The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 things I was hearing out of young kids, and things they were exposed to, I was like, oh my! You know, six-year-olds talking about things that six-year-olds shouldn’t be talking about.” When I asked her for an example of the types of things to which she was concerned about children being exposed, she recounted hearing a child at her church talking about sex: “There’s a little boy, he was probably six or seven, and he was talking to someone about—he knew how babies were made. And, he knew, pretty in detail, how babies were made, for a six-year-old. And I was like, oh my goodness! And then I heard his mom talking about it and how she was mortified that he knew all this stuff, and that he had learned it from kids at school. And I was like, oh my gosh, at six! That’s kindergarten!” Though Jasmine implied that the knowledge this young boy was recounting was factually correct (“he knew pretty in detail”) and focused on the biological process of “how babies are made,” she felt that this was not knowledge that a young child should have. In noting that he had acquired this knowledge from his peers in a school setting, Jasmine constructed schools as spaces in which children are not protected from this knowledge—and thus as potentially threatening spaces.

      This concern about what information children are exposed to was not limited to very young children. Janice, a white, married, middle-income mother of four, did not homeschool her older three children, now adults and parenting their own children, because at the time, she was not really aware of homeschooling. Janice and her second husband had adopted their now-teenaged son, Mark, as older parents, and she explained her decision to homeschool him in relation to her older children’s experiences in public school, saying, “I wish they hadn’t been in that environment. And there was just a lot of garbage that I didn’t need my children being raised around. Not that I’m interested in protecting Mark to the point where he couldn’t function in society. But there’s some things a sixth-grade girl doesn’t need to learn until she’s in high school.” When I asked her to clarify, she named both sex education and the language students used in school as examples of things to which middle and high school students should not be exposed. Interestingly, her example implied that it was more important to protect girls from exposure to this knowledge than boys, indicating that the protection of children’s innocence is a gendered process.9

      Children as Innocent

      Parents frequently justified their concerns about what their children would learn in school by invoking a discourse of children as innocent. For example, Veronica, a white, married, low-income mother of five, stated that because they were a Christian family, “I try to keep them . . . [sighs] sheltered in a way? But not so sheltered that they’re weird? [Laughs] You know, just try to keep their innocence as long they can. I think in public school they lose their innocence sooner.” For Veronica and Janice, as well as other parents, children’s loss of innocence is seen as inevitable; it needs to happen in order for them to transition from childhood to adulthood, and is also necessary to some degree so that they will not be so naïve as to be unable to function in society. However, this loss of innocence is something that they see themselves, as parents, having the power—and even the responsibility—to delay for as long as possible.

      This is not to say, of course, that homeschooled children are not exposed to ideas about sexuality. As many scholars have pointed out, the general lack of explicitly sexual content in children’s social worlds does not mean that these social worlds are not filled with messages about sexuality—particularly about the normative expectation of heterosexuality.10 This was quite evident in the four Christian homeschooling conferences that I attended as part of my fieldwork for this project, where one of the frequent themes that arose was that homeschooling allowed parents to spend more time with their children, and thus helped Christian parents to more effectively model for their children the proper relationships between husband and wife, and parents and children. In all of these talks, there was an ever-present expectation of children’s future heterosexuality: boys were always framed as future husbands and fathers, and girls as future wives and mothers, all within the context of heterosexual families. Importantly, however, these talks made clear that children are always expected to be heterosexual in the future, but not in the present; as children, they are, or should be, more or less asexual. Speakers emphasized that sex and sexuality were very dangerous for children, and a sexually permissive culture was frequently cited as one of the many “enemies” of the homeschooling movement. The overall message was that any exposure of children to sexual themes—outside of the normativity of marital heterosexuality—is threatening and harmful.

      There was one notable moment of rupture in this discourse, however, in the form of a talk at one conference, which focused on protecting children from child sexual abuse. The speaker, Jennifer Hillman, a young mother of two daughters, was at the conference promoting a program she had developed called “Bailey Bee Believes,” СКАЧАТЬ