The themes that arose throughout my research largely cluster around two central critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools. The first is that schools are too sexual and are a threat to the sexual innocence of children; thus, pulling children from the school environment and educating them in the home can serve as a way to protect “innocent” children from the influence of their peers, the school curriculum, and a perceived broader liberal agenda in public schools. This idea appeared frequently in the religious homeschooling events I attended, and many (but not all) of the parents who invoked this critique identified as conservative and/or religious. The second critique is not that schools are too sexual, per se, but that they promote a narrow understanding of gender and sexuality: that the heterosexual and/or traditionally gendered space of the school forces children to adhere to a model of gender and sexuality that is, at best, constraining or alienating and, at worst, dangerous. Many of the parents who invoked these ideas were politically liberal and nonreligious, and many (but not all) were unschoolers. In the following sections, I will discuss and give examples of these two critiques, and in doing so, will argue that they stem from two differing ideological constructions of childhood.
Critique #1: School as Overly Sexual
I began my interviews by asking my respondents to describe the process of deciding to homeschool their children and their motivations for doing so, and followed this up by asking them what they currently saw as the main advantages and disadvantages of homeschooling over the public-school model. One of the common critiques of public schools—and at times, private and other alternatives to public schools—that arose in response to these questions was that schools are overly sexualized spaces. Several different reasons were given for this critique, including that school curricula strayed away from what “should” be taught in school, and that children in schools are exposed to inappropriate sexual ideas and behaviors through their peers.
Critiques of Curricula
For Sharon, the former public-school teacher whom we met in the introduction to this book, the instruction in schools around sex and sexuality was a primary motivation for homeschooling her son, Luke, sixteen. Sharon was white, middle-income, and married; she had a college degree, though her husband, who was the primary breadwinner of the family, never attended college. When I asked Sharon how she came to the decision to homeschool, she told me, “We are a Christian family. We wanted that Christian environment. And you can’t really do that with the public schools. 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. And so I realized that, and it was like, okay, I just know that this is something that we need to look at doing, is to homeschool.” While she did not explicitly mention sexuality in this comment, from what I had heard at the homeschooling conferences I had attended prior to her interview, I suspected that beliefs about sexual morality figured prominently in this distinction that Sharon made between “Christianity” and “everything else.” This suspicion was confirmed when I later asked Sharon to expand on her thoughts about public school, and she brought sexuality more explicitly into the conversation: “In the next town over, there was a big thing last year, they’re pushing the kids at the high school to accept alternative lifestyles. But they don’t want you to teach about a heterosexual lifestyle. You know, you can’t do both. It’s like, okay, they’re going to take the alternative lifestyle, and they’re going to say we accept the gay lifestyle, but then if someone in that school doesn’t believe that perspective, they don’t accept that person.” These comments reveal that for Sharon, public school is an overtly sexualized space, and specifically, one that teaches a version of sexuality that she finds unacceptable. She believes that in public schools, homosexuality—or what she referred to as an “alternative lifestyle”—is taught as a valid and acceptable form of sexuality, a notion that Sharon strongly disagrees with. Because the validity of same-sex sexuality is taught as if it is fact, rather than one of many possible beliefs, Sharon constructs the public school as a space that is threatening to her own worldview.
Several other parents expressed the sentiment that certain things were not appropriate to be discussed in school, but nonetheless were. Claudia, whom we met at the beginning of the chapter, said that “sex education is—I don’t think that that’s something the public schools should teach.” She explained that sexuality was something that parents should teach to their children, and that “signing over that responsibility to the school, I think is just wrong.” She told me that even if her children went to a private Christian school, she would not want them learning sex education in school, because “you never know” where the conversation might go, when children are able to ask questions and have an open dialogue about sexuality.
While, for many of these parents, their concerns were due to the conflict between their religious beliefs and certain teachings about sexuality, not all of the parents who felt this way were religious. For example, Vanessa, a white, low-income, married mother of four children, who identified herself as politically moderate and nonreligious, said, “I think that’s my overall issue, is that things are pushed, you know, in the schools. They teach about sex, I think it’s in fourth grade now. And just from being around my children and knowing them as well as I do, none of my children would be ready to hear about that, at that age.” She later went on to say, “I just don’t think that the school has any place teaching about sex, in general—that’s a parent’s job, to teach them about their values and about their sexuality.” She gave an example, clearly struggling to find the right words as she tried to articulate how she felt about it, of a news story about controversies surrounding teaching about same-sex families in California public schools:
In California, you know—like I said, I will accept my children, you know, if they’re gay, straight, whatever, if they’re purple, green—I don’t know, but in California, I’ve read that where they’ve actually started teaching that it’s—I can’t even remember what I read now, I read too much. They’re pushing, though—let me back up. We have, we were part of a homeschool co-op that we really enjoyed, but it was a little too much for us because it was very intense. But it was a homeschool group where we were all very eclectic, secular, and it had one family that was two moms and two girls, so we’re very accepting of each other, and didn’t have any issues. But the funny thing is, is that none of my children knew that that family was a homosexual family. It never came up. It was never an issue. I didn’t have an issue with the family, but I also didn’t—something in me didn’t want to push an agenda on [my kids], if you will. So for me to hear that schools are making it discriminatory to not include, you know, same-sex couples, or you’re not allowed to say this is bring-your-father to school day or whatever, because the family might not have a father—I feel like it’s going in the opposite direction, you know?
Vanessa expressed a lot of ambivalence about teaching her children explicitly about same-sex families. On the one hand, she professed not to mind her children knowing a family in which the children had lesbian mothers, but on the other hand, she felt as though talking about their sexuality directly would be “pushing an agenda” on her children by exposing them to something for which she felt they just were not ready. Either way, Vanessa, like several other parents I spoke with, felt that it was important that discussions about sexuality happen within the family, rather than at school, so that parents can decide what to expose their children to, and when.
Concerns about Peer Influence
For other parents, the official curriculum of schools was less of an issue than the lessons children learned in school from their peers. Jasmine, a Black, married, middle-income, stay-at-home mother of two (soon to be three), explained to me that, before having children, she had never imagined she would homeschool. But when she and her husband began thinking of having children, she was “starting to see the types of things that public schools were teaching, and the types of kids that were coming out of public school, and