This month my family and I begin our 8th year as homeschoolers. I don’t recall our initial reason for keeping our oldest son out of kindergarten and starting down this path. It was just a vague feeling perhaps that this is what we should do.
Today I’m going to tie together two recent articles1 I read as well as my well-earned criticism of homeschooling as currently practiced and lastly, define what I believe should be the ultimate target, the primary purpose of homeschooling in the 21st century.
Self-Governing
First up, was this poignant personal piece from
called “The Mother’s Gauntlet”. Compared to a job which has clear responsibilities, clear rewards and structure, Lane makes the case that being a homeschooling SAHM is choosing the hard road. A few relevant quotes:“life at home with small children requires self-governance. One must be free of slavery to lower passions, lower pursuits, character weakness and laziness in order to do it really well.”
“What happens when you remove yourself from a system and go rogue? You must become precisely the type of thing America no longer produces: quietly, self-directed, self-governing and self-motivated.”
The reason most women flee the home is because homemaking [and homeschooling] is actually the most difficult job in the world. It’s the job of making oneself and one’s children self-governing.”
Women may want to go to college and later the office and send their kids to public schools for all the feminist, financial, empowerment reasons but no less a reason, and no further from the heart of the matter, is a degree and a career is easier: joining a structured educational and employment system is a personal bail out. A safe haven where a mom doesn't have to create a self-governing lifestyle on her own.
In the past, when households were productive, self-governance was merely a fact of life: animals had to be tended to, clothes had to be sewn, food had to be gathered, prepared and made. Families self-governed or starved. (Sometimes they starved even if they self-governed.) It’s understandable why the less pressing modern work of dishes, laundry and teaching addition to a 6 year old who’d rather play with legos doesn’t inspire the same level of self-governance.
Low Status
There’s less perceived social status attached to staying at home and homeschooling than almost anything else a woman can choose to do in the modern world. Lane Scott’s words are a good personal portrayal of the issues outlined in
mega-popular article “It’s Embarrassing To Be a Stay-At Home Mom”. Kurtz makes the case that the way we measure status in today’s society has a dramatic and direct impact on the birth rate crisis:“We start to see a trend emerge: the more isolated a population is from liberal modernity, the higher their fertility.”
“…the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.”
“Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer.”
In other words, social status is no longer meaningfully connected to and is indeed in direct competition with motherhood (and fatherhood for men). According to recent surveys, 75% of adults under 40 said making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life but only 32% thought marriage was crucial to fulfillment.
According to Pew Research, 88% of parents agreed it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to be financially independent. But only 21% thought it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to get married.
This data shows the success status system our entire society is based on creates a perpetual vicious cycle:
Young people must seek status within the format of an education and a good job.
Family life isn’t recognized or rewarded within the system.
Fewer children are born.
Those children grow up without examples of family-friendly status games and must resort to status within the system.
And the cycle repeats itself again and again: a literal death spiral. When I’ve written that we live in an anti-family culture, this is what I mean. Breaking this cycle and offering an alternative form of status is the highest purpose and most pressing need of homeschooling.
Homeschooling is one of the most powerful sources of leverage in your possession to create a new, virtuous cycle… a flywheel powering the successful flight of generations of your family out of the death spiral.
Allow me to explain.
A Myopic Focus
Homeschooling’s popularity exploded during COVID and overall trust in public schools has probably never been lower. The system itself feels threatened by the rise of home schooling as evidenced by a recent hit piece in Scientific American - which, by the way, should win some sort of horror writing award for the article’s portrayal of parents teaching their children at home as ominous and full of peril.
Still, far too many homeschoolers are disastrously attempting to replicate the outcome of public schools for their children: grades, college readiness, and all around preparation for time served within the status system of mainstream life.
Myopia, a lack of vision, is common in homeschooling: we’re vastly underperforming its privileges and potential.
As Lane wrote in her article, the pressure builds on moms toward making sure their kid is ready for the mainstream status games, but without mainstream support. This might be why to enter into a homeschooling forum of any kind is to find 5th generation warfare raging amongst territorial homeschooling moms battling to the death over curriculums, co-op rules and formats, teaching techniques, grade levels, schedules, expectations and how to manage this or that. Too often homeschooling parents or those who’d like to homeschool, feel unqualified, unable to compete and look to the state for validation forgetting what that validation entails: the death spiral.
People homeschool their kids for many reasons, but common among them is to shelter their children from failing morals and standards of one kind or another which they see infecting the classrooms2. But the protective bubble isn’t eternal and so many parents homeschool their children while young only to place a hopefully more secure and prepared child back into the system in high school.
