The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ was believed to be in need of protection from the adult world.3 As the ideology of the sacred child took hold, schools were seen as the ideal place for children to spend their days, both to protect them from participation in labor and to care for their developing minds. The concept of the sacred child has thus always been intimately linked to ideas about the role of education—and, in particular, public schools—in children’s lives. As the role and importance of public schools have been increasingly questioned in recent years, have our ideas about childhood also changed?

      And what, exactly, is “sacred” about the sacred child? One key component of this ideology of childhood is the concept of childhood innocence—but children’s innocence has always been somewhat contested, and these debates often play out in the context of education. For example, behind debates about abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex education in schools is the question, do children need to be protected from knowledge about sexuality, or does keeping them from such knowledge harm children?4 Not only do changes in social beliefs about education warrant an examination of changes in understandings of childhood, then, but they also indicate a need to interrogate broader social anxieties about childhood gender and sexuality.

      Theorists of childhood gender and sexuality emphasize the importance of the institutional context to how children experience and understand gender and sexuality.5 Two institutional contexts that are especially important in children’s worlds are the family and education. The family is generally the first context in which children learn about gender and sexuality, both through explicit talk about these concepts and through the implicit lessons that come from taking part in gendered family life.6 Schools, too, are spaces where children both receive implicit and explicit messages about gender and sexuality and also “play” with gender in their interactions with other children.7 Parents perceive the environment of schools to be highly gendered, and their 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.8 Because parental concern about the school environment is a common reason parents cite for opting to homeschool, we would thus expect gender and sexuality to factor into their narratives about this decision.

      In this chapter, I look at the ways in which gender and sexuality appear in the narratives of homeschooling parents in order to expand our current theoretical and empirical understandings of gender and sexuality in the context of both education and the family. Looking at a case in which the lines between these institutions are blurred opens a space for novel conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in childhood. I ask, in what ways are parents’ concerns about school environment and academic instruction grounded in their conceptions of gender and sexuality? How do homeschooling parents resist—or reproduce—popular notions of gendered childhoods?

      Childhood Gender and Sexuality in Parents’ Motivations for Homeschooling

      There is great variation in the motivations of homeschooling parents, and certainly not all of these motivations center on issues of gender and sexuality. In fact, few of the parents whom I interviewed for this project would be likely to consciously identify “gender and sexuality concerns” as one of the reasons why they homeschool. Yet themes related to gender and sexuality popped up frequently both in these interviews and in the talks at the homeschooling conferences I attended.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