An Overview of the Homeschooling Landscape

Abstract

Homeschooling in its various forms is, without question, the oldest form of semi-formal education throughout all of the history of humanity. Adults have been teaching their children for thousands of years all manner of survival knowledge dating back to early humans such as hunting, gathering, and defense from predators to agricultural knowledge with the advent of the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia. I refer to this as semi-formal rather than formal education in the sense that such training and skills transfer was done not only as an imperative for survival but often done so in the action of addressing immediate needs and not, necessarily, done in a structured environment (structured homeschooling or otherwise). That is, this teaching and learning was not understood as a formalized process where specific time, goals, and agendas were targeted and met. The teaching here falls along the normal teaching that parents do in the daily efforts to socialize their children into the norms of a particular family, language, culture, geographic region, etc. The historical and legal basis for homeschooling in the United States rests in the Supreme Court decisions of Meyer v. Nebraska (1926) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Those cases concluded that "the state does not have the power to 'standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only'" (Kunzman, 2012, p. 77) and that parents have a natural-though, not constitutional-right to decide the type of education their children receive. This lack of an explicit constitutional right is at odds with the prevailing assertion following these cases that the natural rights of the parent (or parental sovereignty) supersede the need of such legal rights. Specifically, while the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly afford children the right to an education (though, most state Constitutions do as does the United Nation's Declaration of Human Rights) and all states require compulsory attendance at some type of schooling (by and large, public schools), the ascendancy of parental sovereignty over such laws continues to establish the conception of parental control as not only natural but above some conceptions of international, federal, and state laws. This is not exclusive to homeschooling as many states allow parents to opt-out of legally mandated vaccination schedules sometimes on a whim following the development of ideology suspicious of vaccines after viewing YouTube videos of celebrities who are champions of the anti-vaccination movement. And while my intent here is not to challenge the role that parents do, and should, play in the lives of their children, the T. Jameson Brewer-9789004457096