The politics of home education is missing something
How both the political right and left ignore the rights of actual children and wilfully misunderstand who children are and how they learn
We are at a weird time in history. In the US, we are witnessing the attempted dismantling of public education and at the same time the promotion of homeschooling as a viable option for many families (which it simply is not). There is no conversation around safeguarding or how homeschooling can be and is used to indoctrinate.
In the UK, it’s in some ways the opposite. The left-wing Labour government is introducing a new bill to regulate the ways children are cared for, educated and taught. Many home educators are against this attempt to define what home education is and should be doing, and for more details I recommend reading Catherine Oliver’s post on this.
To me this shows how political home education is. And not purely from the standpoint of schooling being a reflection of the ways we organise ourselves as people (which is what politics actually is), but also from the standpoint of conversations and decisions around how to educate children being taken up in very different ways from the right and the left (or so-called left, who knows where the left is anymore!)
This is an entirely reader-supported newsletter. My aim is to talk about children’s rights, (home) education, learning, childhood and carework in ways that are relevant AND radical. This post is free to read, but please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid member. Sharing is also a great way to support me!
The right tends to promote parental rights and the left tends to believe it is the government’s job to look after children and that parents should leave the educating to educators.
There are so many failures embedded in this approach, and I’m going to touch upon three of them:
abuse can happen in all families: the perpetrators are adults, not homeschooolers
It profoundly misunderstands what home education is (and frankly, what education is and how learning happens)
it almost entirely leaves our children’s rights to participation
Abuse happens mostly outside of homeschooling
First off, I want to say that abuse and neglect of children is real and it can happen both in homeschooling families, and in other families. I will go as far as to say that there is a particular type of homeschool abuse that is promoted and sanctioned within certain fundamentalist homeschool circles - and while this is a minority, every child matters. I’ve written a lot more about this here.
That said, in the US in 2022, 27% of child abuse victims are under 2 years old - this immediately tells you that quite a large chunk of the abuse is not directly homeschool-related, since nobody is homeschooling a 2-year old, and technically they are not school age yet so not required to be in school anyway. According to the same 2022 report, 23.8% of victims had caregivers who abused drugs, and 26.5% were living in a domestic violence situation. What this tells us is that the cause of abuse isn’t homeschooling - but keeping children home might be used as a shield to isolate them.
In other words, the issue isn’t homeschooling, it’s abusive adults. And abusive adults will find ways to do what they do.
The most common form of child abuse is neglect - did you know that? I didn’t until I looked it up! Again, if you are ACTUALLY homeschooling, you will be doing something very far from neglect. If you are a neglectful parent, you will be neglectful regardless of whether your child is home or at school.
Something we do need to reckon with is that the vast majority of abuse is perpetrated by parents.
This is a tough fact, because so often we see potential for abuse outside of our home; and of course, it happens - just under a quarter of abuse happens outside of the home, by someone who is not a parent. This isn’t nothing. In a recent report, 67% of schools surveyed said they had at least one violent incident that year (2021-22). A significant proportion of schools said bullying happened at school at least once a week. There is very little data on the routine violation of rights and personhood that happens at school, because adults don’t view it as valid.
And also, the problem is predominantly parents.
The argument of course is that if a child goes to school, or is immersed in their community, they at least have contact with potential reporters.
A few issues are the following: we don’t really know how much homeschool abuse happens because we have very few statistics about homeschooling to begin with, both in the US and the UK. At the same time, we are also fuzzy about how much abuse happens in nursery, daycare and school for various reasons - it is never discovered, it’s never reported, it’s considered part of being at school rather than actual abuse.
This is a really helpful set of slides that discusses education and neglect:
The government and public don’t understand home education
Home education is not school at home. It can be, for sure, but a lot of the time it is not.
This is something that is profoundly misunderstood, and I think this partly stems from our deep misunderstanding of what children need, of how children learn, and of who children even are.
In brief: children are capable social actors who create meaning from their experiences, activities, and interactions with peers, adults and the world at large. They are not empty vessels that need to be filled with knowledge in order to pass exams and provide their country with a better ranking on global education scales.
This is a profound misunderstanding of who children are and their place in society.
They are not vessels for our government’s neoliberal economic policies; they are not measures of economic output, or measures of ‘outcomes’; they are not future workers or future anything, they exist right now as young people.
