HOME-SCHOOLING: AN EXAMINATION OF PARENTAL CHOICE AGAINST SOCIETAL NORMS
Thesis (Education (Curriculum and Instruction)) -- California State University, Sacramento, 2009.
Pluralism to Establishment to Dissent: The Religious and Educational Context of Home Schooling
Although estimates of the number of children currently taught by their parents in a home setting vary considerably—from 750,000 to 1.7 million—no one doubts that their numbers have grown rapidly since the mid-1970s, when only 10,000 to 15,000 children were educated at home (Lines, 1998; Ray, 1999). Home schooling is not, however, a new approach to educating the young in this country. It was commonplace in religiously pluralistic colonial America and virtually disappeared with the establishment and expansion of common school systems in the 19th and early 20th century, but it has experienced a renaissance since the mid-1970s, particularly among evangelical Protestant “dissenters” who, ironically, once PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, 75(1&2), 8–19 Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Family and Schooling in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America
Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, both parents and schools played an important part in the education of young Ameri cans. While historians of the family and of education have frequently acknowledged these complementary, if not sometimes conflicting, institutions in the training of the young, very little effort has been made to examine the interactions between them. The family was an important source of education for children in colonial and nineteenth- century America. But from the very beginning churches and schools were directed to assist parents in the socialization of the young. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, the role of the schools had expanded to such an extent that many of the educational tasks initially assigned to parents, such as teaching children the alphabet and how to read, became the responsibility of the schools.