But no matter how morally pure and devout their child is, they’ll still need to sign up for the same status games as everyone else. With the cycle above in mind, what did homeschooling accomplish?
The Virtuous Cycle
The primary purpose of homeschooling is not flexible schedules, learning super advanced math at age 8, meeting grade-level requirements more quickly or even keeping your kids from seeing porn on their classmate’s smartphone. These may be perks but they cannot be the primary purpose for 21st century homeschoolers.
Instead it’s to create this virtuous cycle:
When we start to create alternative status games, ones which are more family friendly, homeschooling starts to look very different from school at home.
Dad Is Involved
If we’re just doing school at home, dad isn’t necessarily any more qualified to teach the kids than a SAHM. And he’s got a job so he’s got even less time to do so. But if we’re to build the virtuous cycle, dads of homeschooled kids serve a special role, especially with their boys. It’s not common you find dads involved with homeschooling on any level. Boy energy can be overwhelming and fathers can help direct it. Practically, this may mean dads sacrificing a bit of their own system status to build boys capable of existing outside the system. More dads involved in homeschool means more unity and cooperation across homeschooling families. An advantage men have over women is they generally respect a hierarchy as long as the followers trust the leader. On the other hand, generally women have a harder time respecting a hierarchy of other women and can often come to resent another woman who tries to assert her authority - this can be seen time and time again in the homeschooling space. Fathers should be leaders in homeschooling spaces. Fathers should invite their children to work with them. Fathers should seek alliances and partnerships with other men who lead families with similar values in order to give coherence to the world of his children.
Productivity As Education
If you read a lot of older western literature, you’ll find a lot of quotes from smart people like this one from John Ruskin, a Victorian Era polymath: “Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” Defining education as a well-developed character and right behavior is only half-remembered to us now in the form of sticker-charts and time-outs. But the full concept is a still a sound one. Yes, we must teach our children how to read, write, do math and about the natural world. But we mustn’t forget that to complete the education of the child, he must also know his manners, how to behave, how to work, how to maintain his things, how to cook and clean, how to face his fears, and how to communicate to peers and adults. These are truer hallmarks of education than knowing the 3 main types of rocks. And in fact, having good character and behavior will help him with book learning as well. We are perhaps the first society in history which educates a child outside the reality and challenges he or she will face as an adult. This makes the traditional approach to school a decade plus long waiting room: something for kids to do that minimally interferes with the status games of adults. Reversing the alienation of education and adult work removes some of the pressure from a homeschooling mom who can instead ask her children to work with her, to help her and thereby become educated. This is the same with fathers and older children (though how old will depend on the father’s work). Family business and entrepreneurial ventures, (even if they’re just simple side businesses), educate children on the realities of adulthood and will give them confidence to seek status outside the system.3 It seems like a contradiction, but orienting your life around productive tasks requires far less time and energy than orienting around a consumer lifestyle in which you are a chauffeur and an order taker and the kids are nothing but a drag.
Community As Status
Can I write an article without the word community? Probably not, no. The only way this becomes a virtuous cycle, truly building alternative, pro-family forms of status, is with the help of a community. Homeschooling is not going it alone because you like a certain curriculum. Homeschooling is not just joining a co-op so someone else can teach your kids history or science. Homeschooling in the 21st century is communal at its core. It’s establishing a shared pattern of living. Of involved dads who are not just off at work providing but who are networking for their kids; working together to find, fund, and create entrepreneurial opportunities and creative collaborations. And in so doing, they create alternate forms of status for themselves too. Homeschooling in the 21st century is an act of cultural creation: where plays, songs, films, books, poems, stories, adventures and craft are made and recalled together with meaning. Homeschooling in the 21st century is working with others to model a form of life which will encourage the next generation to have families of their own. Because almost nothing else will encourage them to try. Homeschooling in the 21st century is parents coming together not to make sure all their kids are college-ready but to make sure their kids have access to an alternate form of status. a way of good living where having children is good.
The Vision
Few, if any, are in a place to take this all on at once. But you can start somewhere, don’t wait. Start walking towards the vision, crawling toward it even, if needed.
For example, as a dad, you can reach out to a couple of other homeschooling dads and see what you can accomplish together. As a mom, you can work with other moms to figure out how to partner on teaching behavior or skills to kids. You can’t make a productive household overnight, but you can start with two or three things your household can make, rather than consume, adding to the skills your kids can learn. You can offer to teach your skills to one of the other family’s teenage boys or vice versa.
