What is the Future of Homeschooling?

Elena Silva wrote for EdCentral examining historical trends in homeschooling and the reason for increasing popularity as a hybrid educational option for some students and families.

Around this time each year, as children head back to school, a paradox re-emerges: The general public may nod to the adage that “education begins at home”—and agree with the notion that parents are partners in learning—but homeschooling is rarely talked about in a positive way. Public schools don’t consider parents, even if they call themselves home-based educators, to be “real” teachers. Mostly unregulated and untracked, homeschooling is presumed to offer fewer resources to students and to be of lower quality than both public and private schools. And after years of news stories about its sinister side, homeschooling is often associated with a patriarchal, religious fundamentalism: The image of an isolated child—left to care for her many siblings, to learn on her own, or worse, to fend off abuse—isn’t as surprising as it ought to be.

Indeed, while it’s true that these children need and deserve protection, what’s frequently obscured is that this image is really about child welfare reform—a way to protect children from religious fanatics that’s more about the home than it is about the homeschool. And fundamentalist, off-the-grid homeschoolers aren’t the norm. In fact, despite the massive market of religious homeschool conventions, curriculum, and websites and the power of religious legal and lobbying groups, religion isn’t even the top reason for homeschooling anymore. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 36 percent of homeschooling parents said that their most important reason for homeschooling was “to provide their children religious or moral instruction.” By 2012, that figure dropped to just 21 percent, with “concerns about the school environment (such as safety, drugs, negative peer pressure)” and “dissatisfaction with academic instruction” having become parents’ main reasons for homeschooling. Parents also cite a desire to provide a nontraditional approach to education, children’s special needs, family time, and finances as reasons for homeschooling.