Is Homeschooling Right for Your Nation?

The first class I took in a public school was strength training in my sophomore year of high school. Up until then I had been homeschooled by my parents, mainly my mother, and under her tutelage I learned to love reading and learning but I didn’t learn how to naturally interact with other kids my age without coming across as a weirdo. My education took a sharp downward turn when my mother was hired at the local school district to act as a facilitator between homeschool families and the public school, making sure the homeschoolers did not fall too far behind their public-school peers My father took over my education, and he was a pastor, not an instructor, pastors tend to be persuasive, but not very educational. To say I suffered under his tutelage would be an understatement. I flourished in my one public school class that first semester and successfully convinced both my parents to let me enroll in the public school full-time, since my dad wasn’t successful at teaching and my mom no longer had the time. Going through homeschooling early in my childhood and switching to public school as a teenager has given me a unique perspective on the topic of homeschool and education, a perspective I wish to share. Taking into account both the benefits and the drawbacks of homeschooling, I ultimately believe that homeschooling can be beneficial, but for it to be the next step in education, it must have more regulation and oversight.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding homeschooling is quality of education, how effective parents are at actually teaching their own children reading, writing, and arithmetic. To help parents become better educators for their children, there are numerous companies who produce textbooks and curriculum specifically for homeschool and private schools. Unfortunately, the largest of these companies put their own agenda in the educational materials they publish. Rebecca Klein reports in her article “The Rightwing US Textbooks that Teach Slavery as ‘Black Immigration.’” These include Abeka, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education (Klein). I know from experience that many private, Christian school curricula are often used by homeschool families who have a religious tilt to their lives. These companies also publish incredibly inaccurate information, claiming slavery was just “Black immigration” as said in the article’s title, and that the Civil War, famously fought so the southern states could retain slavery, was just “war between the states,” which according to Klein is a common way of describing it by people “who romanticize the Confederacy” (Klein). In fact, one textbook explicitly claimed that the “Bible Belt,” a group of states ranging from New Mexico to the East Coast, was created by the southern survivors of the Civil War through their renewed faith in God (Klein).

These companies, Abeka and the others, boast on their websites to have supplied materials for over a million Christian private schools and thousands of homeschool families in various countries around the world (Klein). As recently as 2017, 4 years before Klein published her article, over a third of private schools in America in the voucher program sourced their curricula from one of these publishers, as well as an unknown number of individual homeschooling families and co-ops. With all these blatant falsehoods and inaccuracies from the top three private and homeschool material publishers it is detrimental to teach children from these books that push lies as truth and sugarcoat the violent history of America while pushing the narrative that the Black Lives Matter movement increased the divide between police and their victims (Klein).

Homeschooling is seen by many parents as a way to keep their children from being bullied and developing mental disorders such as anxiety or depression, but in many cases the opposite happens. Lauren Barton writes for the Nation on “Homeschooled Students’ Invisible Mental Health Crisis.” In her article, Barton brings up Eve Ettinger, a homeschool regulation advocate and former homeschool student herself, children in religious, homeschool families are only surrounded by people similar to them, any deviance from the societal norm is not noticed because it isn’t deviating from the established family norm (Ettinger qtd by Barton). Many families removed their children from public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, preferring to focus on homeschooling instead of the virtual school offered by their local school districts. There is no doubt in my mind that a majority of these families did so with the best of intentions, wanting to bond more with their children and be present in their life and education. Even the best of intentions can have unanticipated consequences, unfortunately, and the sad truth is most parents are not trained to be educators in the same way teachers are and, more often than not, tend to talk at their children instead of teaching them. Many children also fear going to their parents about mental anguish, either not wanting to burden them, or believing that parents don’t care about or understand their children. I know in my own experience, trying to bring up mental health issues or my burgeoning queerness was met with responses of ‘pray about it and read the Bible’ by both of my parents, something which was not beneficial for me at all in either the short or the long term. It’s not beneficial to other children as well, even ones not in a fundamentalist household like I was. Barton mentions a young homeschooler by the name of Rana whose mental health took a turn for the worse during the pandemic and continued to decline after they stopped attending a homeschool co-op they had used to frequent (Barton). There are few resources outside of family and church for most homeschool students to access for bettering their mental health or if they begin to question their identity as a straight, cisgendered person, and family and church are usually not equipped to meaningfully help with these kinds of mental anguish. Many students in public school are able to discuss these issues and concerns with members of faculty who are trained to help adolescents when these issues come up in their lives: guidance counselors, nurses, and in my own experience, English teachers, art teachers, drama teachers, and band teachers. Choosing to homeschool without any form of support network ready to replace these professionals is short-sighted at best and tantamount to abuse at worst.

