Homeschooling and Family Culture
People often discuss the value of homeschooling through the lens of a student’s school grades and achievements, whether this method or that curricula gets better results, and overlook or discount other motivations for why families homeschool. Some studies confirm that something more important than politics, religion, and schooling is at play: preserving family togetherness and heritage are a primary reason for many who homeschool. This recent study, “We Hold Culture in Our Hearts”: A Phenomenological Study of Hispanic/Latina Homeschool Experiences” amplifies this reason.
“We find that parents sought or found preservation or reclamation of their cultural heritage as the most meaningful result of their decision to homeschool. The most cited aspects of culture that parents wanted to preserve, or rediscover, were the family as the central social unit, familial language, and the typical immigrant need to possess a strong work ethic and demonstrate resourcefulness.
“… All participants expressed the importance of education, and some felt a gap in the quality of education in their community and then feeling a need to take matters into their own hands.
“…Several others expressed similar sentiments and confidently described how aspects of their immigrant mentality aided their reimagination of education.This reimagination requires creative thinking, including departing from predominant institutional measures of success, such as school achievement and educational attainment. Most participants aspire for more expansive measures of success, sharing that they want their children to be lifelong learners and content with what they choose to do, whether that means college degree attainment or not. …
“… Participants across all generational immigrant statuses described how homeschooling allowed them to prioritize and strengthen family bonds while providing a culturally sustaining education (Paris, 2012). These findings suggest that homeschooling may serve as a means of resisting individualistic and competitive values often promoted in mainstream American education (Valenzuela, 2010) and instead affirm the collective and relational values central to Hispanic and Latina cultures. …
“We probed specifically about religiosity when asking about the key factors for participants’ journey to homeschooling and only one participant acknowledged their faith as being a motivator for homeschooling. Those that acknowledged having a faith community did not indicate that their religious values and beliefs played a role in their decision to homeschool, even when directly asked. …”
All political parties claim to support families and want better schools but they refuse to make the structural changes necessary for real support. For instance, universal healthcare, which every major industrial country has except the US, would improve the lives of children in school and out. Studies show (for example, https://www.public-health.uiowa.edu/news-items/health-insurance-expansion-linked-to-improved-academic-test-scores-of-low-income-children/) a definite trickle down effect that improves a child’s overall health and school test scores, particularly those from low-income families.
The US Army provides us with a model that we can build on:
“…While the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last decade, the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading. …
… The schools — four elementary schools and one middle school — look a lot like regular public schools. Students arrive on yellow buses. Classrooms are brightly decorated with crayon drawings and maps of the United States. The sidewalk in front of Faith Middle School is painted with bear claws, a nod to the school’s mascot. …
… But there are key differences.
For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.
“Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students.
Her teachers are also well paid, supported by a Pentagon budget that allocates $3 billion to its schools each year, far more than comparably sized school districts. While much of the money goes toward the complicated logistics of operating schools internationally, the Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states like New York, and far more than states like Arizona, where spending per student is about $10,000 a year. … (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
Raising a family takes a lot of money, time, and effort in today’s world, yet our politics and institutions act as if there is nothing they can do other than toss some one-time money, scholarships, or tax breaks to the less wealthy. This benign neglect of the American family is one reason many young people don’t want to raise kids and are so worried about making a living while facing social upheaval and rising costs—a single medical bill can bankrupt a family today! It is no surprise that worldwide birthrates are so low given these factors.
In the face of worldwide declining births, shouldn’t we be thinking about ways to structure society so it makes having children desirable? The surprising increase of homeschooled children in recent years is also an indicator that more parents want something that society is not providing: not more time in school, but more family time.
