Public schools were created as a direct response to these cultural threats.
The initial public schools were Protestant to the core and the same lessons taught in Sunday School were taught in the public schools. It was essentially a way to create a national religion without officially doing so. The most common narrative about public schools in homeschooling circles is that they were created to remove God from education, but the truth is that they were created for exactly the opposite reason. When there was debate about public schools (and there was, especially in the South), it was about the taxes necessary to pay for them, not the curriculum.
Public schools also became a site of class tensions. Gaither notes, “Though some blue-blooded Americans didn’t patronize [public school] themselves, they thought it just the thing for other people’s children.” Affluent Americans continued to use private in-home tutoring and home education themselves, but they wanted to see the miscreant immigrants and poor people around them properly educated for the “good” of society.
The Civil War: Another Shift
As Gaither explains, “the war signaled the beginning of the end of Protestantism as the guiding national ideology” (53). The South was left in economic ruin, and school textbooks moved away from Protestantism specifically to a more generic Christianity. They even erased the anti-Catholic references that had been so crucial to combatting immigrant cultures in the early public schools (which is why so many private schools are Catholic; they had to create them to avoid blatant discrimination for their children in the public school settings).
Birthrates went up for lower-class women who were still sending their children to work when they got old enough, but middle-class women began having far fewer children and spaced them close together to ensure child-free years once they got older. The role of wife was also shifting. Marriage ages went up, and women had different relationships to their husbands. Why? “The reason was contraception. Contraception, more than anything else, facilitated the transformation of marriage from an economic arrangement, whose main aim was to produce and rear children, to a dyadic relationship stressing companionship and intimacy,” Gaither writes.
These changes had a profound impact on the concept of childhood in middle-class families. Moore explains, “In those families where children were expected to become professional employees, parents limited their family size and concentrated their financial and emotional resources on just a few children.”
Industrialization gave housewives more time to spend with their children as products and machines replaced much of their labor demands, and this period also marks the beginning of suburbanization as many well-off families escaped urban centers full of immigrants to create homogenized communities on the outskirts.
The adoption of electricity exploded during this time period as well, changing the way that families used their homes. In other scientific advancements, Darwinism was exploding onto the scene, and traditional, conservative families (especially farming families in rural communities) were fearful of what all of these changes meant.
During this time, public schools remained places for Victorian morality and overtly religious instruction, and attempts to bring new-fangled scientific principles into the classroom resulted in riotous protest.
1890’s: The “Science” of Homemaking
Around the 1890’s, the increased amount of time that women had on their hands in the home left a gaping hole for an industry that was ready to fill it. There was a huge influx of experts writing advice on everything from how to feed a baby to how to educate children. The origins of modern-day parenting books can be found in this move toward the science of homemaking, using the positivist lingo of the day to influence what home life looked like.
All of this extra work of parenting explains the explosion of public schooling: “Even as the family was becoming more intimate and informal, the school was growing larger, more impersonal, and further removed than it had been from home life, taking on more and more of the functions parents had historically performed,” writes Gaither.
Public schooling continued to grow in popularity, and as more children entered the public schools, more standardization was the norm to help make it manageable.
1940s-1960s: Rejecting Standardization and a Political Split
Parenting gurus like Dr. Spock once again helped to shift what it meant to be a child. Ideas about gentle parenting techniques and child-centered approaches became the norm. This caused a split that can still be seen today between conservative parenting advice that is more rigid and stringent and liberal parenting advice that is more child-centered and gentle.
The split between the two wings may get most of the attention, but Gaither notes that the right and the left actually shared a lot of common ground in that both were rejecting the standardization of the government as a whole: “Since the 1960s, Americans on both sides of the political spectrum have been more interested in local community and self-determination than in national identity.”
1970s-1990s: Homeschooling as Radical Political Action
Homeschooling (no space) as a rejection of public schooling began in earnest in the 1970s and occurred on both the right and the left. The left often homeschooled as part of an attachment parenting philosophy. The right began homeschooling as a way to protect traditional family values from what they saw as an attack by Big Government.
At first, these homeschooling defectors were a small minority and didn’t face many challenges, but as their numbers grew, the public schools began to intervene, leading to tremendous legal battles over the right to homeschool.
The early homeschooling movement was very grassroots, and proponents on the left and right often worked together to defend their rights to educate their children as they saw fit. This coalition continued until the 1980s when Christian groups started to close ranks and get more insular and organized. The next few decades were punctuated with battles between a more freeform, grassroots movement on the left and an organized, sanctioned movement on the right even as both groups simultaneously fought for their right to homeschool at all.
Eventually (with a lot of public outcry from the right’s HSLDA organization), homeschooling became legal in all fifty states, a process that has left each individual state with its own regulations and rules regarding home education. For most of the 90s, the growth in homeschooling was largely in conservative Christian circles who saw it as a way to defend their values against increasing secularism.
Today: Homeschooling and Home Schooling
As I mentioned at the beginning, Gaither (writing in 2008) believes that we’re returning to home schooling rather than homeschooling. He notes that the fastest-growing segments of home educators aren’t citing religious reasons for their choices. Instead, they are a diverse group of people who have many different reasons for schooling at home. They are minorities who see home education as a way to protect their children from unequal education systems that lack equitable outcomes. They are parents of special education students who could not get their children’s needs met in the classroom. They are the parents of elite athletes and movie stars who are allowing their children to pursue passions that take too much time for a traditional school setting. They are parents like Jada Pinkett Smith and Elon Musk, both of whom have publicly stated that they homeschool/started their own school because today’s traditional schooling is outdated and doesn’t prepare students for the technological (and largely automated) future.
In other words, today’s home schooling is just one of many educational options in a sea of choices that parents are making to try to do the best they can for their kids. I think it’s also important to note that the “homeschooling” culture wars that tend to drive mainstream narratives about the practice were actually just a flash in the pan of the whole educational history of America. Home education has been more practical than political for most of its history.
Looking to the Future: How do We Prepare Kids for the Unknown?
All that said, what do today’s cultural trends about parenting and the concept of childhood suggest about the future of education?
Today’s parents are raising children for a very uncertain future. In past generations, even during times of technological advancement, changes moved slowly enough that parents could imagine the kind of work and lives their children would lead, but that’s not the case anymore. With automation threatening/promising to take over many types of labor, whole segments of future work are probably not going to exist. In addition, an increasingly globalized world makes it difficult to predict how competition and collaboration will play into our children’s future lives.
At the same time, people are living longer, and childhood has extended well beyond prior age constraints. Many children are not fully financially or even physically independent of their parents until their mid- to late-20s, pushing back the boundaries of what it means to be a child and changing parents’ role.
What will it mean for education and childhood if people live to be 150 and there are very few jobs? What does education look like absent specific career tracks? What do 18 years of education mean if people will be alive another 130 years after they graduate?
The trend toward individualization and self-actualization is a response to these questions. Parents can’t possibly predict what their children will be doing. (My kids are 1 and 7. Will they even learn to drive cars? Will they ever have a career?) They do know, though, about the value of critical thinking, the ability to solve problems, and the benefits of self-confidence. These are abstract concepts that are hard to write into a curriculum, but they’re universally beneficial and safe bets for an uncertain future.
Today’s home schooling is largely a reaction to these anxieties in the face of an aging (and underfunded) public education system that is struggling to keep up.
Photos by Nikhita Singhal, Brandon Mowinkel, Alex Knight