Tantamount to abuse? That sounds extreme, but in a 2020 study led by Dr. Ty Schepis, “Substance Use and Mental Health in Homeschooled Adolescents in the United States,” Dr. Schepis and his associates, Drs. Sean McCabe and Jason Ford, researched substance abuse in teenagers and the differences between public school students and homeschool students concerning drug use. In fact, despite using marijuana less than public school students, “homeschooled adolescents had significantly higher rates of past-year prescription opioid misuse, benzodiazepine use, tobacco use and non-marijuana illicit drug use” (Schepis et al. 3). Homeschoolers are also found to struggle with more mental health issues without receiving treatment, only public-school students at risk of dropping out had lower rates of untreated mental health issues than homeschoolers on mental health (Schepis et al. 3). When adolescents are denied mental healthcare, they tend to turn to self-medication instead of seeking less destructive alternatives.

Now why might someone want to homeschool their children? Candace McManimon, a homeschool alumnus herself, writes about some of these reasons in her Intellectual Takeout article “The Hidden Benefits of Homeschool (From a Homeschool Graduate).” I do admit I disagree with much of what McManimon says, but she still makes some good points that I want to highlight. For example, McManimon correctly points to the outdated education system in the US, saying “[t]his educational model was designed to train children for the military and the industrial/factory world of the early 1900s” (McManimon). Today’s America is not built around industry as much as it is built around economics, something which the public school system has decreasingly offered to teach. By offering homeschool as a way to let children express themselves and develop in their own natural way, it allows children to learn more about the world and not just giving out cookie-cutter diplomas the public school system gives out McManimon also brings up how homeschool allows children to focus on their passions at a much younger age than public school allows, using herself as reference, stating “[her] greatest passion as a child was art,” and her parents would get her art supplies and instructional books for her as gifts to support her interest in sketching and drawing (McManimon). These are both examples of the good that can come from homeschooling, something that I know as well as my parents would often give me books and advice on writing as I discovered my own interest in story-telling and world-building.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been numerous advances in homeschool programs and curricula, something which Sarah Hernholm covers in her Forbes article “Rise of Homeschooling Is Making a Transformative Impact on Education.” Many families chose to homeschool their children in the midst of the pandemic and the social isolation it caused, and not just religious families, but secular households also began educating at home instead of continuing with the constantly changing remote learning many school districts implemented. Part of this reasoning was that homeschooling already had a basic framework to grow off of, there were already articles from other homeschool parents and advice for new homeschoolers. While the public school system stumbled, homeschool co-ops grew, and new ones were formed. Many companies that worked in supplemental education, like Khan Academy and Thinkwell, have grown to include more curriculum developed for homeschooling families (Hernholm). One of the biggest benefits of homeschooling is giving the students more flexible schedules to pursue other interests as well. Hernholm presents the cases of Cash Daniels and Anvi Saxena, both students in homeschool programs. Daniels has launched his own nonprofit organization, The CleanUp Kids, and schedules his schoolwork around running his nonprofit (Hernholm). Saxena utilized the more freeform learning style to focus on assignments due soon while attending mandatory lectures, giving her more time to practice her passion for dancing and even began the process of starting her own dance studio while still only in middle school (Hernholm)! More companies are being formed to help as well. Matt Beaudreau, for example, founded Apogee Schools in 2022. Beaudreau, a former classroom teacher, wanted to make an alternative to what he calls the “public conveyor belt schooling system” (Beaudreau qtd in Hernholm). What I once decried as fundamentalist Christian brainwashing has managed to become something beneficial to many students and could become the new way to educated children.

I think that homeschooling has the potential to be better than it once was. It must be understood, however, that the reason to homeschool is to benefit children, not to indoctrinate them into problematic ideologies and behaviors. My own research for this argument has led me to educate myself on the changes homeschooling has gone through since I entered the public school system at 16 years old. As a homeschool alumnus myself I want to give some advice to parents looking at homeschooling their children to: find a homeschool co-op or other homeschool parents to keep all the children well socialized; avoid the big name publishers like Abeka and Bob Jones, find curriculum that are recommended by teachers and professors; don’t be afraid to reach out to your local school district as well, many have some form of independent studies program that homeschool can fall under. Ultimately, children must be the focus, and raising children to be well-rounded critical thinkers is what this country needs to continue into the future.