From our conceptions of children stem our assumptions about children’s needs - this isn’t to say children don’t have needs, it’s just to say that there is a body of research that deconstructs the ways adults claim something is a ‘need’, with very little evidence of it actually being a need and with little to no input from actual children.
An example is socialisation. there is no universal understanding of what the word means - does it mean learning to talk to people, making friends, building strong relationships, learning to work as a team, figuring out how to fit in at school? What do we really mean? We are obsessed with “children need socialisation” and while I don’t disagree, I like to know what I’m talking about when I say the word.
The perceived lack of socialisation is only one way governments and the public misunderstand home education.
The other is the general misunderstanding of what learning looks like, and of why school teaches what they teach.
Learning is not a top-down process - there is SO much research (not that many of us needed it!) about how learning happens and there is a growing consensus that children and people in general learn best when they have a degree of control over what and how to learn.
Research has shown that learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and cannot be imposed on a child. Children make their own meaning out of what is taught them; in other words, you can stand at the front of a class and teach, but a child will take what you are doing and create their own understanding of it (or lack thereof), and you have very little control over how this process happens.
This should be really heartening for home educators, because much of the way we learn happens WITH our children. We make meaning and understanding together, rather than arbitrarily impose it on above. Our children have a lot more autonomy about their daily lives than school children. We understand the importance of safety and relatedness in learning, and how children will struggle to learn if they don’t feel safe.
We are not their teachers, in the sense that a school teacher is a teacher. And this takes us to the ultimate misunderstanding: you do not need to be a trained teacher to homeschool, because again, home education is not like school, learning doesn’t only happen from teaching (in fact much of it happens in a million different ways), we are not ticking boxes and taking tests, our children are not learning in service of school ratings.
How do we get our governments to understand this?!
Nobody cares about children’s rights
This is the part that infuriates me: if you care about children, truly, then you should be referring to a framework of rights and your policies should abide by it.
Within the UNCRC, which is our most widely-circulated and ratified framework, children’s rights are roughly split in three parts: their rights to provisions (to be cared for and looked after), their rights to protection (self-explanatory!) and their rights to participation (to have a say in all decisions that regard them). There is a growing push that all three of these rights should be considered at once, and that children’s rights to participation should be considered when implementing policies that provide for and protect them.
THIS IS SO CRUCIAL.
In the US, which by the way has refused to sign the UNCRC, the right to homeschool is filed under parental rights (together with several other issues such as the way we ‘discipline’ our children ie. we reserve the right to hit, coerce, punish).
Parental right are super problematic, because they often directly contrast with the rights of children (I wrote more about this here). They also make no sense logically - parental rights are the right of parents to make decisions for their children. And while this seems like no big deal, in practice it is giving adults power over another human. This is power that can be used to advocate for our child, of course, against powerful institutions - it matters! But it’s a double-edged sword because the same power can be used to over-rule our child’s autonomy and rights, to silence them, to coerce them.
The conservatives in the US have supported parental rights to an extreme; the result is that homeschooling is subject to very little regulation, and sometimes none at all.
In some European countries, it has been the opposite - parental rights have been eroded and the government has taken upon itself to make decisions for children.
Neither of these options are good enough, because while governments might claim to do what’s best for children, they are often steamrolling over children’s rights, as well as the concerns of caring parents.
We need policies that put the rights of children - especially their participation rights - at the centre.
The political right and left both seem unwilling to do this, and it is frustrating to no end.
Children’s rights come before parental rights, before what governments think is best, before what institutions decide children need. It’s time we spoke up about this and advocated for our children’s rights.
Children’s rights come before a government-mandated curriculum, a school’s ‘disciplinary’ policies, and also before a homeschool parent’s fundamantalist nutjob indoctrination.
When it comes to legislating about children’s lives, their human rights should be at the very core of everything we do. And yes, this might mean availing of our parental rights to stand in solidarity with our kids - I recognise the irony of this, and I recognise that this process is going to be messy and imperfect. We’ve still got to do it.
Last thing - some news ;)
I’ll be participating in a panel about consent and autonomy at the Unschooling Summit, happening online FOR FREE on March 21-23. You can find all the info here! I would love to see some of you there.
Thank you for reading!
I so appreciated this article. I think home/unschooling is misrepresented on both sides and it’s made me reticent… this was balanced and thoughtful, with your deep experience and research. Thank you