Homeschool an American History Milton Gaither

Homeschool An American History Milton Gaither Revised Second Edition Homeschool Milton Gaither Homeschool An American History Revised Second Edition Milton Gaither Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, USA ISBN 978-1-349-95055-3 ISBN 978-1-349-95056-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95056-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930257 © Milton Gaither 2008, 2017 This book was advertised with a wrong copyright holder in error, whereas the author(s) hold(s) the copyright. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Jennifer Wright / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For Rachel, Aidan, Susanna, and Macrina. Sequamini virtutes ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not have been possible without the willing assistance of many people. Several colleagues, including Sheila Moss, Jim Carper, Bob Hampel, Ed McClellan, Barbara Beatty, Rob Kunzman, Rachel Coleman, and John Fea, gave me valuable feedback on different parts of the manuscript. Thanks to the wonderful group of scholars in the History of Education Society, whose work and comments at conferences inform even more of this book than the footnotes suggest. I benefited greatly from unpublished research and editorial assistance by Annie Blakeslee, Jesse McBride, Philip Martin, Autumn Carpenter, Fiona Tranquillo, Katie Minden, Robby Lyon, and Danielle DuBois. Messiah College’s excellent library staff, especially Beth Mark and Dee Porterfield, located obscure references, answered questions, and filled countless interlibrary loan requests for me. Every homeschooling family I contacted was, without fail, generous with time and graciously answered my many questions. I cannot thank everyone with whom I spoke, but I am particularly grateful to Gregg Harris, Mark Hegener, Susan Richman, Linda Dobson, Cathy Duffy, John Holzmann, Jim Gustafson, Sherry DuShaw, Ethan Demme, Isaac Demme, and Deborah Stevenson. Special thanks to my wife and intellectual companion Elizabeth for enduring too many hours of table talk (and not a little pillow talk) about this book and giving me dozens of helpful leads and ideas over the past several years. Our children have grown up a lot as I’ve been writing it, and in its own way this book on home education has contributed its fair share to the learning going on all the time in our own kitchen and living room. I dedicate the book to them. Maybe they’ll even read it! vii INTRODUCTION This book presents a history of education in the home in the United States. It is not just a history of the modern homeschool movement, though that movement plays a key role in the more recent history of education at home. It is a history of how the use of the home to educate children has changed and how it has remained the same from colonial times to the present. Taking such a long view allows us to correct some misconceptions about home education in the past and today. We need a book like this not least because advocates for and against homeschooling have often mis- represented the past in an effort to score political points. In the popular literature many historical misconceptions have circulated for so long that they have become commonplaces. Here are two of the most common. On one hand there is a tendency among some to understand the modern homeschooling movement as a simple continuation of a process of education that has existed from time immemorial. The past is raided for examples of people, especially famous and influential people, who were taught at home. This virtuous and venerable tradition of home education is contrasted with the more recent and pernicious model of compulsory government schooling, and finally the modern homeschooling movement is introduced, described as a return to the original American (or in some cases Western) model of education. Here is an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, coming from Theodore Forstmann, an advocate for parental choice in education: For the first 230 years of our history, parents, not government, were in charge … Competence in reading, writing, and arithmetic was nearly ix x INTRODUCTION universal at the time of the American Revolution. But by the mid-nine- teenth century, a band of reformers led by Horace Mann of Massachusetts replaced our founding, free-market education system with a system of state- run education, with compulsory attendance and standardized curriculum.1 Now there is something salutary in this perspective. It reminds us that the historiography of education as it was written by public school leaders in the early twentieth century was simply wrong in its failure to attend to the family’s role in education or to overstate the degree to which the American experiment nullified its reach. Though his own work later refuted this, a young Lawrence Cremin wrote in 1957 that “the European tradition of education centered in the family rather than in schools did not take root in the United States.” Homeschoolers know better and have compiled an admirable list of historic individuals whose biographies collectively dem- onstrate the educative significance of the family. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, the family was in fact the very center of education in early America.2 Yet this perspective, while accurately pointing out the anachronistic tendency of older histories of education to interpret the past as simply prolegomena to the public school, commits its own anachronism by reading current conflicts between family and state into the past. It doesn’t often recognize that the modern homeschooling movement is in many ways fundamentally different from earlier efforts to educate children in the home. One of the central questions this book will be addressing is why and how education in the home shifted from being something that was done as a matter of course, actively encouraged by government, to being an act, even a movement, of self-conscious political protest against government. A second tendency in some of the homeschooling historical writing that deserves scrutiny is the growing hagiography of the homeschooling movement’s pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s. While different homeschoolers have different pantheons of saints (largely based on religious affiliation), all seem to share the assumption that homeschooling was brought back into prominence through the writings and works of great individuals. Frequently cited names include R. J. Rushdoony, John Holt, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Gregg Harris, Michael Farris, and Mary Pride. No doubt these and many other leaders played crucial roles in making the modern homeschooling movement what it was and is. All will be covered in this book. But emphasis on the life and work of such notables tends to INTRODUCTION xi obscure the larger social forces at play during these decades that might go some distance in explaining not only why these thinkers and activists believed what they did but also why their views and initiatives met with such a strong grassroots response. It also misses the populist element, the reality that homeschooling’s gains have come largely from the labors of a large group of ordinary Americans, almost all of them women.3 My task here then is twofold. First, I want to tell the history of education at home in the English colonies and the United States in a way that does not anachronistically valorize home education, pitting the home against the school or the family against the government. My tale must consider both the astonishing diversity of forms in which education in the home took place and the broader context of American social history that informed these practices. Second, I must explain the emergence since World War II of the self-conscious homeschooling movement proper, in a manner that goes beyond the “great man” history that has been typical of insider accounts, by attending to both the cultural climate in which the movement was incubated and the grassroots activism of thousands of Americans who participated. Fortunately, historians have for several decades been producing excellent work in many fields that can help uncover some of these broader trends and themes. There are now well-developed literatures and entire subdisciplines of American history devoted to the history of childhood, the family, and education. Though much of these literatures are directly related to the topic of home education, until now no historian has explic- itly made the connection. Professionals who spend their lives immersed in this historical world know that one of the most common complaints about the current state of affairs in American history is that there is so much good work being produced by so many scholars in such disparate fields that it has for some time been impossible to put it all together into one tidy synthesis.

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