The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ and relationships. But Claudia felt that homeschooling was a better context for children to learn about and understand romantic relationships, for several reasons: first, homeschoolers have a closer relationship with their parents and are more likely to tell them what is going on in their lives; second, the homeschooling families know each other well enough that they can set boundaries and ground rules about dating; and finally, the parents of homeschoolers have greater control in deciding whether, when, and under what circumstances their children are allowed to date.

      This last reason was especially important to Claudia. She told me that part of the reason she and her husband were not going to permit their children to date while they are young is that children—even older teens—are just not ready to handle romantic relationships. She explained,

      There’s this book that I read a few years ago, I think it’s called What You Should Be to Marry My Daughter. It’s written by a pastor. And at the end of the book, he says, it’s not required that he be complete, now, but just be moving in the direction of all these levels of maturity in all these vast areas. And so I think that that book kind of led me to the fact that you just, when you’re sixteen, seventeen [years old], you’re just not ready. [ . . . ] And he bragged early on, “My daughter has never cried her eyes out about a boy. She has never had to be on some type of suicide watch.” Because he’s a counselor, and he’s had all these people come into his office about all this stuff, and he’s like, “We’ve never done that, because we realize that those types of relationships, they’re just not ready for them.” It’s too much for them to handle; feelings are inevitably going to be hurt. And it’s just too much for them.

      Claudia felt that it was extremely important that she protect her sons and daughter from romantic relationships during their preteen and teenage years, for two reasons: first, because such relationships bring about stress and heartbreak that children are not able to handle; and second, because the end goal of relationships was heterosexual marriage, and she did not see dating as an ideal way to find a spouse. Homeschooling allowed Claudia to have—or at least, to feel that she had—a greater level of control over her children’s experience of love, romance, and sexuality.

      Claudia’s feelings about the importance of maintaining control over her children’s experiences stood in stark contrast to those of Jamie, whom I interviewed several weeks later at a picnic table outside of her suburban YMCA. A white, bisexual, middle-income, married mother of one daughter, Jamie identified as politically very liberal and not at all religious. She explained that one of the major reasons why she and her husband decided to homeschool—or more specifically, unschool—their daughter, Emery, who had just turned seven, was to help her develop a sense of personal autonomy. Jamie explained how it was very important that they consciously cede control, and let Emery make decisions for herself:

      We do try to give her as much autonomy as possible. We let her make as many decisions for herself as much as we possibly can. And everything that we don’t let her make a decision on, is up for negotiation. We try to leave it up to her as much as possible, because if she can’t make her own decisions even when we’re here to support her, what’s she going to do when we’re not there to support her? How is she going to make any decisions for herself? I mean, you see it all the time, you know, kids leave the safety of their home, and the support of their parents, and they go kind of crazy, because they’ve never had that opportunity before. Or God forbid, they’ve never been able to make any choices, so they don’t even know what they like to do; they don’t know what they want to do with their time, because they’ve never been given the opportunity to figure it out.

      One of the clear benefits Jamie saw of raising Emery in the way they were raising her was that it provided Emery with a sense of self, and more specifically, a sense that she deserved to be treated with respect. Jamie gave a compelling example of this in describing a recent visit from Emery’s grandfather:

      My father-in-law was here visiting last week, and he is of an older generation—and he is not nice to little kids. He teases them, and he gets joy out of making them cry from teasing them, and stuff. [ . . . ] But she stood up to him. He was teasing her, and she didn’t like it. And she told him to stop. And he continued. And I told him to stop. And he continued. And she left the room. And she was afraid I was mad at her. I was like, “I’m not mad at you, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, you asked him to stop, and he didn’t, and that’s not your fault. That’s on him.” And she stood her ground, and she was very firm, and said no. And [later] when she had her chat with him, she told him, “I don’t deserve to be treated like that. I told you to stop, and no means no.”

      Jamie was impressed with Emery’s firmness. “It’s not easy for kids to stand up to adults, especially if it’s an older family member,” she said. “But she stood her ground. She knows that she deserves more respect than that, because we’ve told her that she deserves more respect than that.”

      Jamie wanted Emery to know that she deserved to be treated with respect, even as a child, and even by the adults in her life. But, she went on to tell me, she did not see traditional schooling as providing an environment in which children are treated respectfully. She explained, “It’s not really very respectful to tell a kid what they can and can’t wear every day, or how they can and can’t do their hair, or what have you, or what they can and can’t play with. I just don’t think that’s very respectful of them at all.”

      For Jamie, it was of utmost importance that Emery develop a sense of autonomy, which included a sense that she could make decisions about her own life and her own body, and that she could say no to others who tried to get her to do things that she did not want to do. Unlike Claudia, who saw homeschooling as a way to exercise control over her children’s behavior, keeping them from having the kind of autonomy they would have, but not be able to handle, in public school, Jamie saw homeschooling as a way to provide Emery with the ability to exercise control over her own life, giving her a higher degree of autonomy than she would be able to have in public school.

      ***

      Claudia’s and Jamie’s perspectives align with the two central critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools that emerged in my fieldwork. In this chapter, I discuss these critiques, and demonstrate that they correspond with two competing ideologies of childhood: one that views children as “in process,” as developing toward selfhood, and the other that views children as already selves, capable of exercising agency and autonomy. These two different ideologies of childhood result in differences in homeschooling practices, and highlight the way the “homeschooling experience” may look very different for children depending on their parents’ ideological standpoint. I further argue that these two different viewpoints are the subject of a much broader cultural debate about the nature of childhood that is currently ongoing in the United States, a debate that centers on the question of whether “who kids are”—including their gender and sexual identities—is innate, or something that is learned or cultivated. This debate is playing out in local elections and at school board meetings, on parenting blogs and in the opinion pages of newspapers, in classrooms and in churches,1 and it has important implications for how we understand children’s rights, and the responsibilities of individuals, families, schools, and the state to provide for children. Thus, the way in which homeschooling parents talk about childhood matters not only for how we understand homeschooled children but for how we understand childhood more generally.

      Childhood Gender and Sexuality

      Understandings of childhood are historically and culturally situated; in fact, the very idea that there is a distinct phase of life that falls between infancy and adulthood is, historically speaking, relatively new.2 The emergence of the idea that childhood is marked by a special, even sacred quality is even newer. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer chronicled, compulsory education only emerged in the United States when the “productive child”—who was expected to contribute to the labor and upkeep of the СКАЧАТЬ