The rise in both the popularity and the acceptability of homeschooling has occurred in tandem with the rise of the rhetoric of school choice, where homeschooling is one of the many educational choices that should be available to parents and children. The school-choice model is itself part of a larger trend toward the privatization of public education and other public services—what scholars have come to call the “neoliberalization” of public education.6 Neoliberalism refers to a broad set of global economic policies focused on competition, market discipline, and fiscal austerity.7 Privatization of what were previously public services—including education—is one of the hallmark practices of neoliberalism. While the privatization of public education is most often associated with the emergence of privately run (and for-profit) public charter schools or voucher programs that allow children to attend private schools using public funding, homeschooling is arguably the most radical manifestation of this trend, in which education moves into the private realm of the family home. Just a few decades ago, homeschooling was considered a deviant practice, but the privatization of education has helped to legitimize it.8
How are neoliberal education reforms affecting families? The narratives I present in this book give us a rich understanding of how parents make decisions about their children’s education under the school-choice model, revealing the ways in which parents navigate the rhetoric of school choice and the corresponding changes in education. The decisions that parents make around homeschooling help illuminate the changing relationships among the family, the state, and public schools, and the stories I present in this book highlight how trust in, and reliance upon, public services are changing, and what this means for families.
Childhood Gender and Sexuality
Homeschooling also provides a window into contemporary changes in the meaning of childhood in general, and of childhood gender and sexuality specifically. Understandings of childhood are historically and culturally situated. At least in the West, the very concept of childhood, as distinct from both infancy and adulthood, only emerged beginning in the fifteenth century.9 In Pricing the Priceless Child, sociologist Viviana Zelizer argues that the movement to end child labor and move children from factories and into schools through compulsory education laws was largely an ideological dispute between two opposing views of children: the “sacred child,” who is in a special part of life and in need of nurturing and protection from adults, and the “productive child,” who can contribute to the family economically like any other family member. Ultimately, the sacred child won, and compulsory education is now the norm in the United States.10 The concept of childhood as a distinct, special stage of life has thus always been intimately linked to ideas about the role of public schools in children’s lives. Recent changes in the provision of education, and particularly beliefs about the purpose of this education, beg the question of whether our societal beliefs about childhood have also changed. Homeschooling offers fresh insights into the ways in which dominant beliefs about childhood are shifting alongside these shifts in education.
Debates about what is “sacred” about childhood often revolve around gender and sexuality. Are children innocent and asexual, and in need of protection from sexuality, or are they sexual beings who can and do exercise agency? These debates have deeper roots, and more far-reaching consequences, beyond how we understand childhood. They are really debates about sexuality more broadly; the concept of “childhood” serves as a container within which society expresses anxieties about sex, gender, and sexuality.11 As the narratives of Sharon and Maura at the start of this chapter indicate, debates about childhood gender and sexuality are central to competing framings of homeschooling in the United States. These narratives are a microcosm of broader societal anxieties about gender and sexuality.
Institutional context matters to how children experience and understand gender and sexuality,12 and education is one context in which childhood gender and sexuality are especially salient.13 The environment of the school—and the perceptions of that environment by parents—are highly gendered,14 and academic instruction in public schools contains both explicit and implicit lessons about gender and sexuality.15 Parental concerns about peer influence at school tend to be formulated in racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized terms: that is, parents construct racial, class, and gendered “others” as potentially dangerous influences on their own (assumed-to-be) innocent, impressionable children.16 In this book, I explore the ways in which homeschooling parents’ critiques of public education are tied to their beliefs about childhood gender and sexuality. How are the homeschool environments they create themselves gendered and sexualized spaces? And how do homeschooling parents resist—or reproduce—popular notions of gendered childhoods?
Mothering and Gender Inequality
Cultural beliefs about childhood are intimately tied to beliefs about what it means to be a good parent, and more specifically, how to be a good mother. Parenting the “sacred child” requires the investment of money and time, particularly on the part of the mother, and it requires that parents take a protectionist stance toward their children, as the sacred child holds an emotional value greater than any other.17
The investment of time and money into raising children is the hallmark of what Sharon Hays dubbed the “ideology of intensive mothering,” which, she argued in the 1990s, had become the dominant way of thinking about parenting in the United States.18 Intensive mothering functions as an ideology insofar as it orients the behavior of mothers in certain ways.19 Though this ideology is adapted and resisted by individual women, all mothers in the United States are aware of it, and it shapes how they think about, feel about, and experience motherhood.20 Intensive mothering requires that mothers be both economically productive and highly invested in caring for their children, and this creates tension for many women as they strive to achieve the ideal of the working mom who “does it all.”21 The ideology of intensive mothering remains central to the experiences of most American mothers today, whether or not they are able to come close to attaining its ideals. As sociologist Jennifer Lois has argued, the fact that mothers perform the vast majority of homeschooling labor supports this claim.22
However, since Hays first conceptualized the ideology of intensive mothering, the cultural rhetoric of neoliberalism, with its “buzzwords” of “efficiency” and “individual responsibility,” has crept into our thinking about parenting. Parenting under neoliberalism is marked by the need for mothers to manage their children’s lives. This trend is informed by two primary beliefs: the first, consistent with the ideology of intensive mothering, is that parents must rely on expert advice in caring for their children; and the second is that implementing this advice is an individual, private decision.23 As “expert advice” on child rearing has proliferated, parents—particularly mothers—are faced with an onslaught of contradictory advice on how to best raise their children. But it is seen as their responsibility—not the responsibility of the “experts”—to sift through this competing advice and make individual decisions about what is best for their children.24 Thus, mothers are required to be the ultimate experts on their own individual children—even when this means going against certain expert advice, as is the case with mothers who choose not to vaccinate their children.25 This is certainly the case with homeschooling, as “expert advice” advocating both for and against homeschooling abounds. An understanding of how mothers make the decision to homeschool, and how they understand the gendered nature of this decision, is thus central to understanding gender inequality in the era of neoliberal motherhood.
The Study
I carried out the research for this project between August 2013 and May 2016. During this time, I conducted a survey of over six hundred homeschooling parents, interviewed forty-six of those parents, and attended five homeschooling conferences and conventions across the state of Texas. The parents I surveyed came from all over the state and represented a wide range of political stances, religious affiliations, and motivations for homeschooling. The survey asked about homeschooling experiences and