The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ followed later that day by a talk called “Ten Things to Teach Your Daughter before She Graduates.” While there were certainly some gender-specific points made in each talk, there was also clear overlap. In fact, the primary message of each of these talks was very similar: that parents must model for their children how to be good husbands/fathers or wives/mothers, and be devoted to God and to their families. Dividing the content into two separate talks, however, had the effect of reinforcing the idea that boys and girls are very different from each other, and that all boys have certain needs, while all girls have other needs.

      At the Catholic homeschooling conference I attended, the talk of “virtues”—a concept that seemed to carry the same meaning as “character” did at the fundamentalist Protestant conferences—was also very gendered. The development of virtues was also framed as being of importance primarily so that girls will be able to inhabit the roles of wife and mother, and boys the roles of husband and father, later in life. While the speakers emphasized the importance of virtues for all children, some of the virtues were very gender specific. For example, when speakers described the virtue of modesty, the focus was almost exclusively on the importance of girls being modest in how they dress (one of the speakers, Colleen Hammond, wrote a book on this very subject, titled Dressing with Dignity). Physical endurance was noted to be a virtue that is especially important for boys. Much of the focus on the preteen and teen years had to do with developing virtues that would aid children in maintaining sexual abstinence until marriage. For example, in her talk, Hammond named fortitude as an important virtue to develop for children ages eight to twelve, and suggested developing this trait by keeping meatless Fridays as a family (which, since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, is no longer a mandatory practice for Catholics). Hammond explained the practice by asking how, if parents cannot teach their children to avoid meat on Fridays, parents can expect them to avoid giving in to “the baser feelings” in the coming years, like when they are teenagers and they find themselves alone with someone they really like.

      Many of the parents I interviewed echoed the sentiment that parents needed to be able to instill their values around gender and sexuality in their children as a means of guiding their gendered and sexual behaviors. Danielle, a white, high-income, married mother of two, told me that she did not mind teenagers being taught about sexuality in the context of a biology or anatomy class, but, like Sharon, she felt that schools should not promote certain sexual behaviors, including “alternative lifestyles” and “lesbian, gay, and transgender issues,” which she thought were “mom and dad’s arena.” She told me,

      I’m not necessarily opposed to him learning about, you know, gay and lesbian issues, or what is a transgender [sic], you know, I mean that’s the world we live in. But that should come from me. And that should be something that I can explain to him, okay, well this is what gay means, this is what lesbian means, this is what rainbow coalition means, this is whatever. And it’s up to me to make sure that he understands that they are still people, and you still treat them with respect, and you don’t hate on them. But what they’re giving them in the schools is that this is normal behavior. That it encompasses all the normal range of human behavior. And you have to accept it, or you’re a bigot. And I don’t agree with that either. That’s something that’s a philosophy, it’s a political-type discussion, that is probably better served in the home, where you’ve got mom and dad that can, you know, guide them.

      For Danielle, it was important that she be involved in any conversation her children had about same-sex sexuality, so that she could include her perspective that same-sex behavior is unacceptable, and thus that it is not something that her son should engage in.

      In short, these parents worried about public school because, as Claudia put it, at school, “other people are able to influence their thoughts, their choices.” Claudia and Danielle, like other parents who utilized the childhood-innocence discourse, were not worried that, for example, public school would make their children gay; in fact, none of the parents I interviewed expressed such a fear. Rather, they worried about the school’s influence on their thoughts and their behaviors. Claudia summed up the importance of homeschooling in this project, saying, “The values, and the things that we hold dear—they’ll be lost for them if I don’t take these early years and share with them why we think the way we think, and why it’s the righteous way to think—if we didn’t establish that first and let them get all their questions out and have open dialogue and discussion about them, then they may not have a firm foundation, a firm beginning.” She later added, “There’s a lot of opportunity there, to teach what’s appropriate. But, without supervision, they’re going to make the wrong decisions. They just need guidance, into making the right decisions.”

      I argue that in emphasizing behavior rather than identity, these parents rely on an understanding of childhood gender and sexuality as malleable, rather than fixed, and as marked by choice (see table 2.1). It is not how their children choose to identify, but rather a question of how they choose to behave, that defines their character, or “who they are” as a person. Such beliefs are evident in Claudia’s statements about how children need to be guided in such a way that they will be more likely to make the right decisions, choosing righteous beliefs and appropriate behaviors, as adults. Or, as another parent, Donald, put it, rather than putting his children in situations where they would face such decisions, “We want to slowly develop them.” In other words, although these parents believe there is only one correct way to enact gender and sexuality, they paradoxically adopt a social-constructionist view of gender and sexuality in childhood.

Table 2.1. Characteristics of the “School as Overly Sexual” Critique
Critique:	School as overly sexual
Understanding of gender/sexuality:	Defined by behaviors
What defines “who you are”:	Character • Evidenced by behaviors • Formed during childhood
Goals of parenting:	• Protect children’s innocence • Shape children’s character • Lay foundation for right behavior/choices (including gender & sexual expression)
Theory of childhood gender/sexuality:	• Malleable • Social constructionist

      Critique #2: School as Constraining Gender and Sexuality

      Alongside the critique of public school as overly sexualized and a threat to childhood innocence, a second, very different critique featured prominently in my interviews. In this critique, parents—usually politically liberal and mostly, though not exclusively, nonreligious—were critical of schools for being spaces where children’s gender and sexual expression are constrained. As with the previous critique, parents saw this constraint as coming about both from the school curricula and from students’ peers. Rather than focus on what children were exposed to from their peers, however, these parents spoke more about the differences in the type and quality of peer culture and peer interactions that exist between public school and homeschooling.

      Critiques of Curricula

      Several of the parents I interviewed were strongly critical of sex education in schools, but rather than be concerned that children were exposed to more than they could handle, they were concerned that they were not being exposed to enough information. One parent who felt this way was Raya, an Indian-immigrant, middle-income, married mother of two sons, both of whom had previously been in public school. When her older son, David, was in middle school, she signed a permission slip allowing him to participate in the school’s sex education program, but was surprised when he came home one day with a flier promoting abstinence. In her mind, abstinence should not СКАЧАТЬ