We don’t have to figure it all out in one generation, but we can get the cycle started.
Do You Need Guidance?
These are big ideas and the details need to be planned and tailored to your village and circumstances. Often I find it helpful to get the perspective of someone far removed from my circumstances to help me see what I can’t see.
To that end, I’m available to consult with you to help you succeed.
What’s Coming?
Throughout September, I plan on writing on the following topics:
Homeschooling For Boys
Publishing my first interview with a master village builder.
The type of village building projects and initiatives that make the biggest difference and how I can help you.
How communication skills can help in your village
How to build villages in the office
I highly recommend both articles and you should read them.
Conversely, some parents think that if the classroom and schools are good, full of other good kids, then there is no need to homeschool. The death spiral we’re trying to escape lets us know this assumption is flawed.
They also have the benefit of making them more capable, more experienced than their public school peers.
Oh, man, I have a lot to say about this one.
First, I really appreciate what you are saying here about education as ultimately an exercise in cultivating self-governance; and how this applies to both teacher and student. The teacher, too, must become self-governing enough that they don't outsource their role to an 'outside' system. This is the type of virtue that must be cultivated for entrepreneurship, too. (There is a political commentary to be made here about the fact that this type of self-governance is an essential pre-requisite to wide-scale liberty, but I'll leave that aside for now).
On a broader view, the clash between viewing education as values-focused (or character-focused) versus skill-focused has always been a tension in Western society. (Well, more than Western society, but we are having this discussion in a Western context, so I'll limit the frame to that). When I took a year-long course in Greek Thought & Literature at UChicago, I was exposed to how much this battle has always played out going way far back into Western history.
The best characters always tried to blend the two, i.e., Aristotle with his 'practical wisdom' (phronesis, φρόνησις); or Xenophon who emphasizes both the need to 'manage a household' but also develop 'civic virtue'. Even certain Greek plays are written exactly about this tension: Sophocles writes Creon to represent the figure who prioritizes practical education (governance, management), while Antigone represents moral or cultural education (literature, history).
The modern, i.e, post-WWII framework of public education introduced an implicit agreement that 'school' would be for skills-development in a global economy, while the 'home' would remain be the primary place for 'values-development'. However, what we've seen over the past several decades is that 'school' more and more tries to intervene and usurp the private domain of character-building, all while it fails to transmit skills. (One of most pernicious trends, of course, being a curriculum that tries to cultivate various socio-sexual 'identities' in students from a young age, instead of you know, teaching multiplication tables.)
I think in this emerging 'networked age', families are re-negotiating both the terms of physical and digital community – usually trying to somehow integrate both. The postwar consensus on centralized knowledge delivery is dying, if not dead already.
Thus, you have people like Joe Norman (@normonics) who has, on the one hand, completely embraced the back-to-the-land homestead lifestyle of the New England Catholic, and on the other hand works for a startup (@synthesisschool) creating really effective and interactive AI tutors for all levels of mathematics. That's a pretty good example of a novel approach to education that promotes self-governance. In the morning, set your kid up for an interactive lesson on geometry, and take them skiing and wood-chopping in the afternoon.
But, even if one doesn't lean into technological solutions as hard as Joe, I can imagine an emergent network of topic-specific tutors within a given physical and/or digital network. Basically, trustworthy individuals who have aligned-enough values with parents, that create content and learnings that supplement the parents' overall educational framework, and fill in essential gaps that go beyond foundational or general skills; kind of an adaption of the aristocratic rotating governess model, but for the internet age.
I've often thought that if someone wanted to, they might be able create a profitable business model where they travel to homes or communities to teach highly intelligent kids about calculus and organic chemistry (something their parents can't do) for some weeks. Because the kids are at home, they get to spend afternoons and weekends doing craftwork, community service, sports, performance arts, etc. – something even the tutor could participate in. (This is something I've seriously thought about, and yearned to participate in, but I'm not in a position to make it happen well, unfortunately.)
Alright, this turned out to be a way longer ramble than I intended. I've just been situating myself at the intersection of technology, education, civic development, etc. for many years, so on a post like this, it all comes flowing out. The point is, there is a ton of room for innovation here, and it's exciting to see people look at the vast potential here and approach it with the seriousness that you do.
Extremely thought-provoking essay, Mr. Perrone, eliciting observations and comparisons with other aspects of child development and how it both leads and follows changes in the social contract.